Is it a skills gap or a bias against the long-term unemployed?

I'd like to call your attention to what is essentially more wood for the fire of the seemingly endless 'Skills gap' debate - a summary of some recent research by two Northeastern University academics, William Dickens and Rand Ghayad, titled 'It's not a skills mismatch: Disaggregate evidence on the US-unemployment-vacancy relationship' posted this past weekend on the Vox site.  

You should take a few minutes to read the piece from Dickens and Ghayad - it provides an interesting and somewhat alternative method of examining the alleged skills gap problem - the scenario that so many corporations, government agencies, and educational institutions seem to take as truth. Namely that one significant reason (perhaps the most important reason) for persistently high unemployment, even after the official recession was over, is that a fundamental 'skills gap' is preventing organizations from filling many of the millions of current vacancies that exist in the USA.US Beveridge Curve 2004 - 2010

Dickens and Ghayad analyze the behavior of the so-called 'Beveridge Curve', the relationship between unemployment and job vacancies that is an indicator of the efficiency of the labor market. As you'd expect, the Beveridge Curve suggests that as the vacancy rate increases, the corresponding unemployment rate decreases (in an efficient labor market), as more people find work in an environment of increased opportunity.

But in the months following the end of the recession, the data points that connect the level of job vacancies and the reported unemployment rate continue to lie outside of the range of expectations suggested by the Beveridge Curve, implying some kind of inefficiency in the labor market. The most common explanation for this discrepancy is the 'skills gap', simply that the nature of work is changing so rapidly, that the skills and experience that employers demand simply can't be met efficiently by what skills and experience that the unemployed job seekers present.

Dickens and Ghayad take the Beveridge Curve data a bit further however, by examining how the relationship between increased job vacancies correlates to the unemployment rate for multiple stages of unemployment, from the short term, (less than 5 weeks), to the long-term, (more than 26 weeks). The results of this analysis are startling. Essentially the researchers found that only at the longest unemployment durations, does the Beverdige Curve 'jump' or shift.  At the shorter and medium term unemployment periods the data shows consistency with the historical trends, i.e. as job vacancies increase, unemployment rates decrease.

Said more simply - as the economy continues to recover, and more job vacancies get created, the expected reduction in the unemployment rate implied by the Beveridge Curve has held except for the long-term unemployed cohort, defined as being unemployed for greater than 26 weeks. For this group of unemployed workers, and this group only, job vacancy increases have not resulted in the expected and historical level of unemployment reduction. The authors contend then, that a fundamental 'skills gap' problem can't be the cause of aggregate high unemployment, otherwise we would see this effect across the entire range of unemployment durations, not just the longer term. From the Vox piece:

 It is possible that the long-term unemployed are increasingly made up of workers whose skills are not suited to available jobs. However, if this were the case why wouldn’t we see some outward shift in the short-term relationship as well? Furthermore, the fact that the vacancy-unemployment relationship has shifted in all industries when only the workers who were previously employed in those industries are considered calls the mismatch hypothesis into question as well.

 Another possibility is that the long-term unemployed in this recession may be searching less intensively, either because jobs are much harder to find or because of the availability of unprecedented amounts and durations of unemployment benefits.

This seems like a more likely explanation, though if a drop in search intensity is due only to difficulty finding jobs it again raises the question of why we wouldn’t see that at shorter durations as well.

It is interesting and challenging data for sure, but it has some pretty important implications if the author's conclusions are correct. Mainly, that the recovery is passing right by the long-term unemployed. Whether it is job search fatigue and discouragement, or a more troubling employer bias against these people, either way, if this recovery is effectively creating a large and growing class of unemployable (for myriad and hard-to-determine reasons), then even as the total unemployment rate seems to stabilize, the problems we face as a country and an economy will persist.

What do you think - does this 'skills gap' really only exist, (if at all), once someone has been out of work for quite a long time? 

Lessons from an Ad Man #1

Over the holidays I finished off an old book that had been on my 'I really should read that' list for ages - Confessions of an Advertising Man by ad industry legend David Ogilvy. The 'Confessions', first issued in 1963, provide a little bit of a glimpse into the Mad Men world of advertising in the 50s and 60s.

Ogilvy's book is a little short on the dramatics and indulgence portrayed on Mad Men, but it is long on practical, insightful, and simple advice for running a business, managing people, serving customers, and more.  Since I love to share such nuggets of solid business advice, and I need to create a few more blog 'series' to help keep this little blog updated, this post will be the first in a semi-regular series called 'Lessons from an Ad Man.'

So with the too long setup out of the way, on to Lesson #1 - this one on what fourteen years of running his ad agency taught Ogilvy what his, as the 'top man' in the organization should consider his primary responsibility:

After fourteen years of it, I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principle responsibility: to provide an atmosphere where creative mavericks can do useful work.

Like much of the insights in 'Confessions', Ogilvy doesn't really knock you out with how incredibly profound or ground-breaking his thinking on management was. But if you pause to consider that he was postulating about this idea of management as an enabler of creative accomplishment back in the early 60s then the observation seems a bit more meaningful.

Face it, 50 years later it is pretty easy to find any number of management and leadership gurus and though leaders advising the very same thing. Find the best, most creative and talented minds. Carefully construct an atmosphere where they can and will be motivated to work on what drives them. And finally, be brave and smart enough to stay (enough) out of their way.

A simple recipe for success, no? 

Ogilvy had it figured out in 1960.  How long do you think it will take the rest of us to catch on?

Have a great weekend!

2012 Rewind: The secret of not wishing to be anywhere else

Note: I am winding down the last, waning days of 2012 by re-running a few posts from this year that either I liked, were (reasonably) popular, or just didn't get a fair shake the first time around.  If that is not your sort of thing, then come back on January 2, 2013 when fresh and tasty content resumes. Thanks for reading in 2012!

This piece, The secret of not wishing to be anywhere else, ran in June and was, I suppose, a bit of response and reflection on feeling pretty tired and a little sick of all the buzz, chatter, and noise that surrounds work and business sometimes. And for what it is worth, this might be my favorite piece I wrote in 2012.

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The secret of not wishing to be anywhere else

Whether it's during a long meeting at work, standing on the sidelines of a U-7 soccer match in the cold rain when you know you have about 4,120 other things to do, or making small talk in a big room at an event or trade show, most of us at least once in a while, battle with the sometimes intense desire to be somewhere else, or to be doing something else.

Part of this, I think, stems from a kind of achievement at all costs, stay one step ahead of the next guy, keep Tweeting and Tumbr'ing and Instgramming, while simultaneously talking, texting, and making sure your SEO and SEM and mobile optimization strategies are all in place and whirring. There's always something else to do, something else that could be done, something that the next guy is doing that maybe threatens or angers or makes you envious. Whatever. Work, building a business, angling for some better opportunities, trying to raise your profile to get on an internet list or get comped to an event - it can be a pretty exhausting grind.ATL

Of course there is lots to do, maybe more to do than ever before. Certainly the explosion in platforms and applications that require care and feeding are one reason, and I suppose the degradation (for many folks), in the employee-employer contract or said more plainly, the notion that the next day at any job might be your last, as the spectre of one bad quarter or a decision from a large company to jump in to your market conspiring to make any job in any company seem more temporary and fragile than in recent memory.

So the natural, and I think for the most part correct, response to all this uncertainty, (and also, paradoxically, opportunity), is for professionals to be much more on the hustle, even those with so-called 'real jobs'. There is a lot of chasing going on no doubt, and while the rewards can be really nice for the ones that do it well, and work at the the hardest, certainly all this chasing and hustling and posturing and angling comes with some downside.

First, the nagging feeling that no matter how much one works, there is someone else out there doing just a little bit more. And that's annoying. Second, it is really, really, easy to forget to say 'No' sometimes, and to remember that less is usually more, (and more interesting). And last, it is easy to fall into the trap of feeling no matter where you are and what you're doing, that you've made the wrong, or at least not the best, most bang for your time, SEO-optimized decision and that somewhere else, something fantastic is going on and you're missing it.

The truth is there probably is something better going on. And you are missing it. And there, wherever there is, is one of your peers/friends/competitors thinking the exact same thing. 

Have a Great Week!

2012 Rewind: On Gates and Gatekeepers

Note: I am winding down the last, waning days of 2012 by re-running a few posts from this year that either I liked, were (reasonably) popular, or just didn't get a fair shake the first time around.  If that is not your sort of thing, then come back on January 2, 2013 when fresh and tasty content resumes. Thanks for reading in 2012!

This piece, On Gates and Gatekeepers ran in May as part of what seems like the annual blogging exercise of finding interesting college commencement speeches to write about. Of course I complied, and this was both my favorite post on the subject as it talked about the wonderful commencement address given by author and artist Neil Gaiman.

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On Gates and Gatekeepers

A week or so back I had a post titled, 'The Skilled Trades Need a Famous Commencement Address Too', in which I whined for 500 words or so about the prevalence of actors, politicians, ridiculously successful internet gazillionaires, and the other non-relatable types that seem to deliver just about all of the annual college commencement addresses, or at least the ones we hear about. My point was more or less that in a tough economic climate, and with an enduring and worsening need for talented people to enter fields such as the skilled trades, teaching, and other not-as-glamorous-as-acting-or-being-a-social-media-consultant, that the consistent set of messages stemming from the annual round of typical commencement speeches, ('Just go out there and be fantastic', 'You can save the world', 'Borrow $20k from your parents and start a business'), were all just getting tiresome.  If the nation truly needs more machinists or nurses or accountants, then could we at least start acknowledging that more openly and with more conviction?

So as I said, I don't really give two shakes about 99% of the latest round of commencement addresses. But once in a great while there is a talk worth talking about, and worth sharing, even if it does bear some similarity to the hacky, same-old same-old advice that gets recycled each spring.  The speech I wanted to call out was given on May 17th at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia by the author Neil Gaiman, famous mostly for The Sandman, a series of comics written between 1988 and 1996.

In the speech, (text here, embedded video below, email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), Gaiman, speaking to a graduating class from an art school, offers advice and wisdom gained over his career as a working, and certainly, highly successful creative. While the entire speech is interesting, I wanted to call out two passages that speak more broadly to issues about career planning and management, and to the pace of change impacting not just the creative industries, but almost all organizations these days.

On career planning and management:

When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing.

This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should not.

Value in the real world - In your organization, the people making the rules, setting the boundaries, (maybe that's you?), are inherently limited by their tendency to fail to envision a world outside those boundaries. Having a job setting rules, well it seems that is a path to a long career setting rules and enforcing boundaries. Maybe you are ok with that, maybe not. 

On organizational and business model change:

I've talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last century or so are in flux for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds.

Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're supposed to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are.

Value in the real world - In the arts, and probably your business too, the landscape two, five, ten years out is entirely unpredictable, and it is likely what works today will not work tomorrow. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. 

 Don't allow yourself to use that as an excuse to over-analyze or hesitate. The winning organizations are not waiting to 'see how things play out', by that time, it's likely that you'll be too late to adapt once the new landscape is revealed. Better to set off on the course you think will be successful than wait for some kind of signpost from beyond.

Anyway, that's it for me on commencement speeches, at least until next Spring. 

The video of the full speech is below, and I think definitely worth your time over lunch, or at night when you have a spare 20 minutes or so.

Have a Great Weekend!

Great places to work are like great sports franchises

The nice people over at Glassdoor.com released their 'Top 50 Best Places to Work for 2013' list today, and as usual it is an interesting collection of all kinds of organizations - large and small, high-tech and old-school, and relatively young to long lasting.

The full list can be found here, as well as on the image to the right, (click the thumbnail for a larger view).Click to expand

The important aspect of the Glassdoor 'Best Places' list, unlike any of the other, similar types of lists that are around, is that it is determined not by some kind of expert panel of thought leaders, judges, or academics; but rather it is calculated from the company reviews and ratings about the companies that have been left on the Glassdoor.com site.  So these ratings are the closest equivalent to say, the Amazon.com book review or the Yelp restaurant review for the workplace.

But since I like to compare, evaluate, and assess just about everything through the prism of the world of sports - rather than give you a (lame) take something along the lines of 'Facebook is the Best Place to work again, I wonder what lessons you can learn from this', I thought I'd make it fun, (for me at least), and cherry pick a few big names form the list and juxtapose them with the big time sports team they seem the most like.  

Why do this?

Why not?

Here goes:

2. McKinsey & Company - Easy, these guys are the New York Yankees.  Big name, big reputation, have a kind of mystique about them and have had it for a long time. The name that the rest of the market compares themselves to.

4. Bain & Company - Again, pretty easy. If McKinsey are the Yankees, then Bain are the Boston Red Sox. Also have a big name, have had some success, but will always be looking up at the big dog on top.  It is fitting that McKinsey came in a couple of notches above Bain.

11. Careerbuilder - Not as obvious as the McKinsey and Bain comparisons, but I will go with the basketball's San Antonio Spurs.  Consistently good, with some legendary performance in the recent past. But also consistently overlooked and sometimes underrated despite their pedigree. Finally they both have a bit of 'I can't believe they are still relevant after all these years' kind of feel to them.

24. Trader Joe's - I will go not with one team with which to compare the eclectic grocer, I will go with an entire league - the National Hockey League (NHL), currently not playing their current season due to a labor/management dispute.  Like the NHL in sports, Trader Joe's is kind of a niche player in the grocery business, has a kind of weird appeal, but if it was gone hardly anyone would really miss it. Think about it - does anyone really need a Trader Joe's?  Or the NHL?

35. General Mills - Time for a football comparison. Let's go with the Green Bay Packers.  Midwestern organization, been around forever, everyone can recognize them by their brand, and kind of hard not to like, even if you don't care about cereal or sports. Feels like they will be a part of the landscape forever.

50. Starbucks - I'll go international on this one and call them Manchester Uniited from English football soccer. They are both ubiquitous, have a global presence and instant brand and name recognition, and both have the most annoying fans/customers that you will ever encounter.  Man United fans and Starbucks customers are really similiar - smug, kind of annoying, ('Quad-soy-no whip-light foam-hazelnut-extra shot'), and somehow think being a fan/customer grants them some kind of unearned social status.  Disclaimer: I am a Liverpool/Dunkin' Donuts person. 

That's it - I need to stop there, but I am sure you have your own ideas. There are 45 more companies on the list that need a sports team equivalent assigned to them, have at it in the comments!