New Generation Of Sites Refine Online Job Search : NPR
Survival strategies
New Hiring Practices – 2009
| WORKFORCE METRICS |  |
|
| NEW HIRING PRACTICES |
| Percentage of employers reporting new hiring practices, 2009 |
|
| Offering delayed start dates (e.g., six to 12 months later) |
7% |
| Offering internships to new graduates | 9 |
| Lowering starting salaries | 24 |
| Targeting younger, less-expensive employees |
14 |
| Targeting experienced, reduced-risk employees |
9 |
| Hiring freeze | 44 |
|
| Source: Monster
I got this chart in an email from Workforce Recruiting. |
Personal Financial Security – Skimmers
Would You Have Spotted the Fraud? — Krebs on Security
I realize this is a website/blog on underwriting and most of the time I do stay on point. But this little article about skimmers is just too good not to pass along.
Read a Book a Week – 2009 Results
1.0 per week in 2009.
Experience matters. Now I know why from the following NYT article.
Better pattern recognition, significance recognition, and faster solutions.
I hope you kept some of your older underwriters on the payroll.
Adult Learning – Neuroscience – How to Train the Aging Brain – NYTimes.com
Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.
What Matters? A Thought For The Decade
A Life That Matters
Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end. There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours or days. All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else. Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance. It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed. Your grudges, resentments, frustrations and jealousies will finally disappear.
So too, your hopes, ambitions, plans and to-do lists will expire. The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away. It won’t matter where you came from or what side of the tracks you lived on at the end. It won’t matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant. Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.
So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured?
What will matter is not what you bought, but what you built; not what you got, but what you gave. What will matter is not your success, but your significance.
What will matter is not what you learned, but what you taught. What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage or sacrifice that enriched, empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example. What will matter is not your competence, but your character. What will matter is not how many people you knew, but how many will feel a lasting loss when you’re gone. What will matter is not your memories, but the memories that live in those who loved you. What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what.
Living a life that matters doesn’t happen by accident. It’s not a matter of circumstance but of choice. Choose to live a life that matters. It really matters!
Michael Josephson
80% NOT Planning to Hire
Survey: Employers Expect Hiring Uptick : NPR
Maybe it’s just my individualistic perspective but when I hear a news story touting:
Twenty percent said they plan to bring on more full-time staff in 2010.
my mind immediately says “80% are not”.
A New Paradigm for Education
Reining in College Costs – BusinessWeek
In the “learning” paradigm, the teacher is not the expert provider of knowledge, but rather a guide who first specifies what students are expected to learn and then lays out pathways they can follow to meet the learning goals. The teacher becomes a supporter, a collaborator, and a coach for students as they learn to evaluate and gather information, test ideas, and explore their application to different issues and problems. Students begin to learn how to develop and pose their own questions and to explore alternative ways of finding and framing answers. So instead of working only to master the subject matter of a course, students are developing the skills to learn on their own. They no longer wait to be taught—they come to realize that, if they are to succeed, they must take a good deal of responsibility for their own learning.
Read this article written by Michael Bassis, President of Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah. We need to rethink corporate training methods if you agree with Mr. Bassis’ paradigm shift assessment.
The Ant Tribe
I’m of the opinion the global economic recession will be long and nasty. Read this article if you think the job market in the US is bad. A few years back I posed the following question to an unemployed friend,
“What are you going to do if what you’re looking for doesn’t exist anymore?”
Read a Book a Week – Change Your Brain Structure
Reading Practice Can Strengthen Brain ‘Highways’ : NPR
Intensive reading programs can produce measurable changes in the structure of a child’s brain, according to a study in the journal Neuron. The study found that several different programs improved the integrity of fibers that carry information from one part of the brain to another.
Debating the Wrong Debate – Outsourced Underwriting Will Become the New Normal
These Jobs May Not Come Back – BusinessWeek
I’ve maintained for several years that many of the jobs being eliminated are just not coming back. We are way past the debate of whether or not outsourced underwriting is a good or bad business practice. Outsourced underwriting will be the new normal.
Read this Business Week article. Send me your comments.
lifeunderwriter.net 
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