Author: Edu-Advisor

Dream2Career: Our Only Angle is Student Success

by Edu-Advisor, posted in Advice for Workers and Career Seekers, Work-Learn Solutions for Businesses

Every story is written from an angle. Our only angle is to ensure that students are not taken advantage of by the system and that they are provided with the best on-ramps to sustainable careers. Dream2Career writes stories that help students find and prepare for dream careers. We can’t do it alone, we need insights from industry professionals who understand the nuances of each specific industry. Business leaders can recommend workforce-aligned schools, majors, programs and events offering career exploration and preparation matching future needs.

Once this information is collected, Dream2Career organizes and shares business-led insights with students and educators across the nation. We want to write more stories about real solutions that align with emerging industries like the internet of things and artificial intelligence. We also want to allow small business professionals and entrepreneurs to have a stronger voice in creating the workforce of the future. An African proverb states, “It takes a village”. Let’s come together and change the lives of children in our communities.

Dream2Career is a company of educators. We understand that teachers are not the problem but as innovation changes the business environment, teachers need opportunities to engage with the future world of work. Teachers work tirelessly, often for very little money, to help students succeed. For this reason, we are not working with the political climate. We do not want to create a system of extensive regulation. These regulators are robbing our classrooms of the creativity our nation desperately needs.

Therefore to help educators and students connect with businesses, we created a tool called the Edu-Advisor. Edu-Advisor promotes business recommendations and collaboratives in an organized way. Students and educators can filter through relevant content to find the best matches relating to career aspirations. This free resource helps teachers align workforce agendas with the curriculum and projects that they have already designed for their classrooms. In essence, we give the power back to the educator to do what they do best—inspire and teach our next generation workforce.

Join the Rope of Hope Campaign –5 million voices impacting 56 Million Students. Do it for your students, do it for your community.

Join 5 Million Voices Impacting 56 Million Students

by Edu-Advisor, posted in Businesses Work-Learn Insights, Solving the Work-Learn Problem, Work-Learn Solutions for Businesses

Post Talent Recommendation | Change a Life.

 

Join Us:  Help students succeed. Recommend schools, majors, programs and events to help students find and prepare for dream careers. Join  Dream2Career.org. Based on your recommendations, students can find organized and useful information about existing career on-ramps.

Workforce Development = Student Development

by Edu-Advisor, posted in Businesses Work-Learn Insights, Solving the Work-Learn Problem, Work-Learn Solutions for Businesses

Join Us:   Help students succeed in life. Recommend schools, majors, programs and events to help students find and prepare for dream careers. Dream2Career.org

Workforce developers have been at this a long time, we need to hear your insights in the educational community. Working together we can impact the life of a child.

Businesses Make Training Recommendations and Help Students Succeed

by Edu-Advisor, posted in Businesses Work-Learn Insights, Solving the Work-Learn Problem, Work-Learn Solutions for Businesses

New Educational Tool for Work-Learn Synergies

Dream2Career created a new educational tool that allows hiring managers to post recommendations that help students find and prepare for dream careers. Businesses that want to serve their communities are quickly seeing the benefits of this new platform. For only $29.95 hiring managers can create a talent request and recommend schools, majors, events or programs that match entry-level positions. This information is organized and shared with educators and students across the nation. Students are then able to tap into the industry-specific workforce pipelines and programs while being shielded from online scams.

 Job-Seekers Beware!

Job boards have become pervasive, yet most offer few legitimate career opportunities and are the new way of scamming desperate career-seekers into giving up personal information. These deceptive practices have exacerbated identity theft and have done little to help students find sustainable careers.

Most businesses are doing their part to help students avoid job boards by participating in career fairs, offering internships, presenting at schools and even working with schools to enhance curriculum. Unfortunately, these opportunities don’t reach students and parents with a great enough frequency to impact the decision-making process for youth.

Finding a Needle: Student Options are Limited

When I was a student, I could look in the newspaper and see who was hiring in my town. Now with the internet, job boards make us feel that there are millions of jobs locally. The bait and switch process used by many job boards does little to help students navigate the system. These trolling platforms show headings for jobs and then when clicked, you find that the job is not even in the vicinity of your town. In too many cases, the jobs are not even available anymore, they make students provide personal information and pay fees just to access career information. This process should not sit well with anyone. 

A student’s one remaining option might be to go to the businesses websites directly. Who has the time to investigate every website of every business in a specific region, let alone the 28 million+ businesses in the U.S.? Students need a way to limit and organize career information so they can find and prepare for dream careers. Dream2Career now offers a new free solution to educators, students, and career-seekers. Students can find entry-level salary information, and direct links to the appropriate hiring information provided directly by the hiring managers at each specific firm.

In the past, students were guided by teachers, counselors and parents but depending on the environment, this left some students with limited opportunities. Hearing only a few voices does not sufficiently cover all career options and rarely leaves students understanding what is best for them. Because of advances in artificial intelligence, healthcare, green energy, and the internet of things even the most well-educated person could struggle see all of the emerging career opportunities that will exist in the next few years. As industries workforce needs change, businesses can simply add to the entry-level training recommendations in their listing so students will be graduating matching workforce needs.

We say that students are lazy and lack motivation, but I truly believe students are uninspired and confused. There are more depressed students than ever before. These feelings are nothing like what we knew as children. Our lives were simple, “ignorance was bliss”.  Students today see opportunities all around them, yet they have little to no guidance on how they might obtain these opportunities. This leads to feelings of hopelessness and despair. However, as we start to work together using the D2C Directory, students and career-seekers will be able to see pathways to their goals and communities will start to flourish. 

Businesses Can Impact on 56.6 Million Students

Dream2Career is beginning make a difference in Philadelphia, but we need your help if we want to reach students across the nation. We need your insights and your specific career-related recommendations so we can help all students find and prepare for dream careers. Students need to hear voices from business leaders, talent professionals and even those still on their own professional journeys so they can figure out how to achieve success. Join us because working together we will have the greatest impact on our next generation workforce! 

Help Students Access Your Workforce Pipeline| $29.95/yr

by Edu-Advisor, posted in Businesses Work-Learn Insights, Solving the Work-Learn Problem, Work-Learn Solutions for Businesses

Click on Create Talent Request -$29.95/year | Create a listing. In 15 minutes you can place an order.

SME Weighs In: Students Need Industry Specific Career Advice

by Edu-Advisor, posted in Businesses Work-Learn Insights, Naturalists, Specialists, Work-Learn Solutions for Businesses

I recently had a conversation with Troy Johnson, a leading voice in the trades industry, about how we might help students learn about high demand and emerging career opportunities that match career aspirations.

Read his brilliant insights:

I think [finding a way to help students find and prepare for careers] would create a much happier workforce as well. Technical education has become “the consolation prize” – to use Mike Rowe’s phrase – for students who can’t get into a four-year liberal arts college. It’s a shame because, as I think you will agree, not every high school senior should go to a traditional four-year college. There are multiple options for them now. Even the young people who finish a four-year liberal art bachelor’s degree accumulate six figures of debt. It’s really no wonder that they are so discontented as a group. And there seems to be no one advocating for reductions or limits on tuitions anywhere. The price of tuition has gone up faster than energy costs, food costs, and even healthcare, yet the emphasis is always on financing the tuition, not looking at ways to make these educational institutions more cost-efficient.

I’d really like to see a renaissance in career guidance and counseling that emphasizes more in-depth matching between students’ abilities AND interests against the real works needs of companies in the U.S. It is such an important point in these young peoples’ lives, they deserve more thoughtful advice and exposure to more potential career trajectories. With a smaller population of young people, I really think there could be a business concept that serves companies looking for bright high schoolers that they will hire for demonstrated work ethic and train them in-house for whatever job level skills the companies need filled.

Like I said, “America doesn’t have the skill problem, it has a recruiting problem.” Maybe what we need is something similar to the NFL draft where companies compete for students with strong skills right out of high school…It’s something to think about.

Some states are finding creative ways to create stature for positions in the trades. Dream2Career uses the term “specialists” to describe these positions because these individuals are the true problem solvers needed in our society. Join the conversation. What are your thoughts about how we might help students succeed?

What Should My Child Do After High School? Go to College, Trade School or Go to Work?

by Edu-Advisor, posted in Businesses Work-Learn Insights, Mavens, Naturalists, Processors, Protectors, Solving the Work-Learn Problem, Specialists, Visionaries, Work-Learn Solutions for Businesses

Society is starved for relevant insights about colleges, trade schools, and other work-learn solutions. Good advice can be found everywhere and that is the problem. Because insights are coming from everywhere it is difficult to make heads or tails of the information. Even for the most well-educated, it is almost impossible to help our children make informed decisions about their future. Many times the best advice comes to us after the decision is already made. For example, you might hear from an old friend who tells you about their career that has an abundance of job openings and then you find out that they were even able to retire at 45. If only you had this information sooner because your child just graduated with a degree in something totally different and is sleeping on your sofa. Should you send them back to school?

It just seems that it would be so much easier if we could find the answers about career preparation and emerging career opportunities when we are looking for them. Having the chance to hear the voices from others in our communities, as well as, industry experts.  It would be excellent to even hear from those individuals with ideas very different from our own. Having access to these perspectives based on varying career-related experiences would give our children the best chance to fulfill our own career aspirations. Just think if you could hear from all of the hiring managers and industry professionals who are seeking employees in a specific region. This type of organic environment would provide amazing value and it could help so many communities thrive. The students graduating from colleges, trade schools and even those going to directly to work would more closely align with the needs of the workforce locally.

As an educator, I always wanted to do more for my students. I consistently brought professionals into my classroom to talk with students, recognizing that students need a village of responses to make better decisions about careers. For this reason, I set out on a course to try and figure out a way that we could help more students find the best career pathways while they were spending the least amount of money on tuition and other career-related expenses. I wanted students to be able to follow their passion, but still, have a realistic focus on how to achieve their goals. The only way through this problem is to provide information that helps students discover who they are while having access to information about all the jobs out there. This is quite a task, given the fact that the Department of Labor has identified at least 1100 job titles. But believe it or not, with the help of other educators we created a system that breaks all of the jobs down into 6 Mega Clusters for easy career matching.

There are certainly places that you can go to find career advice for your child. For example, there is an amazing group called Grown and Flown Parents on Facebook. In this group, parents seek advice from other parents about college for their children. This group is super active in less than 1 hour one career-related question will have will over 50 replies from other parents who have experienced similar situations. This platform is perfect for the person who asked the question and even those who have come across the thread, but wouldn’t it be even better to have a way to organize responses so those with similar questions could quickly and easily find the answers to their questions? These useful insights could help so many more families find the information that they seek. One problem with this group is that is college focused, not every child will attend college so parents of the child going to a trade school might not exactly fit into this group, but they certainly could benefit from hearing the voices of these other parents.

Because so many students and families are struggling to figure it all out, I started an organization in 2017 called Dream2Career. We are working with educators and business professionals on a platform called the D2C Directory. We are in the launching/testing phase of this solution, and we would love to hear your thoughts as we seek access to hiring managers and talent acquisition experts who can add training recommendations and relevant entry-level hiring information.  If you are interested in helping, you are an industry subject matter expert or if you just want to stay informed sign-up and follow our blog. We will keep you updated on the progress.  By this summer, we hope to have a fully functioning work-learn ecosystem that will help students find and prepare for dream careers.

Idaho Labor Research Emphasizes Value of Education and Training

by Edu-Advisor, posted in Mavens, Naturalists, Processors, Protectors, Specialists, Visionaries

Idaho Labor Research Emphasizes Value of Education and Training

Check out the Hot Jobs Table too!  https://idahoatwork.com/2019/02/25/idaho-labor-research-emphasizes-value-of-education-and-training/ via @wordpressdotcom