Government Hiring Surge

A new study from the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service predicts a government hiring surge in critical fields during the next three years, especially in careers related to public health.

By September 2012, federal agencies will have hired 273,000 workers for mission-critical jobs, according to the report, which is set for release on Thursday. Those numbers mark a 41 percent increase, compared with the previous three fiscal years. The numbers are based on hiring projections from 35 federal agencies that employ more than 99 percent of federal workers.

Max Stier, president and chief executive officer of the Partnership, said one reason for the jump is the Obama administration's push to beef up the federal workforce.

"There's pent-up demand," he said. "A lot of agencies have been flat-lined, or have been reduced for quite a number of years, and this administration is recognizing that this is a problem, and that they need to deal with it."

According to the report, 54,114 new hires will expand the ranks of medical and public health workers, and 52,077 in security and protection jobs. Many will be nurses at the Veterans Affairs Department and transportation security officers at the Homeland Security Department.

Agencies also will be looking for job candidates at law schools. According to the report, they plan to hire 23,596 people for legal positions. And not everyone will be headed to the Justice Department. While Justice plans to hire 4,556 attorneys, paralegals and legal assistants; VA expects to hire 4,277 claims examiners. And the Treasury Department is looking to pick up 6,621 people in the legal field -- mostly contact representatives.

Other reasons for the hiring surge include an increase in retirements and more demands on agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and especially VA, Stier said. VA, which is dealing with a surge of veterans from two wars, plans to hire 48,159 people in mission-critical positions.

"This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the government to restock its talent," he said.

The Partnership has predicted that in Obama's first term, agencies will bring on 600,000 employees, making a third of the federal workforce newly hired.

The report, "Where the Jobs Are," is released biannually. This is the third study.

http://www.govexec.com/pdfs/090209p1.pdf

Economic Development in the Southeast U.S.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124485634480511841.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The Southeast has attracted an array of corporate facilities recently. In February, Asbury Automotive Group Inc., a major chain of national auto retailers, relocated to metro Atlanta from New York. In recent months, Tennessee announced three projects, all valued at more than $1 billion each, by units of Wacker Chemie AG, Volkswagen AG and Hemlock Semiconductor Group. North Carolina last week welcomed a new Apple Inc. data warehouse.

Meanwhile, state economic development officers say they are pursuing a higher number of relocation prospects. "The level of competition on retention, expansion and relocation projects has become more intense," said North Carolina Deputy Secretary of Commerce Dale Carroll.

Development agencies across the Southeast are therefore pushing their recruiting machines into overdrive. Gwinnett County, where NCR is moving its headquarters, revamped its development strategy in 2007 to prevent the slowing of the area's red-hot job growth. Nick Masino, the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce's vice president for economic development, says the organization hired seven new staff and created national and global marketing teams.

Since then, the number of companies the agency is courting soared to 36 this year compared with seven in the first six months of 2007. The Gwinnett Chamber has won five projects this year—including a 75-job expansion of Habasit America, a Suwanee, Ga., belting company, and a 300-job unit of California's YesVideo Inc., which transfers VHS to DVD. The agency says it brought at least 5,000 jobs to the county in the past 24 months. Half the companies it is pursuing are based in the Midwest.

College Grads shun Wall Street for Washington

http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/personal-finance/lifestyle-money/college-grads-shun-wall-street-washington/

Potential Job Opportunities for IT Professionals

Two corporate giants to land Georgia government technology contracts


http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2008/11/10/daily64.html?f=et50&ana=e_du

Unemployment rate at 14-year high

CORRECTED: Job losses soar, jobless rate at 14-year high

I am posting this, not to discourage you, but to emphasize you will likely need to put careful thought and deliberate focus on your job search. Simply submitting resumes online will probably not result in the type of opportunity you are looking for, unless you have a very specific job skill. A top notch resume to accurately showcase your skills, a targeted job search and dedicated networking will be the keys to finding the type of opportunity you wish to find.

Even when unemployment rises, someone is being hired every day. More often than not, the person who is being hired found a way to get to a hiring manager and bypassed the thousand or so resumes that were submitted online.

You find a way to be that person!

Employers cut payrolls by 240,000 in October, much more severely than expected, while September registered the biggest monthly loss in jobs in nearly seven years, according to a government report on Friday that showed labor markets were sharply deteriorating.

REUTERS/Graphics

By Glenn Somerville
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. employers slashed an unexpectedly steep 240,000 jobs from payrolls last month and the jobless rate shot up to a 14-1/2-year high, the government said on Friday in a report underscoring the economy's steep slide.

The Labor Department also said job losses in September and August were deeper than previously thought. The economy shed 284,000 jobs in September, the most since November 2001 which was shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, and lost 127,000 in August. That meant 179,000 more jobs were cut in August and September than previously thought.

So far this year 1.2 million jobs have been lost, 651,000 in the past three months alone, showing labor markets are crumbling faster and heightening chances of a deep recession.

"We have entered the phase of serious recession conditions. Unfortunately we will encounter more of this ...," said Richard DeKaser, chief economist for National City Corp in Cleveland.
Analysts said the bleak data could give further impetus to efforts on Capitol Hill to quickly craft a package of measures to help support the economy. President-elect Barack Obama was set to huddle with top economic advisers later in the day before holding his first news conference since being elected.

Wall Street economists had expected a loss of 200,000 nonfarm jobs in October and had looked for the jobless rate to move up to 6.3 percent from 6.1 percent in September.
Instead, the unemployment rate rose a steep four-tenths of a percent to 6.5 percent, the highest since March 1994.

"The 6.5 percent unemployment rate will only reinforce market talk of a peak in the unemployment rate above 8 percent," said Alan Ruskin, chief international strategist at RBS Greenwich Capital in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Still, the data was not as dire as some had feared.

While the dollar extended losses, U.S. stocks rose and prices for U.S. Treasuries turned lower.
"I think people were basically looking for a pretty weak number so it needed to be a tremendous surprise," said Thomas di Galoma, head of U.S. Treasury trading at Jefferies & Co. "It needed to be down 350,000 to really get the market rolling."

PAIN WIDESPREAD
The U.S. Federal Reserve has cut benchmark interest rates by 4.25 percentage points over the last 13 months, including 1 point last month alone, in an effort to buffer the economy from a deep housing slump and a widening credit crisis which has reverberated worldwide.Interest-rate futures prices imply a 64-percent perceived chance the Fed will lower its target overnight federal funds rate to 0.5 percent at its next policy meeting in December. That would be the lowest on records dating to July 1954.

In manufacturing alone, a whopping 90,000 jobs were cut in October -- reflecting in part 27,000 striking workers at Boeing Co. That followed a loss of 56,000 factory jobs in September.
Service-producing industries cut 108,000 jobs in October on top of 201,000 lost in September.
Earlier this year, job losses had been concentrated in the factory sector, but September marked the third month in a row that the vast services sector lost more jobs than manufacturing, a sign of the economy's widening woes.

Construction industries dropped 49,000 more jobs last month after eliminating 35,000 in September, many of them in specialty trades related to home building.

Average weekly hours of work held steady at 33.6 in October. At factories, the average workweek also held steady at 40.6 hours, while overtime was unchanged at 3.6 hours.

But the big drop in employment pulled down a measure of overall work effort by 0.3 percent.

(Additional reporting by Ros Krasny in Chicago and Burton Frierson in New York; Editing by James Dalgleish)

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/CORRECTED-Job-losses-soar-rb-13501267.html

Builder Implode A Meter

Where not to look for a job in construction :(
http://builder-implode.com/

Market Meltdown: Change Your Job Search Mindset

Market Meltdown: Change Your Job Search Mindset
Joe Turner 10/20/08

The current economic meltdown is just the tip of a much larger iceberg that will have far reaching economic implications for all of us here in the U.S. Tens of thousands of layoffs in and beyond the financial industry will only be the start of more sober times as companies across the country will be forced to rethink their future hiring plans.

One fact seems certain. All of these combined circumstances will have huge ramifications for job seekers. The failing economy and a constantly rising unemployment rate will require individuals to take a fresh approach to their job search.

Referencing the most recent economic crisis, Neil McNulty, Principal Recruiter, McNulty Management Group states, "The game has changed, but the rules remain the same; now, more than ever, job seekers need to change their mindset from looking for 'openings' to looking for 'opportunities. ' Opportunities are born out of crisis and chaos, and exist even in the worst economy."This means that you, as a job seeker, must look beyond job postings and move into marketing yourself to the managers of the companies and organizations who are experiencing problems that you can solve.

Here's how:
1. Change Your Mindset: Move away from being a passive job seeker and toward being an active problem-solver. Don't just rely on the Internet to find job openings. Scour the marketplace to find the hidden jobs that aren't advertised. Most jobs are not posted or advertised. The best jobs are often found through networking, word-of-mouth and informational interviews.
2. Stop Thinking of Yourself as Just an Assortment of Job Skills: See yourself as a product to package and market, and then create your own marketing campaign to find your desired job. This includes having a state-of-the- art resume and sharpening your interviewing skills.
3. Sell ROI: View yourself in terms of Return on Investment for an employer. See yourself as a mini-profit and loss center. Be prepared to demonstrate ways you have helped to positively impact the bottom line of your past or current employer. This means demonstrating ways you've helped make money or save money for an employer or clients. As employees, we all touch money. Some of us may be closer to it than others. Regardless, we must find ways to prove this in short "sound bites" when given the opportunity.

Remember, it's not about you, but about the organization itself. All communication with a prospective employer must answer the question, "What's in it for me (the employer)?" The road ahead will be littered with casualties; make no mistake about that.We could sit by and whine about the circumstances. We could wait for the government to initiate a "bailout" package that might somehow rescue the unemployed. Or, we could take charge of our own lives and power ourselves forward.

Joseph P. Kennedy said many years ago, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." That statement is just as true today as it was then. Whether we're employed or not, we all have this rocky, tough economy in common. We can respond as victims of the economy or we can get tough, and get going. As a recruiter, Joe Turner has spent the past 15 years finding and placing top candidates in some of the best jobs of their careers. Author of "JobSearch Secrets Unlocked" and "Paycheck 911" , Joe has interviewed on radio talk shows and offers
<http://www.jobchangesecrets.com/> free insider job search secrets.

Job Networking Ministry at Roswell United Methodist Church (RUMC)

A button posted on the lower right side of this blog will enable you to join RUMC's Yahoo Group. Their group distributes an email "Daily Digest" of job openings in the metro area.

Job Networking Ministry at Roswell United Methodist Church (RUMC) located at 814 Mimosa Boulevard in Roswell, Georgia.

We focus on tending to the needs of job seekers and career changers. We meet every second and fourth Monday evening at the Dodson Youth Center starting at 7:30 pm and ending around 9:15 pm. If you arrive early at 6:00 pm you can take advantage of our new program "Developing You Spritual Resume".

We provide a Free Dinner that is sponsored by companies and individuals that want to contribute to your search. Then at 6:45 pm you can take advantage of:
- Resume Guides (recruiters who will review your resume)
- Our small group program (learn more at http://www.c3g.org/)
- And many other networking opportunities.

Before you leave, take advantage of our Industry Guides (a RUMC creation) where you get to select an employed church member to network with after the meeting based on the industry and company they are employed with.

Our main program at 7:30 pm typically has powerful guest speakers and programs that will provide practical strategies you can put to work the next day.We have one of the largest volunteer programs in the State of Georgia with over 110 employed RUMC volunteers. We are anxious to show you how we can help you personally in your job search.

For directions and more information, check us out at http://www.rumcjobnetworking.com/. Take a look at our Crossroads Career Partner website. We can help you with the best practices with the Key Six Steps. It is free to everyone because we have paid for your subscription as a service to you. You will need a membership key to log into the site as a career explorer. We provide these at no cost every meeting! Join us to learn how to find the hidden jobs and obtain the skills necessary for a successful job search. Remember, keep God part of your job search too. It makes no sense to do this alone!

Get A Job - Video from Fox

If you cannot use the link, the video is posted with the Fox Network video section, entitled "Get a Job", How to beat unemployment as employers slash jobs by Michael Irwin with Careerbuilder: