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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?