Chapter 11 and Chapter 16

The material discussed in Chapter 11 was particularly relevant to me this week as I'm currently trying to assist my mom in her recent career transition after she was laid off a few weeks ago from her manufacturing position at Tyco Electronics in Harrisburg. After working for the company for 20 years in various fiberoptic manufacturing positions, this is the only work my mom knows. She does not have a functional resume, so we're currently working on creating that from piles of various evaluations and trainings she's completed over the years. She did have one day of HR readjustment training before she left, which details the support she may receive from such programs as the Federal Trade Assistance Act and other educational programs. Her unemployment benefits are tied to the effort she makes in her job search, as she'll have to report on the jobs she applies to biweekly every time she files. She has the opportunity for educational benefits, which I'm trying to encourage her to take advantage of, but after being out of school for over 30 years and never attending college, she is lacking confidence in her academic skills. After reviewing all of her HR information and discussing her options this weekend, I think we were both feeling overwhelmed. The information presented in the "Executing the Job Search" section in the text provided a sound structure for the process that my mom is planning to embark on. Although we're planning to create a resume, I had never really considered taking a personal inventory of skills as the initial step in analysis. It will be important for her to identify her strengths and areas for improvement as she creates her resume and identifies jobs or academic programs that might best suit her talents. This self-inventory will also be helpful as she plans ahead for interviewing, as this analysis will likely be the focus of a number of interview questions. Brown reminds us that mock interviews are especially useful and this is something I definitely plan on suggesting to my mom as she's only participated in one or two formal interviews throughout her career (Brown, 2012). I was not that familiar with the job placement services available in the York, PA, area, but her company did recommend an office of vocational assistance, so she is planning to begin there and utilize other resources as needed. The description of job descriptions in the text was somewhat vague, so I hope that the office she was recommended to provides some helpful resources. The information discussed in Chapter 16 brought up memories of work conducted in my former position at the University of Delaware, as one of my many projects was to administer a recruitment and retention survey to all of the new teachers (5 years of experience or less) in the state to determine their reasons for staying in or leaving the profession. The survey was initiated because the situation in Delaware mirrored national research indicating that 50% of new teachers leave the profession within 5 years. Although I admit that I initially dreaded the thought of administering the survey, analyzing the data with SPSS software, and following the other steps of descriptive design experiments as outlined in the text, I found myself being proud of and even enjoying the labor-intensive process as it was occurring. The most important result from the study was that we secured funding for professional development programs for new teachers that my center then designed and delivered. We would never have secured State Department of Education resources for our programs without the strong evidence of data identified in our survey research. I also participated in several qualitative studies during my time there, and definitely enjoyed this work more, as conducting interviews allows you to have more of a personal connection with your subjects. We used an interesting software package that permitted us to divide our data into quotes and other pieces of information by theme which then allowed us to organize our report by our major findings. Again, we were able to secure funding for certain programs because of identified needs, which is a major advantage of using formal evaluation methods. Brown, D. (2012). Career information, career counseling, and career development (10th ed.). New York: Pearson Education, Inc.