From WSJ by Peter Cappelli:

Even with unemployment hovering around 9%, companies are grousing that they can’t find skilled workers, and filling a job can take months of hunting.

Employers are quick to lay blame. Schools aren’t giving kids the right kind of training. The government isn’t letting in enough high-skill immigrants. The list goes on and on.

But I believe that the real culprits are the employers themselves.

With an abundance of workers to choose from, employers are demanding more of job candidates than ever before. They want prospective workers to be able to fill a role right away, without any training or ramp-up time.

In other words, to get a job, you have to have that job already. It’s a Catch-22 situation for workers—and it’s hurting companies and the economy.

To get America’s job engine revving again, companies need to stop pinning so much of the blame on our nation’s education system. They need to drop the idea of finding perfect candidates and look for people who could do the job with a bit of training and practice.

There are plenty of ways to get workers up to speed without investing too much time and money, such as putting new employees on extended probationary periods and relying more on internal hires, who know the ropes better than outsiders would.

It’s a fundamental change from business as usual. But the way we’re doing things now just isn’t working.

From CNN.com’s piece:

Jobs also was a Buddhist and a spiritual person whose religious beliefs were altered by his cancer diagnosis, Isaacson said.

“I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden one day and he started talking about God. He said, ‘Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe.

“But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of — maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on.’ “

Did you see this opinion by a medical expert on the cancer Steve Jobs had and his promethean approach to his own health?

Steve Jobs had a mild form of cancer that is not usually fatal, but seems to have ushered along his own death by delaying conventional treatment in favor of alternative remedies, a Harvard Medical School researcher and faculty member says. Jobs’s intractability, so often his greatest asset, may have been his undoing.

“Let me cut to the chase: Mr. Jobs allegedly chose to undergo all sorts of alternative treatment options before opting for conventional medicine,” Ramzi Amri wrote in an extraordinarily detailed post to Quora, an online Q&A forum popular among Silicon Valley executives. “Given the circumstances, it seems sound to assume that Mr. Jobs’ choice for alternative medicine has eventually led to an unnecessarily early death.”

Amri went on to say that, even after entering conventional medical care, the Apple CEO seemed to eschew the most practical forms of treatment. Addressing the period when Jobs began to visibly shed weight, Amri wrote, “it seems that even during this recurrent phase, Mr. Jobs opted to dedicate his time to Apple as the disease progressed, instead of opting for chemotherapy or any other conventional treatment.”

From Michael Cavna at WaPo:

“Picasso had a saying. He said, ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

— PBS’s “Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires” (1996)

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

— Fortune

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

— BusinessWeek

(more…)

From Yahoo:

CUPERTINO, Calif. (AP) — Steve Jobs, the Apple founder and former CEO who invented and masterfully marketed ever-sleeker gadgets that transformed everyday technology, from the personal computer to the iPod and iPhone, has died. He was 56.

Apple announced his death without giving a specific cause.

“We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today,” the company said in a brief statement.

“Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve”

Jobs had battled cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009 after taking a leave of absence for unspecified health problems. He took another leave of absence in January — his third since his health problems began — and officially resigned in August.

USA Today got some experts together to discuss how to create jobs, and this is a great topic for today – our Labor Day. Wow, do we need jobs. The picture below is at a job fair in Atlanta.

What’s being done in your community? What are you hearing?

My neighbor was unemployed for two years; he’s 62 now. He got a part-time job at Dick’s Sporting Goods, and tells me all those around him are college educated grads (and each, he said, has a major in education).

More than two years after the Great Recession ended, some 14 million Americans are out of work, nearly half of them for six months or longer.

What’s worse, this bleak picture shows no signs of brightening soon. Economic growth is expected to plod along at a lackluster 2.5% pace next year, leaving the jobless rate hovering just below 9% by the end of 2012.

August’s unemployment rate remained at 9.1%, unchanged from July.

So they asked experts (and not Repub or Dem politicians, who — perhaps — have too much vested in which decisions are made). Here are their suggestions, but you’ll have to go to the link above to get the details:

1. Infrastructure work: repair roads, build bridges, and schools. (2 million jobs)

2. Give States a helping hand.

3. Add workers at a discount

4. Share jobs to save jobs.

5. Lower corporate taxes.

6. Train the jobless.

7. Cut red tape.

I see these weekly and have never done a thing about it. So, here’s a try to notify our readers of job opportunities in the publishing world.

Digital Acquisitions Editor

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI
RESPONSIBILITIES: • Acquire and recommend new biblical reference content, some of which become print books, all of which become digital projects. • Develop digital projects out of existing backlist CCARR titles • Work with other CCARR AE’s to develop enhanced ebooks and other digital products in the areas of church life/ministry, textbooks, and curriculum • Work with publisher to oversee partnerships with software companies selling CCARR product downloads. • Serve as editorial contact for production staff, marketers, and sales staff on CCARR projects.

[View complete profile at CareerCenterforChristianPublishing.com]

Marketing Manager, Baker Books and Bibles
Baker Publishing Group, Ada, MI
Baker Publishing Group is accepting applications for a Marketing Manager for Baker Books and Bibles. This position will be responsible for independently developing effective marketing strategies for Baker Books, GOD’S WORD Bibles, and Cambridge Bibles in North America, managing the execution of marketing activities such as positioning, titling, copy development, advertising, and promotions for assigned campaigns. The individual in this position is also expected to be an active participant in division-level strategic planning and publishing boards, and assist as needed with acquisitions and author development. This position is located in the company’s headquarters in the Grand Rapids, MI area. Telecommuting/offsite working arrangements are not available for this position.
[View complete profile at CareerCenterforChristianPublishing.com]

Acquisitions Editor, Baker Books
Baker Publishing Group, MI
Baker Publishing Group is seeking an Acquisitions Editor for the Baker Books division. The individual in this position will be responsible for acquiring in Baker Books’ key publishing categories, including nonfiction trade, church and ministry resources, and popular reference. Related duties include evaluating solicited and unsolicited proposals, proposing titles to the division publishing committee, negotiating contracts with authors and agents, assessing initial drafts and manuscript development, and representing acquired titles through each step of prepublication planning and development. Travel is required, and salary and rank will be commensurate with experience.

[View complete profile at CareerCenterforChristianPublishing.com]

This is an issue for some, and it’s an eye-roller for others. But not all think tats are a good idea, especially the more visible down-the-arm or around-the-neck or all-over-the-face kind. Flannery O’Connor you may remember used a tattoo in “Parker’s Back” to create a sense of the dramatic and grotesque.