ED Futures Newsletter

Dear ED Futures Reader:

Welcome to the latest issue of ED Futures Newsletter. You will find many new articles on the website from this past week. Hopefully you will find some information that is useful to you.

Best wishes,

Don Iannone
Publisher
Email: dtia@don-iannone.com
Tel: 440.449.0753

Indiana-San Diego Biotech Collaboration

I have been preaching the concept of inter-regional collaboration for the past three years. More regions are now doing it. Indianapolis is the latest to look concept. Download my background paper on the concept here.

Companies in San Diego are renowned for discovering breakthrough biotech proteins -- the chocolate chips. But they aren't well-equipped to put those morsels into tasty cookies -- the actual pills and injection liquids -- that help to make a drug safe, effective and more pleasant to consume.

Indiana, on the other hand, has few drug discovery firms but lots of expertise in drug development. So BioCrossroads, an economic development group in Indianapolis, wants to connect the two regions.

To do this, BioCrossroads plans to employ a person amid San Diego's cluster of biotech drug firms to promote Indiana companies and send back deals. BioCrossroads also hopes to hire a second person here to coordinate firms in Indiana to test, analyze, store, ship and manufacture the new drugs discovered in San Diego.

Read more about the Indianapolis-San Diego collaboration here.

Google Ann Arbor

Google is going to Ann Arbor, Michigan. This is a significant move.

In announcing last week that it would open a 1,000-employee office for its AdWords division in the Ann Arbor area, Google joined a growing number of high-tech employers in and around the city of about 113,000.

Toyota Motor Corp. and Hyundai Motor Co. both recently announced plans to add hundreds of research jobs in Washtenaw County. And other knowledge-based industries like pharmaceuticals and information technology, the kinds of jobs touted by Gov. Jennifer Granholm as an alternative to Michigan's declining manufacturing sector, are thriving here.

More here.

Tennessee Ups Its Incentives

The State of Tennessee is trying to improve its recruiting advantages for high-paying manufacturing jobs, offering an extra level of job tax credits to companies that create well-paying jobs and spend at least $100 million in the process.

The changes are part of a sweeping tax measure the Tennessee legislature approved as the legislative session wrapped up in May. It's the latest change to a tax law that helped persuade Nissan North America to expand its manufacturing operations in the state in 2000 and move its headquarters to Tennessee this year.

More here.

Tucson Region Job Growth, 2001-2006

Here is the job growth picture for the Tucson region since 2001. Total employment in May stood at about 381,000.

Source: Univ. of Arizona Eller College of Management and State of Arizona data

Tucson Region and TREO have Good Year

To meet the needs of a rapidly growing region and address issues and planning on a coordinated regional basis, Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities, Inc. (TREO) was formed in July 2005 to serve as the lead economic development agency for the Greater Tucson area and its surrounding community partners.

How did TREO do in its first year? Pretty well. Click here to read the organization's first annual report.

Latest Phoenix Hiring Outlook

According to the latest Employment Outlook Survey by Manpower, Inc., 25 percent of Greater Phoenix employers are planning to expand their workforce. The area's employers are expecting less hiring activity than in the first quarter, but are continuing at a healthy hiring pace. For the coming quarter, job prospects appear best in Construction, Finance/Insurance/Real Estate, Education, and Public Administration. Wholesale/Retail Trade employers plan reduce staffing levels. Hiring in Durable and Non-Durable Goods Manufacturing is expected to remain unchanged in Greater Phoenix. Transportation/Public Utilities and Service employers are showing mixed hiring intensions.

During the period from April to June, 25% of the companies interviewed plan to hire more employees, while 11% expect to reduce their payrolls, for a net increase of 14%. Another 64% expect to maintain their current staff levels.

Source: Manpower, Greater Phoenix Economic Council

Forbes on Jobs for the Future

But one thing is clear: In two decades, your job probably won't exist, at least not in the same form. "I think there's going to be an enormous shift of occupations," says futurist Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and Revolutionary Wealth. "Most jobs are going to change. They'll survive, but they'll change."

Forbes

Results That Matter: 21st Century Skills and High School Reform

High schools need a relentless focus on the results that matter for student success in the 21st century according to The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (the Partnership). The Partnership issued a new national report, “Results That Matter: 21st Century Skills and High School Reform,” outlining a compelling framework for 21st century learning that focuses on the results that matter for today’s high school graduates.

The report is available to download here.

For a complete overview of the "Principles for Connecting High School Reform and 21st Century Skills" click here.

The Diligence/Laziness Matrix in Work

Source: Balancing diligence and laziness

Rand on the Future of Work

Trends in workforce size and composition and in the pace of technological change and economic globalization will have implications for the future of work. Employees will work in more decentralized, specialized firms; slower labor growth will encourage employers to recruit groups with relatively low labor force participation; greater emphasis will be placed on retraining and lifelong learning; and future productivity growth will support higher wages and may affect the wage distribution. Given this, some policies may need to be reexamined.

Read more here.

Workers Feel Underpaid

The average worker hasn't seen a meaningful pay increase in three years, despite the economy's rebound, according to U.S. Labor Department data.

That may explain the findings of a national survey released recently reporting a sharp jump in the number of employees who feel underpaid.

Nearly 40 percent of employees think their companies pay less-than-market-rate salaries, compared with 28 percent last year, according to an annual survey of workplace attitudes by the Randstad USA staffing agency and Harris Interactive Inc.

Source: Tucson Citizen

India: The Next Big Thing for Business

"For business, India is seen as the next big thing: China 15 years ago, as the saying goes. No big international company can do without an India strategy. Some multinationals eye the country and see a vast domestic market about to take off. But even those who doubt that are impressed by its wealth of highly skilled, low-cost professionals. Some Indian firms, meanwhile, have become world-beaters—not just the well-known stars in its IT and other service industries, but manufacturers too, of products ranging from motorcycles to footballs, from medicines to steel."

Source: The Economist

The Benjamin Factor

Demos
June 2006
“Working Progress: How to Reconnect Young People and Organisations” (Download does not seem to work)
By Sarah Gillinson and Duncan O'Leary

This report by Demos, a British think-tank devoted to promoting “everyday democracy”, says that there is “a disconnect between young people and the organizational cultures they encounter in the workplace”. Graduates enter the workforce thinking that the knowledge they have gathered during their education has prepared them for the world of work; yet a majority of human-resources directors say that it is increasingly difficult to find the right graduates with the right skills. They want softer skills such as communications and creativity, yet graduates do not seem to appreciate this need.

What can be done about this problem? The authors have a number of suggestions ranging from schools holding termly equivalents of “parents' evenings” for local businesses and community organizations, to universities drawing on new ideas about how “to embed transferable, work-based skills into the curriculum”. Some of their ideas might help at the margin, but this gulf between employers and graduates has been around for decades now and is beginning to look intractable. Remember the moment in the 1967 movie “The Graduate”, when the skill-challenged character Benjamin, played by Dustin Hoffman, is being steered into a career in plastics? The gulf then between graduates' expectations and those of their employers was little (if at all) different from today.

How's the Economy?

According to the latest Gallup Poll Survey, it's not so good...

Americans remain quite dour on the U.S. economy. Almost two-thirds say the U.S. economy is getting worse, not better, and well less than half are willing to rate the economy as excellent or good. A slight majority of Americans say now is a bad time to find a quality job, although views of the job market have gradually improved this year, and are markedly more positive than in the earlier years of this decade. On a personal level, Americans say the most important financial problems facing their families are healthcare costs, basic lack of money, and energy costs.

Gallup's monthly tracking of economic perceptions for July shows scant signs of sustained improvement in Americans' views of the economy.

Asked to assess the current state of the U.S. economy, just 38% say it is excellent or good, while 42% say it is only fair and 19% say it is poor.

More here (if you subscribe).

Is China Growing Too Quickly?

China has achieved remarkable economic growth over the past 20 years. But now some economists worry that the Chinese government has engineered growth too fast and without needed reforms. The result, they say, could be ugly. Listen to the story at NPR.

North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement

Some good questions we should be asking ourselves:

What is my image of retirement? Is it useful? Accurate?

When is it time to leave my current job and do I want to return to paid employment, possible in a second or third career? What are the opportunities and constraints?

How do I balance my personal dreams and goals with family and societal responsibilities?

Can the next step be truly revitalizing? What obstacles stand in my way and how can I overcome them?

How will I structure my time and coordinate schedules with others who are important to me?

Does my past pattern of dealing with change provide me with a good model or do I need to consider other approaches?

How do I plan for uncertainty? What is the first step in putting my plan into action?

Source: NC Center for Creative Retirement

ED Futures Newsletter

Dear ED Futures Reader:

Welcome to the latest issue of ED Futures.

Hope you find something in here that helps you.

Best wishes,

Don Iannone
Publisher
Email: dtia@don-iannone.com
Tel: 440.449.0753

Minority Entrepreneurship

Between 1997 and 2002, the number of U.S. firms owned by minorities grew at three times the rate that of firms in general -- a fact that reflects the reality that ethnic communities in the United States are expanding rapidly. Indeed, more than 85 percent of the estimated population growth between now and 2050 will come from minority groups.

A close look at the breakdown of distribution of business ownership by race, gender and ethnicity reveals significant imbalances. Women, for example, are under-represented as majority owners of firms, and the under-representation increases as one goes up the ladder.

Much the same can be said of Hispanics, who account for 13.5 percent of the population, but just 7 percent of firms and less than 1 percent of revenues. African-Americans account for 12.4 percent of the population, but only 5 percent of firms and less than 1 percent of revenues. By contrast, for Asian-Americans, the percentages of firm employees and receipts are in approximate parity to the group's percentage of the population as a whole, and they own a share of firm numbers higher than their share of population.

Milken Institute

Cobell v. Kempthorne

Yes, it's a lawsuit. The dispute involves royalties due native Americans dating back to 1887. That's when Uncle Sam took control of some 11 million acres of tribal lands in the West as part of the federal policy of forced assimilation. The US was supposed to be paying into Indian trust accounts what now amounts to billions of dollars in revenues from oil, gas, timber, minerals, and grazing on those acres, then disbursing payments to native account holders.

Read more here.

Massachusetts: Dealing with Its Costs of Business

"Massachusetts: Nice place to think. But you wouldn't want to meet a big payroll there."

Read the story here.