Gene Graves

Reports on the results of a study of women who break into top management. Sex discrimination in employee promotion; Efforts to identify systems in corporate structures that may lead to increased career opportunities for women.

Women Who Break into Top Management A Study

LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In an effort to help laid-off newspaper employees, Newspapers & Technology and The Job Network have created an online program to help journalists as well as operations and production personnel find new employment. Job seekers can post their resumes free of charge on Newspapers & Technology's Web site, www.newsandtech.com. The resumes will be available for viewing on nearly 375 Job Network sites, plus affiliated networks such as RealMatch, SimplyHired, Google, Scientific American and Geek.com.The Job Network offers state-of-the-art real-time technology that grades and matches employers' needs with candidates' skills. Employers can also use the service free of charge to enter criteria associated with open positions. Job Network matches employers' needs with submitted resumes and returns those resumes that best match those requirements. An employer would be charged a small fee to view the contact information associated with candidates who best matched the job.The partnership was announced Monday at the Newspaper Association of America's mediaXchange conference here. With major newspaper groups facing serious financial challenges - and some in bankruptcy - the number of newspaper jobs has plummeted. More than 7,000 newspaper jobs were lost in 2008, and no relief appears in sight for 2009. Late last month, the Rocky Mountain News closed, and daily papers in Tucson, Ariz., San Francisco and Seattle have been targeted for closing or staff cutbacks."This is a very challenging time for the industry," said Mary L. Van Meter, publisher of Newspapers and Technology. "Not a day passes that I don't get a phone call or an e-mail from some very capable person who's looking for a job." Van Meter and Marc Wilson, president of The Job Network, both serve on the Inland Press Association board of directors, and at a recent board meeting the two agreed to merge the promotional power of Newspapers & Technology and Wilson's Job Network technology in an attempt to help laid-off newspaper employees."I wish we could do more," Wilson said. "I understand that very few newspapers are hiring. But I think that many newspapers have gone overboard in staff reductions, and when the recession ends, there once again will be a demand for talented reporters, editors, production, circulation and other staff."The Job Network, a premier provider of employment solutions, is a limited liability partnership owned by TownNews.com, RealMatch Inc., Schurz Communications, Pioneer Newspapers, Dix Communications, the Seaton Group, Calkins Newspapers and the PAGE Cooperative. Newspapers & Technology is the publishing industry's premier source of news and information about newspaper operations and production. For further information, contact Mary Van Meter at 303-575-9595 or Marc Wilson at 309-269-7826(Read the original release at BusinessWire.)

Job Board Created for Laid-Off Newspaper Employees

Clark Aldrich, in his insightful blog several months ago, said "As I work with organizations in developing e-learning, I am increasingly aware of dead elephants in the room, large reference points that we have to avoid because we can't wrap our minds around them." He then went on to give several examples, where we talk about one thing (the traditional approaches and methods), and do not bring up the related Dead Elephants of e-learning (the new, innovative tools and techniques). Clark ended his post by asking readers "What are some other dead elephants?"In the 10 comments that followed, Godfrey Parkin touched upon what I think is not only a dead elephant, but the huge rotting carcass of a Wooly Mammoth. He said "One very large elephant that nobody wants to talk about is the increasing marginalization (and ultimate demise) of centralized training, and its implications for training departments as we have known them."That was the point of the Snake Oil post. Back then, when it was first published, it was a wake up call for those of us who worked in corporate training departments. Back then, a lot of people paid attention and responded.As I understood the post, the purpose was to start a dialogue, to try and build a business case and discover a migration path from what Sam called "Snake Oil" - training that had been proven NOT to work - to new approaches that DO work (e.g. affective and cognitive learning, mentoring, collaboration, database-driven embedded and portable WIFI 'performance' systems, etc.). In Sam's words, it was an opportunity for us to be " rated on whether you save or make money (or both) for the company."Two years later, after the alarm was sounded, it seems as if many of us have not only gone back to sleep, we're disappearing.People left inside corporate training organizations are still selling Snake Oil. To quote a friend of mine, "This is professional suicide." The new (now old in PC years) learning and knowledge transfer methods that the Snake Oil post listed are still not being discussed or widely adopted.The reason I thought the Snake Oil post was so important - I remember forwarding it to almost everyone on my email contact list - was that it was a chance to bring the Dead Elephants to life and have them enter the room. By doing so, I thought we could move away from the old Snake Oil approach, and begin to employ and incorporate the more readily measurable methods and tools into our work. The net result would have been several years of providing corporate education that would have had a more visible impact upon performance and profitability.Because we did not take the Snake Oil post either to heart or to work, that window of opportunity is lost. And the consequences are apparent.I recently read some research about our industry by Ambient Insights that shows that we - corporate trainers - are gradually going away. We are moving from inside the corporation, where we might have had a tremendously valuable impact, especially in the Knowledge Economy, to the outside. In 2004, there were about 75,000 corporate training professionals in this country. The trends towards off-shoring, outsourcing, downsizing and capsizing indicate that by 2008 there will be about 45,000 of us left.Most of us will be working for companies outside the corporation. As an outside vendor, our influence and impact upon corporate decision making, with regard to education and training, will be minimized. And if the trend continues, and we cannot break away from using Snake Oil, more than 75-80% of us by 2011 will be looking in from the outside, as we develop and deliver corporate training programs .The upshot of all this is that 6 years from now, by 2012, only 20,000 of us (or less) will be working inside companies as part of a training department. As Godfrey Parkin said, we will be even more marginalized, our ideas for innovation and new approaches even more discounted, and our primary role will be as project managers of outsourced contracts. The majority of us will work for outside companies as low paid and/or contract workers. And becasue there will still be money in Snake Oil, that's probably what they will sell.I had high hopes, when the original post was first published, that we could change direction. I knew that we were NOT on the right path every time I bent over backwards, using some clever new system, to try and prove an ROI for a training program. I was looking forward to a new and exciting dialogue about the different role we could play. I was envisioning a more rapid adoption of the innovative methods of learning that were surfacing as part of the Digital Revolution.I had even hoped we could broaden our scope to learn what was going on outside the workplace, look at what was being done in the government, the military, Grades K to 12, and post-secondary schools. My goal back then was to reverse the trends, move away from just being 'the training department', jettison the canned Snake Oil approach, and move onto a better track that could help us become more valuable and valued by our companies.And so, two years later, the infamous Snake Oil blog is posted once again. I still believe, despite the trends, that it's not too late, that those of us inside the company can still change what we are proposing and doing, get away from what measurably does no good (Snake Oil), to what works better if not best. I look forward to 'walking the talk', using the newer and more collaborative technology of the wiki, to discuss the possibilities posited by the Snake Oil blog. As Andrew Williams wrote in his response, perhaps the original post can still be viewed as "an inflection point" in the history of this industry.

Gene Graves

About