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The Forum > Article Comments > Creatively creating jobs > Comments

Creatively creating jobs : Comments

By Paul Dabrowski, published 21/2/2006

It is time to take a long look at how to create new jobs and to search for inspiration to develop our own solutions.

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We don't need to create more jobs. The government tells us that we have record low unemployment, that our unemployment rate is lower than Germany's. We will have a shortfall of 195,000 workers within 20 years.

But is this true?

How can we know what our labour predictions will be when the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates the numbers of unemployed from a sample of 30,000 households per month. The respondents who say they are studying or did an hour of paid or unpaid work are not considered unemployed.

Seriously, I think we need to create more jobs. We need to make it easier for people engaged in seasonal labour, like a lot of Australia's food harvest, to have income support schemes to ensure they have a decent standard of frugal comfort through the whole year.
Posted by billie, Tuesday, 21 February 2006 10:14:14 AM
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Paul, it may be true that "about 70 per cent of new jobs are created by small and medium businesses" (I've seen lower figures), but this tends to be on the back of wealth created by large businesses. The programs you mention were very small-scale in terms of overall job creation, and even if they were effective, would make little difference. We have to look at "bigger picture" issues which can affect employment on a larger scale.

In general, that means government policies across a wide range of fields which facilitate the generation and retention of wealth, which foster entrepreneurship. This needs to be on two levels - exposure to competition, which is the main driver of innovation and productivity growth; and regulatory, tax, IR, education and infrastructure policies which make entrepreneurship attractive and profitable. Too often government policies act as a disincentive to risk-taking, make it more difficult for businesses to get off the ground and profitably employ people, and claw back too much from successful businesses in tax. We need pro-growth policies to generate sustainable employment.
Posted by Faustino, Tuesday, 21 February 2006 3:57:36 PM
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Paul,

Great article!

Your observation of the beat-up over supposed IT skills shortages in 1999 strkes very close to home for me.
Posted by daggett, Tuesday, 21 February 2006 9:25:53 PM
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Yes entrepreneurs are the future. Local small and medium business is more responsive to its customer base than large, and multinational corporations. A move toward decentralised government would also be a plus. A large central government tends to be wasteful and unresponsive to the average person who does not have millions of dollars with which to buy influence.

Of course if government actually encouraged the self reliance of local government and entrepreneurship, it would lose its power. Ultimately power and control is what bureaucracies are aiming for. That is why government never gets smaller or more responsive.

The average person needs to take more control of their own destiny and not look for someone else to hand them their livelihood.

How do you inspire someone to self reliance? If I ever have the answer to that question, I'll be on the lecture circuit, making lots of money, inspiring others to come up with their own answers.
Posted by Patty Jr. Satanic Feminist, Thursday, 23 February 2006 4:32:08 AM
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Hi all,
1. yes - 70% is the highest estimation, there are various figures with this regard.

What I would consider as 'in', in aprticular, are young companies - like, the Boost Juice and ABC Childcare centres - not small anymore, but quite young - result of recent entrepreneurial effort

1. The programs you mention were very small-scale in terms of overall job creation, and even if they were effective, would make little difference. We have to look at "bigger picture"

no, and yes;

no:
seeds are always small.

yes:
yes, we need to look at the 'bigger picture'.

Yes, there is number of macro-economic factors, that facilitate or inhibit entrepreneurship, but

Bigger picture is created by thousands of small pieces.

yes, every program mentioned is small - that's why we need thousands of them.

huge scale jobs creation does not work any more. What works are community based entrepreneurship programs. For instance,

Ernesto Sirolli states that:
>> a facilitator in a township of 10,000 sees 150 to 160 clients a year, assists the creation, expansion or sustaining of 25 to 35 businesses that foster 25 to 60 new jobs per year.

and a manager of one of Australian Business Enterprise Centres confirms:
>>These figures by the way are substantiated by our own local experience. In our small regional area of three shire councils (16,000 people) assisted the creation of over 550 new jobs in 12 years

The economic impact for a community is at an average of say 40 new jobs each with a minimum income of $35,000 = $1.4 million. The government income tax and GST collection and its is likely to be a minimum of $400,000 per year.
It pays for itself <<

3. We need pro-growth policies to generate sustainable employment

yes, indeed - that's what I am advocating;
what I am saying, is that we can not limit it to creating favorable environment for EXISTING businesses.

this just favours incumbents, and does little (although statistically significant) to foster business growh

we need active policy in the area of entrepreneurship facilitation
Posted by Paul_of_Melb, Thursday, 23 February 2006 6:51:05 PM
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yes we do need to make choices that promote employment.

Yesterday I met a bloke who is 45, was a technician retrenched from Telstra 10 years ago, whose current income from a charity is $300 per week. He is living with his brother also in his 40s doing emergency teaching, getting 3 days per week in term 3. This articulate healthy man should be engaged in society but instead he is now a fringe dweller.

A classic example of how to promote employment was when Melbourne introduced ticket machines, the tramways and railways got rid of ticket sellers, guards and conductors. The ticket machines are expensive to run, the NAB collects the money and the software was written by Arthur Andersen - who didn't even write Y2K compliant code in 1995. That means income has been shifted from thousands of low paid workers to 2 corporations, one a bank and the other a multinational with a very tarnished reputation. ACTU statistics suggest that 55% of retrenched workers never work again. The transport system is now unsafe and unused after dark.
Posted by billie, Friday, 24 February 2006 8:52:51 AM
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Hi Billie,
would you be able to direct me to tha source of '55%' claim?

I looked at the internet, with not much result.

thanks,

Paul
Posted by Paul_of_Melb, Friday, 24 February 2006 10:25:34 AM
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Patty Jr,
When you can elect a President who can string a sentence together, we MAY consider your opinion, untill then, we know how much the yanks know, not much.

Enconomics, the art of turning the simple into the complicated.

There are many and varied ways of creating employment, if one model were superior, there would be millions of unemployed in socialist countries, communist countries. While I am not calling for the other models, I am pointing out the simplicity, rather than the complication in ECONOMICS, what a joke.
Posted by SHONGA, Sunday, 26 February 2006 11:29:15 AM
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often it's not so much a 'lack of skills', as a lack of imagination from employers. they want cookie-cutter employees who are already trained and experienced and can be slotted into a job and left to it.

education used to prepare you for more than just employment. now it seems to be all about being 'job ready'. but even that is not enough. you have to be not only 'job ready', you have to be the right kind of person - certainly for professional positions. you are not employed because you're *compentent*. you're employed because you're *liked*.

with employers now getting even more control over employees, whether you are liked in the work environment will become even more important. by liked, i don't just mean agreeable. i mean the employee must have the kind of personality and so on that the employer likes. being different seems to be an real impediment to employment, let alone progress.

also, our semi-commercial universities are now churning out large numbers of people qualified for jobs that not only don't exist, but are very unlikely to exist. there are only so many jobs for physicists, for example.

the neis system is more than just broken. it is heavily biased. as is much/most of the job network. you front up and tell them you're looking for a job as a lawyer or molecular biologist or computer programmer/analyst. eyes glaze over. they're set up for unskilled jobs or tradespeople.

some prefessions require you to complete a certain amount of supervised employment before you can operate independently. if you only acquire part of that you're left in limbo. the 'system' is not there for us as potential employees, it's there for the employers. they get to pick and choose. we can only hope that after 3-6 years of training, we happen to be liked by an employer.

otherwise, we're fighting over callcentre jobs, and wondering why we bothered. and wincing as slices of our income go to pay off the hecs debt we accrued getting that now irrelevant education.
Posted by maelorin, Monday, 27 February 2006 10:05:19 PM
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Shonga

May I politely request that you actually read Patty's post BEFORE passing judgement.

Her comments regarding small to medium business creating more jobs is true. They also create a genuinely competitive market compared to the stultifying effect of monopolies.

Not all Americans are pro-Bush - especially one with a moniker like Patty Jr. Satanic Feminist.

While we certainly don't need entreprenuers like Bond or Skase we do need innovation and creation.

Regards
Posted by Scout, Tuesday, 28 February 2006 7:43:12 AM
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maelorin, when I employed graduates/near-graduates, I chose them on their talent, they reckoned they learned more in three months with me than in 3-4 years at uni. I gave my staff every opportunity to further develop their skills through access to professional journals, seminars and courses.

This may not be common, but my newly-graduated daughter has joined an international engineering consultancy who seem to genuinely see staff as their greatest asset and treat them accordingly. Like me, they seem to pick staff on their potential rather than expecting them to hit the ground running.
Posted by Faustino, Tuesday, 28 February 2006 7:48:01 AM
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i guess i'm a little jaded. i probably overstated my case to make my point. the interview process is largely a social one. employers only interview you if they like what they see on paper. then you get a half hour or so to convince them that they'd like to work with you.

coming second or third at every interview in four-five years gets tiresome. feedback has made it clear that, apart from experience (which is hard to get without getting in the door somehow) or specific qualifications (be it a particular major, elective, or project), the crucial issue has been what the interview panel think of you.

a lot is made of the need to check out the culture of the organisation. that *is* important, but how to do that from the outside? websites and mission statements are not much help. they can give you an idea of the aspirations of the organisation, but not about the people inside it.

*who* you know is still at *least* as important *what* you know. i've become very good at profiling organisations from the outside, at analysing their public face.

almost all the work i've ever had has come from referrals. often from people who chose to employ other people over me for 'more regular work'. problem is, though this often looks like consulting, it is difficult to get the very same people to accept it as such.

in short, employers are people and behave likewise.

how do you determine someone's talent to do a job by talking to them?
Posted by maelorin, Tuesday, 28 February 2006 1:09:11 PM
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mealorin, you are absolutely right.

selection process limited to an interview is deeply flawed.

indeed, companies tend to hire best talkers, not workers...

funnyly enough, concepts like assesment centre have been around for many years;

regards

Paul
Posted by Paul_of_Melb, Thursday, 2 March 2006 5:09:56 AM
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