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Hiring in the technology sector remains sluggish

September 7, 2010 / Staff

The news isn’t very good on the job front, and even the tech sector is struggling to add jobs.

Government labor reports released this year, including the most recent one, present a tableau of shrinking opportunities in high-skill fields.
Job growth in fields like computer systems design and Internet publishing has been slow in the last year. Employment in areas like data processing and software publishing has actually fallen. Additionally, computer scientists, systems analysts and computer programmers all had unemployment rates of around 6 percent in the second quarter of this year.
While that might sound like a blessing compared with the rampant joblessness in manufacturing, it is still significantly higher than the unemployment rates in other white-collar professions.
The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost.
That’s a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.

Technology firms are sitting on a mountain of cash, so hopefully this will be temporary. President Obama is now proposing huge tax breaks for investments in equipment, along with making the research tax credit permanent. If the GOP can put aside politics and pass these proposals that they have supported in the past, perhaps we can jump start this sector and other sectors.

Your Career

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HP sues regarding Mark Hurd’s new position at Oracle

September 7, 2010 / Staff

There’s an interesting battle brewing between HP and Oracle regarding Mark Hurd, who was recently hired by Oracle after he was recently ousted as CEO by HP’s board following an expense and sexual harassment scandal. Now, HP is suing Hurd regarding Hurd’s new position at Oracle.

Hewlett-Packard Co. is suing Mark Hurd, the chief executive it ousted last month, to stop him from taking a top job at rival Oracle Corp.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in a California state court, came a day after Oracle hired Hurd as co-president to help lead the database software maker’s efforts to lure business away from HP. HP claims that Hurd won’t be able to perform his job at Oracle without spilling HP’s trade secrets and violating a confidentiality agreement.
This type of complaint isn’t unusual in the technology world, nor is the confidentiality agreement that Hurd had signed as part of a severance package from HP that could top $40 million.
Technology companies often require such agreements because workers walk out the door with valuable technical information.
But the stakes are higher with Hurd than a rank-and-file employee, and the lawsuit may delay when Hurd could start his new job.

HP may have a valid claim, but you have to wonder why they wouldn’t have an even more explicit non-competition agreement. It sounds like they might have a case surrounding trade secrets and confidentiality, but for $40 million you would think they would have something more concrete.

This should be a lesson to any company who provides VERY lucrative severance packages – get something in return!

Your Career, Your Compensation

Future hiring trends

September 6, 2010 / Staff

Here’s one disturbing trend that should have you focus on education and training:

Whenever companies start hiring freely again, job-seekers with specialized skills and education will have plenty of good opportunities. Others will face a choice: Take a job with low pay – or none at all.
Job creation will likely remain weak for months or even years. But once employers do step up hiring, some economists expect job openings to fall mainly into two categories of roughly equal numbers:
_ Professional fields with higher pay. Think lawyers, research scientists and software engineers.
_ Lower-skill and lower-paying jobs, like home health care aides and store clerks.
And those in between? Their outlook is bleaker. Economists foresee fewer moderately paid factory supervisors, postal workers and office administrators.

This has been going on for years, and it’s only going to get worse. You can’t rely on walking into a factory and getting a well-paying job. Those days are gone.

Your Career, Your Compensation, Your Education

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Should you be Allowed to pay Bills at Work?

September 3, 2010 / Staff

If you believe everything you read and see on TV, you would think that Americans spend every waking hour at their jobs – jobs which they are blissfully happy to still have, after all of the shenanigans that went on during the Panic of 2008. In some people’s cases, this may be true. Workaholics didn’t go anywhere over the past 2 years, except back to work. And that’s probably where they would have ended up going anyway. But it leads a non-workaholic to wonder about how much our employers really rule our lives, and how much they should let us relax from time to time.

This is almost a business ethics question: During breaks and other non-critical times at work, when everything is in a normal mode, is it okay to chill out for awhile and do some recreational computer browsing? Not to suggest that “recreational” use would include porn, updating a hate blog or shopping for a new automatic weapon, necessarily. Even though every one of those activities are totally American rights, they are a little too far out there for an office environment. But is it wrong for an employee who puts in long, arduous hours at the office to do more low-key, harmless things on their computers, as a way to unwind and get a little something done?

Is there any harm to the company if you check out some crazy YouTube video, or do a little blogging about that cute thing your hamster did yesterday? What about if you went online to do some early holiday shopping (yeah, it’s starting to get into that “calm before the storm” part of the year already). Would it be wrong to hit up your bank’s web site, make sure your credit cards are taken care of, and pay your auto insurance and whatever other bills you might have? There’s no harm.

Uncategorized

For-profit colleges that target the homeless?

August 30, 2010 / Staff

We keep finding interesting stories around the problem of for-profit college scams. The latest is a report from BusinessWeek in the spring about how some recruiters for University of Phoenix and other for-profit colleges were targeting homeless people in Cleveland and other cities.

Benson Rollins wants a college degree. The unemployed high school dropout who attends Alcoholics Anonymous and has been homeless for 10 months is being courted by the University of Phoenix. Two of its recruiters got themselves invited to a Cleveland shelter last October and pitched the advantages of going to the country’s largest for-profit college to 70 destitute men.
Their visit spurred the 23-year-old Rollins to fill out an online form expressing interest. Phoenix salespeople then barraged him with phone calls and e-mails, urging a tour of its Cleveland campus. “If higher education is important to you for professional growth, and to achieve your academic goals, why wait any longer? Classes start soon and space is limited,” one Phoenix employee e-mailed him on Apr. 15. “I’ll be happy to walk you through the entire application process.”
Rollins’ experience is increasingly common. The boom in for-profit education, driven by a political consensus that all Americans need more than a high school diploma, has intensified efforts to recruit the homeless. Such disadvantaged students are desirable because they qualify for federal grants and loans, which are largely responsible for the prosperity of for-profit colleges. Federal aid to students at for-profit colleges jumped from $4.6 billion in 2000 to $26.5 billion in 2009. Publicly traded higher education companies derive three-fourths of their revenue from federal funds, with Phoenix at 86%, up from just 48% in 2001 and approaching the 90% limit set by federal law.

The article goes on to allege similar problems at Drake College of Business and Chancellor University in Cleveland which has Jack Welch as an investor and spokesman.

The article also alleges that relaxed standards under the Bush administration helped exacerbate the problem, but now the Obama administration is tightening the rules.

Some schools have suspended the policy of recruiting at homeless shelters after the publication of the BusinessWeek article.