Help for Good Works

…to whom much is given, much is required.

(Luke 12:48)

It is amazing how your perspective changes based on your exposure. Since I have become more active in workforce readiness, I view situations and see things differently than I may have in the past. Last week, I was in a big box retailer and I was so impressed with the salesman, I initiated a conversation with him about his career path. Last night, we were in a fast food restaurant and I witnessed a working mom's children in the dining area, waiting on her shift to end. My immediate response was to inquire about other types of work or skills she had. Before, I might have been oblivious to their circumstances.

Today, I am learning more about the resources available to help those in need to retool their skills and training in order to find better paying jobs. I will admit, the last time I lived in Arkansas and needed help finding a job, I referred to the agency as the “unemployment office.” Today, the assisting organization is called the Arkansas Workforce Board, which offers various programs ranging from industrial readiness training (to equip potential employees with the basic skills needed to succeed in a manufacturing or warehouse work environments) to on-the-job or incumbent worker training (to improve the employees opportunity for advancement at a specific company. Oftentimes, these training programs are of little to no cost to the employees. To find out more about Workforce Investment activities in Arkansas, visit http://workforceinvestmentworks.com/workforce_board_info.asp?st=AR. For other parts of the country, visit http://www.servicelocator.org/onestopcenters.asp.

After registering with a service center, it is important for job seekers to visit the local Workforce office and establish a relationship with the career counselors, who are available to help with navigation through the employment process. They work with the employer services team to understand the real needs of the local companies, and in many cases, have relationships with the human resources officials making hiring decisions. In other situations, they may have the ability to set up job fairs or specific training that allows motivated job seekers to personally meet prospective employers. I am a firm believer in human relations and relationships. (One of my biggest pet peeves in the reliance of algorithms to get selected as a best qualified candidate because I know that one wrongly selected keyword, or equivalent, and you will be eliminated from the possibility.) So after meeting with people like the young man and the single mother mentioned earlier, in addition to giving them my card, I also share the cards of my esteemed friends from the Workforce Investment Networks.

Since I have become more exposed to the local employment resources, I have met many people who have a passion for helping others and a mission to give back. I smile when I look at how my journey of finding my purposed work has taken me down a different path of helping others to find better paying jobs.  How are you giving people in your community information about improving their skills and finding opportunities to advance into higher wage jobs and occupations?  Feel free to comment or send me an email to latanyua.robinson@gmail.com. If you like this post and want to catch up on some of my previous discussions, please visit the full Purposed Work blog at http://ltr-latrobe-mfg.blogspot.com/.

Mid-South Good Works

Some of what I am discussing in this post may be old news to regular readers of this blog. When I read press releases, I do not always take them at face value. I oftentimes conduct my own research in order to process information for my own understanding. The announcement of the Investing Manufacturing Communities Partnership (IMCP) (http://ltr-latrobe-mfg.blogspot.com/2015/07/outreach-for-good-works.html) has piqued my interest in the broad manufacturing landscape of the Mid-South that is based on data, and not simply my observations and limited personal knowledge.

So imagine my surprise when I consulted the Memphis Business Journal’s Book of Lists for 2014-2015 for the largest manufacturing operations in the Mid-South. The Top Ten Manufacturing plants, ranked by the number of full time employees in the region, include: Ashley Furniture Industries, Tyson Foods, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Mississippi, Nucor Corp, Lennox International, Riceland Foods, UTC-Carrier, Cooper Tire & Rubber, Kellogg, and Tenneco. Who knew that Stuttgart is home to two of the largest manufacturing employers in all of the Mid-South? (To learn more, visit http://www.bizjournals.com/memphis/research/bol-marketing/).

The regional IMCP awardee is called The Made in the Mid-South Manufacturing Alliance (MMMA). The initiative “supports expansion of manufacturing in the Memphis Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), with a special focus on a strong and growing medical device cluster in three states – Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas.” In the announcement, I was surprised to read that Memphis is the home to 56 medical equipment and supply manufacturing companies. In my previous exposure to medical device manufacturers, the hotbed of activity was Warsaw, IN, known as the “Orthopedic Capital of the World,” boasting such companies as DePuy, Zimmer, and Biomet. In the Memphis area, I was familiar with companies like Smith & Nephew, Medtronic, and Wright Medical Technology. However, I was surprised to read in the Business Journal of regional companies like MicroPort Orthopedics, Medical Action Industries, Gyrus, NuVasive, Bioventus, Onyx, and Tegra Medical, in addition to a host biotechnology companies. To learn more about the MMMA, you can download and read the following: http://www.eda.gov/challenges/imcp/files/2nd-round/IMCP-2-Pager-Handout-Memphis.pdf

My own biases and limited knowledge lead me to believe that the primary industries and economies in the Mid-South were agricultural and distribution related. I grew up in this region, and until recently, never considered how the Mid-South has evolved as a realistic Land of Opportunity (nickname of Arkansas) for entrepreneurs and job seekers interested in manufacturing. For me, this research has been a personal teaching moment and reminder to never look at anything from your limited perspective. Are there other areas of economic diversity in the Mid-South that others should become aware? Feel free to comment or send me an email to latanyua.robinson@gmail.com. If you like this post and want to catch up on some of my previous discussions, please visit the full Purposed Work blog at http://ltr-latrobe-mfg.blogspot.com/.

Pitching Good Works

…the wise makes his speech judicious

and adds persuasiveness to his lips…

 (Proverbs 16:23)

One of my new volunteer activities is working with future leaders in the community to help expand their business etiquette skills. Once a month, I am involved with a team who meets with a diverse group of young people and role play various experiences they should expect to have in a business or professional environment. This weekend, we engaged them in developing his or her individual elevator pitch.

An elevator pitch is a business tool for clearly articulating what you or your organization has to offer. I prefer to call it your 30 second commercial: If you only have a short amount of time, like an elevator ride, what would you say that makes a lasting impression that leads to a follow-up?

An elevator pitch is a prepared statement. When crafting one, consider the following steps to make sure that the message is interesting, memorable, and succinct:

1. Identify the goal or objective of the pitch.
2. Explain what you or your organization does by using examples of problems you have solved.
3. Communicate what makes you UNIQUE, your value proposition.
4. Engage with an open ended question.
5. Put it all together.
6. Practice, until you get the pitch into a natural sounding 30 second conversation.

I love working with creative young people because their imaginations are limitless. Even though it was role-play, one young man pretended he was trying to get an invitation to apply for an intern position and he wanted to share his concepts for the first commercially available teleporter. Based on his pitch, I would have invited him to go through the interview process!

Working through the process was a reminder that I had not updated my elevator pitch in awhile. Using the guide provided above, a revised statement to introduce our workforce readiness solution to potential community or industry influencers reads as: My company provides consulting services to industrial organizations looking to expand their operations or their workforce. From my experiences in both corporate American and as a consultant, one of the issues that I have seen time and again is that small to mid-sized companies have a difficult time finding qualified candidates who have the necessary soft skills to succeed in a manufacturing or industrial work environment. To address that need, we developed workforce readiness solution that aides our partners in hiring the right people with the potential to excel in manufacturing jobs. Who in your organization is responsible for the #Youarehired! activities of identifying the technical and interpersonal skills needed to be successful on day one in the workplace? Here’s our capability brochure with our contact information. (Of course, the spoken message would be tailored for the audience.)

http://www.latrobellc.com/industrial-people.php

In working with young people, we try to emphasize that you never know when you will have an opportunity to make a lasting impression. Developing an elevator pitch is one example of preparing future leaders for likely exchanges in the professional environment. What other tools would you suggest we introduce and role play with the next generation to equip them for success in the workplace? Feel free to comment or send me an email to latanyua.robinson@gmail.com. If you like this post and want to catch up on some of my previous discussions, please visit the full Purposed Work blog at http://ltr-latrobe-mfg.blogspot.com/.

Success in Good Works

I have learned that success is to be measured

not so much by the position that one has reached in life

as by the obstacles which he has overcome 

while trying to succeed.

Booker T. Washington

It's that time of year where prom season quickly transitions into graduation and new beginnings. In our family, my oldest niece is preparing to graduate from high school and head off to college in the fall. My middle niece is beginning to make decisions about whether her post graduation plans include vocational training or university studies. And my son is considering the courses he will take in high school, based on his CAP assessment. Three unique young minds with one thing in common, to answer the question, what do I want to be when I grow up?

When our mom grew up, the conventional wisdom was to get a good job and begin a family. A generation ago, we were told to go to college to position yourself for a long-term career. Our children, Millennials,  have so many options and possibilities, that it is challenging to make a decision today about finding career success in a world that is rapidly changing, that will not be the same a decade, let alone 40 - 50 years from now. So what advice are you giving to children trying to decide on secondary education paths?

Over the years, I have become an advocate of vocational training before deciding on a profession. If I had one regret about the decisions I made immediately after graduation, it is that I did not know how to do anything with my hands. I can solve almost any math problem put before me, but if I had to earn a living, I have no immediate skills to fall back on. Jokingly (and seriously), I always wanted to become a welder. Fast forward to present day and my imagination runs wild with the possibility what I could do in manufacturing if I owned and operated a welding shop!

If you look at the history of several well-known colleges and universities, many began as industrial training schools that met the immediate needs of the workforce during that era. Somehow along the way, industrial, or vocational training, became stigmatized as less valuable that university training, but is it really? When you consider the cost of attending a four-year institution, you have to ask, is the return-on-investment a real value in today's rapidly changing society. I challenge that notion.

Some of the most successful people that I know are entrepreneurs with in demand skills. I have a friend who followed his families' business as a master barber and has franchised beauty and barber shops around the region. By the same token, another friend is a plumber, a vocation whose skills always have and always will be in high demand. What both of these gentlemen have in common is they started with basic skills and transformed their companies into success stories not imaginable a few decades ago.

There are no particular route to finding success in the workplace and in a career. We used to measure success by the education required to obtain the job, or the job title earned. Today, our children have so many more options because the expectation is not to get a job, work for forty years, and retire from that company. Life and opportunity give them so many more options to consider that their measure of success will be different that how we defined it. And that is OK. The thing we have to instill in them is that regardless of the path they choose, it will require hard work and dedication to overcome the obstacles they will face along the way.  How are you encouraging the young people in your life to measure what they consider success in their purposed work? Feel free to comment, or send me an email at latanyua.robinson@gmail.com. If you like this post, and want to  catch up on some of my previous discussion, please visit the full Purposed Work blog at http://ltr-latrobe-mfg.blogspot.com/.