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Cost-cutting, leaner organizations--these are familiar phrases these days. As budgets shrink, training and development are among the first areas to feel the pinch. Organizations are trimming travel and lodging costs used to send employees on week-long seminars. Yet training plays a strategic role because of its impact on performance improvement and organizational effectiveness; in response, organizations are looking to online training to keep developing the "just-in-time" skills and competencies crucial to keeping a competitive edge in a changing world.
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Approximately five million green jobs are predicted to result from the renewable energy sector. The Obama administration even pledged during his presidential campaign $150 billion funding over the course of the next 10 years to ensure that green collar jobs are created. But what if all this faith that we are putting in a single industry is misguided?
The layoff doesn't end with the brushoff in HR. It drives away with you in the front seat. It settles in at home and rearranges the emotional furniture. It brings on grieving and picks at old marital wounds, even as it carves out new room for love and laughter. The end of a job is just as much a beginning. And as the three recently laid-off Silicon Valley employees chronicled in the Mercury News' Pink Slip 2.0 series have discovered, a layoff can impact you and those closest to you in profound and surprising ways.
There are always winners and losers in the employment game. The spoils this year go to the graduates with smarts, strong technical skills, and -- most important--relevant work or internship experience. What to do for others, those graduates having a rough time finding career success out of the box? Is going to B-school or seeking another professional degree worth the time and expense?
When Van Jones -- Oakland activist, best-selling author and "green jobs" proselytizer -- spoke to online political organizers last fall, he couldn't resist kidding them: "You've really messed up. You're about to win this election." Their favorite candidate, Barack Obama, was going to inherit a mess, Jones predicted: "It will be like cleaning out the barn with a straw. I don't know why he even wants the job." Now Jones has signed on to help clean out the barn.
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