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Future Trends in the Job Market – Make the Most of Your Transferable Skills

April 9th, 2012 by admin No comments »

This is a changing world, especially in the job market. Don’t get left behind. According to best-selling author of the book, A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink encourages us to look to our career futures in a new way. He suggests that the information age is at an end, primarily due to computer automation and outsourcing to Asia. Pink says, “If number crunching, chart reading, and code writing can be done for a lot less overseas and delivered to clients instantly via fiber-optic cable, that’s where the work will go. Any job that can be reduced to a set of rules is at risk.” If we are to remain on the cutting edge of job viability, it is time to set our Industrial Age left and logical brain on autopilot and revamp our right brains to stay marketable in the new Conceptual Age. With logic and analysis becoming more and more computerized, the job market will be looking for transferable right brain skills such as empathy, design, synthesis and contextual thinking in order to remain competitive.

So, what work areas should we be encouraging our children, as well as ourselves to explore? Let’s take a look. We will begin to see an influx of jobs in the less rational theories, such as spirituality, beauty and emotion. In the past our left-brain mentality left behind much of our right brain transcendence. But today the world is looking for meaning, values, interaction and service. While this change will not happen overnight, it is happening, nevertheless. Begin by evaluating and mastering your abilities to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to give a voice to the meaning of life and to touch people on a personal level. While automation may have left us stumbling to teach values to our children, you’ll find teachers will be more involved with life skills, while still remaining adept at math, science, English and the traditional schooling.

You’ll find music and art making a comeback in the classroom and in the job market, because these are the right brain areas for work that will not be outsourced or automated anytime in the near future. This will be your new market.

In a recent Columbus, Ohio article titled Retire Smart, Demand for Teachers Spurs Second Careers, we can already see that those who once retired at 55 years old are finding second careers in the desperately understaffed teaching market. Sharon White, who recently retired as a financial analyst at Boeing has a special interest in second careers for baby boomers. She has enrolled in the Encorps Teachers Program, along with other mid-life retirees who are looking for a new challenge and will find her second career inside the classroom.
Ken & Kathy Robbins recently left Denver, Colorado where he was an architectural draftsman for an engineering firm and she was in marketing. Transplanting themselves to Pennsylvania, the retirees are now living their dream by making money off their land. With his architectural background, Ken designed the entire property to produce in such areas as fruit trees, Christmas trees, a berry patch, a chicken enclosure, beehives and possibly an alpaca barn. The enterprising couple has also opened a bookstore on Main Street.
Elise Brownell was only recently a high-ranking upper management employee at a California Biotech company. With a complete PhD background in her chosen field, she, like many around the world, experienced a job loss. Utilizing her transferable skills, values and interests, Elise and a partner formed their own service business in the field they knew best. Today their company, ZephyrBiotech, provides project and executive consulting services to the biotech industry.

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How to Help Right Brained Children Spell

April 9th, 2012 by admin No comments »

The way we learn best depends on the way our brains operate. We are all different and have preferences when it comes to learning. Education courses will teach prospective teachers about learning styles; these styles are usually defined as visual, aural and kinaesthetic. In simple terms the idea is that some people learn best by looking, others by hearing and others by touching and doing. Of course, we are all a mixture of these tendencies but it goes some way towards explaining the differences between children’s academic progress. How often have we seen siblings with completely academic performance? In short, some styles of teaching simply do not fit our children’s brain set up.

When looking at brain function, specialists tell us that the two halves of our brain deal with different functions and that we have can have a preference for one side. This has an important impact on learning. For right brained children see the world as a whole and will find it difficult to analyse and label the world whereas left brained children will happily chop up the world into constituent bits. For learning spelling the characteristics of right brained children can pose a problem. The solution is to harness the right brained child’s ability to visualise the whole.

It turns out that our vision and memory can be connected. When remembering things, people will often look up and to the right. This is a method we can utilise in the teaching of spelling. Here is a method to help.

Firstly test the child’s spelling of certain words and identify the letters that are incorrect or missing. Re-write these words on flash cards inserting the correct letters in a different color. You can add pictures to the word to make a story. For example of the child is practicing ‘chair’ and they are missing the letter ‘i’, this letter should be in a different color and a picture of an ice cube could be added to form a connection to the sound of the missing letter. The key is to stimulate the visual memory and hook it up to triggers.