There will not be enough trained workers to fill the anticipated 1 million vocational jobs available in Illinois in the next years, according to a report released Wednesday by The Workforce Alliance and Skills2Compete-Illinois, not-for-profit job advocacy organizations.  

The report projects that 45 percent of all available Illinois jobs between 2006 and 2016 will be in the middle-skill level, which generally requires education and training beyond high school but does not require a bachelor’s degree. In that period of time the number of these jobs will outpace the number of workers who have the proper training, leaving jobs vacant.

But the report caused at least one local expert to raise a question.

“This [report] does strike me as an accurate picture of where job growth is going to happen,” said Robert Bruno, professor of labor and industrial relations at University of Illinois-Chicago. However, “the projections are somewhat hopeful.”

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Tags: illinois, middle skills, skills gap, training, education

Categories: News

Champaign, IL (PRWEB) October 5, 2009 -- Wolfram Alpha LLC today announced that it will inaugurate Wolfram|Alpha "Homework Day," a groundbreaking live interactive web event, on Wednesday, October 21, 2009. Led by noted scientist and Wolfram|Alpha creator Stephen Wolfram, this marathon webcast will bring together students, parents, and educators from across the country to tackle tough homework assignments and explore the richness that Wolfram|Alpha brings to K-12, college, and beyond.

Launched this May, Wolfram|Alpha is a free website powered by a computational knowledge engine that generates answers to questions in real time by doing computations on its own vast internal knowledge base. Named by Time magazine as one of the 50 Best Websites of 2009, Wolfram|Alpha is widely recognized as an innovative and invaluable new resource for education. 

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Tags: education, wolfram, learning

Categories: News

phrases, today's managers have to keep learning continuously, not only from their jobs but also through formal pedagogy. This is where the role of executive management programmes steps in.

Several new institutes and organisations cater to the rising demand of training of executives, as opposed to predominantly fresh graduates that enroll into B-schools. And, the enrolment numbers at executive education programmes is only going higher by the day. Take for example NIIT Imperia, which was set up in the year 2006 to address the demand for executive training.

Now, has a presence in 8 cities; and it has aggressive plans to be present in 75 cities by 2010! Other than the big players like IIMs and ISB, many other organisations and institutes like HughesNet Global Education, Apeejay School of Management, IGNOU, Reliance Webworld, NIS Sparta, 24 x 7 Learning and U21 Global are growing rapidly too, and are offering various executive education programmes.

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Tags: india, executives, education, management, globalization

Categories: International | News

(BusinessWeek) -- The idea that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it may be the bane of undergraduates left to the mercies of graduate teaching assistants, but it's remarkably true. In medical school, the cliché "See one; do one; teach one" has become a dominant pedagogical principle. In fact, George Bernard Shaw's notorious anti-educational quip gets flipped—instead of "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach," it's "Those who teach effectively learn how to do."

The power of this practice was recently reinforced at a statistical software customer conference I attended. A participant complained that one of the training sessions was really more of a "technical demo" than a class. The session leader was less a teacher or facilitator that a presenter. The collective frustration was palpable. This seminar's attendees could "see" what the presenter was doing and observe the outcomes but they simply couldn't "get" the underlying principles. You really couldn't divorce getting business value out of the software from understanding the core statistical techniques.

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Tags: mentoring, teaching, education

Categories: News

(From The Economic Times) MUMBAI: The traditional image of finishing schools is of the Swiss Alps, where elegant young ladies from well-to-do families learn to walk, talk and make conversation before entering polite society.

Now India is looking to the model for the three million or so graduates it produces every year to refine the skills they need to succeed in business and give the country a sharper edge in the global marketplace.

The "finishing schools" in Mumbai, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore are to open later this year, as part of a two-million-dollar project by the Indian School of Integrated Learning (ISIL) and British training firm Speak First.

"The finishing school is taking graduates and anyone else of that academic level through a programme which will give them all the skills that a business could possibly want," Speak First's Amanda Vickers told AFP in Mumbai.

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Tags: training, business training, education, workforce, india

Categories: International | News

(From the Washington Post) The high unemployment rate has provided an unexpected boon for the nation's public schools: legions of career-switchers eager to become teachers.

Across the country, interest in teacher preparation programs geared toward job-changers is rising sharply. Applications to a national retraining program based in 20 cities rose 30 percent this year. Enrollment in a career-switcher program for teachers at Virginia's community colleges increased by 20 percent. And a Prince George's County resident teacher program increased enrollment by 40 percent.

In many places, there are more converts to teaching than there are jobs, except in hard-to-fill posts in science, math and special education classes. But the wave of applicants might ease teacher shortages expected to develop as 1.7 million baby boomers retire from the public schools during the next decade.

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Tags: training, education, skills, teacher training, careers

Categories: The Economy

(From Freep.com) One out of three working-age adults in Michigan — 1.7 million people — cannot read well enough to be hired for a job that will support a family. More than 40% of those potential workers, who all read below a sixth-grade level, also lack a high school diploma or GED.

The stunning statistics come from a report done for the state Council for Labor and Economic Growth, which since December has been quietly formulating a plan of attack against what may be Michigan’s greatest economic challenge: transforming adult education from a system for enhancing job skills into one that prepares undereducated, unemployed people for work.

“It’s incredible,” said Dianne Duthie, division director of lifelong learning for the Bureau of Workforce Transformation in the state Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth. “It would take billions of dollars to remediate them. … We’re serving 48,000 people with $33 million.”

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Tags: training, business training, education, workforce

Categories: News

I envy them for their lifelong access to a media that's diversified enough to bring them news, information, and opinion from an enormous number of sources.

There's something to be said for having access to thousands of media outlets. Unlike those of us who grew up in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, young people who smartly use the Internet to consume news today don't have to worry about everything being filtered by a small, elite, and typically white male cadre of journalists working for one of only three broadcast networks or one or two local newspapers. And it's no longer a one-way street. Today's news consumers can also be producers thanks to blogs, social-networking sites, YouTube, podcasting, and microblogs like Twitter.

But, as I look back at the career of Walter Cronkite, who died last Friday, I also worry that young people are finding it harder to come by trusted sources for news and information. The Internet's strength as a news resource is also its weakness. We never will nor should return to the days of only a handful of media outlets, but today's diversified media landscape and especially the Internet, do bring new challenges to consumers of news.

One of the things I loved about the "CBS Evening News" with Walter Cronkite was that it was watched by a high enough percentage of the population that it created a shared experience. When we heard Walter tell us "that's the way it is," we had something that we could all talk about the next day. We all knew it was true even if we didn't all agree on how we should interpret the implications of what Cronkite told us happened.

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Tags: training, education, skills, technology, web 2.0

Categories: News

The Washington Post ran an interesting piece on educators' "brain drain" problem as impacted by summer vacations. Some interesing insight on young minds' ability to retain. Read it here.

Tags: learning, education, brain drain

Categories: News

New York, NY (Vocus/PRWEB ) June 3, 2009 -- An interim report issued by ACM www.acm.org and the WGBH Educational Foundation www.wgbh.org as part of a project to improve the image of computer science among high school students confirms a significant gender gap among college-bound students in their opinions of computing as a possible college major or career. The research, funded by the National Science Foundation, found that 74 percent of boys - regardless of race or ethnicity - reported that a college major in computer science was a "very good" or "good" choice for them, but only 10 percent of girls rated it as "very good" and 22 percent rated it as "good." The report, which covers the first phase of the New Image for Computing (NIC) initiative, seeks to answer why interest in studying computer science in U.S. colleges and pursuing computer-related careers is declining.

"We know that the number of computer science majors is not meeting projected workforce needs," said John White, ACM CEO and co-principal investigator for the project. "Many factors contribute to the low interest in computer science, but the image of the field is a key element in current perceptions among this population."

The gender gap extended to computer science as a potential career choice as well as a field of study. From a selection of 15 possible careers, computer science came in fourth among the respondents with 46 percent rating it "very good" or "good." However, while 67 percent of all boys rated computer science highly as a career choice, only nine percent of girls rated it "very good" and 17 percent rated it "good."

(Read the entire release.)

Tags: it training, careers, education, gender issues

Categories: News