By Rod Hirsch

Once the world’s undeniable beacon of economic vitality, upward mobility and prosperity, the outlook for the American economy today is being dimmed by workplace illiteracy.

It is a mounting problem that has begun to fray the edges of the manufacturing, high-tech and services infrastructure that has served as the benchmark for other economies for generations.

A workforce that struggles to read, write, comprehend and communicate with coworkers, vendors and customers threatens to stagnate growth while increasing the likelihood that the U.S. economy will slip to second-rate status in the competitive global marketplace, according to business and academic leaders.

Though overshadowed by the lingering effects of the banking meltdown, the worldwide economic slump and double digit unemployment, workplace illiteracy is contributing to the dumbing down of America’s well-oiled economic engine, posing a daunting challenge for industry, government and educators.

The connotative definition of illiteracy is the inability to speak or write. The workplace definition is multi-layered – an inability to comprehend, execute or function, impediments to getting the job done in a timely and acceptable manner.

Shirley Hollie-Davis, associate dean at the Center for Workforce Development,  Union County College (UCC), offers a simplistic definition of workplace illiteracy. “It’s the inability or lack of ability to read and write and do mathematical operations that are not rudimentary,” she explained. “You might understand that green is go and red is stop but in the workplace you must be able to read the words stop or go.”

There are 92,000 workers employed at thousands of companies of all sizes throughout Union County, according to the Union County Partnership for Progress. Seventeen percent did not graduate high school; 32 percent have a high school diploma only; 20 percent spent some time in college without graduating; 8 percent have associates’ degrees; 17 percent have a bachelor’s degree; and 6 percent have a

master’s degree or better.

The increasing swirl of high-tech equipment and reliance on computers and cyberspace has heightened the demand for skilled, educated workers with multidimensional skill sets and the ability to work both independently and as part of a team.

The traditional three Rs – reading, writing and ‘rithmetic – are not enough in today’s job market. Also required are “soft skills,” according to Jennifer Cleary, senior project manager at the John Heldrich Center for Workplace Development, Rutgers University. Employers place high value on employees who are multi-talented and able to multi-task, she explained.

“In general there is more of an expectation that people who have strengths in a specialized, technical area must excel in those soft skills,” she said. “Pharmaceuticals ideally are looking for people who have a Ph.D. and MBA and who have business skills and marketing sales skills, as well. In (Information Technology) it is no longer acceptable to just be the nerdy guy in the back room. You need to have presentation skills and speaking ability to tailor the information to the audience.

“Telecom companies back in the ‘70s used to let their engineers play and come up with things. Now as competition has increased and business has gone global there is no room for playing. From the minute I get an idea and write it on a napkin I need to call in the marketing people, explain what the value of this is. There is increasingly a need for new skill sets, a broadening of everyone’s skill sets. There is less room for specialists, although their skills are still needed,” Cleary said.

A comprehensive study of workplace dynamics published by the Policy Evaluation and Research Center at Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton concludes: “Higher levels of skill and education are important not only for gaining access to better jobs, but also for negotiating our bureaucratic society and its complex legal, health care and retirement systems and for accessing and comprehending the seemingly limitless amount of information that comes our way...As the likelihood of long-term employment declines and as greater numbers of individuals will be required to assume more responsibility for managing various aspects of their lives, including career planning, health care and retirement, higher levels of skills will be required for full participation in our society.”

Statistics from a multitude of sources offer a troubling juxtaposition of the realities and demands of the 21st century workplace:

  • A report compiled by the American Association of State Colleges & Universities  shows that the number of Americans obtaining college degrees is on the decline; Americans aged 25-34 have less education than their parents’ generation.

  • One million New Jersey adults over the age of 25 do not have a high school diploma, according to the Literacy Volunteers of New Jersey.

Apply Within – Literacy Not Necessary

By Rod Hirsch

Calvin Sierra once tried to teach his Spanish speaking machinists at Imperial Weld Ring in Elizabeth how to speak English. Sierra brought in an instructor two hours each week to conduct an English class.

The effort failed and today Sierra is learning Spanish.

“It didn’t work too well,” he said. “They just go back to what they’re comfortable with.”

The men all speak Spanish fluently but little English and, according to Sierra, have little interest in doing so. Sierra is forced to rely on one or two trusted employees to  act as interpreters with the dozen or so men who operate the machines, most of whom he says came to this country from  Central America.

Needing to train his workers to operate new computer-assisted machinery, Sierra – whose ancestors immigrated to the United States from Spain in the 19th century – is

teaching himself Spanish with the help of a popular language learning software package.

“Americans have been arrogant for a long time,” he said. “Now maybe it’s time to change.”

Sierra’s role-reversal underlines how much things have changed. His parents opened the small machine shop in 1959, with many of their first employees Cuban refugees who assimilated a lot better than today’s immigrants because they came from a different background and some held professional jobs in Cuba.

Things have changed since then. There has been an influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants into New Jersey over several generations; increasingly, national and state

statistics show many lack high school education and have few options when it comes to higher-paying jobs.

“Employers can’t get anyone else to fill those minimum-wage jobs,” said Jennifer Cleary, senior project manager at the John Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

She said Spanish-speaking immigrants recently arriving in New Jersey are being recruited to fill warehouse jobs at an expansive warehousing and distribution center off the New Jersey Turnpike.

“They’re trucking them in with vans from Elizabeth and Newark,” she said. “They’re going to the train stations and handing out fliers to those taking their first steps on American soil because they realize these jobs are difficult and pay is low and there are not many willing to do that work.”

There are parallels between workplace illiteracy and an upward spike in immigration, research shows.

During the 1980s, net international migration accounted for only 21 percent of the nation’s population growth, rising to 31 percent in the 1990s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau projects that between 2000 and 2015 net international migration is likely to account for more than half the nation’s population growth. Between 2000 and 2005, the U.S. population grew by about 15 million; 6.3 million were immigrants, or 42 percent. (The U.S. Census does not differentiate between legal and illegal immigrants.)

According to a study by the Policy Evaluation and Research Center at Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton, those immigrants had a major impact on the labor market. The study estimates that between 2000 and 2005 new immigrants accounted for two-thirds of the nation’s labor force growth and nearly 86 percent of the country’s net employment growth.

Nearly two-thirds of immigrants during that period lacked a high school diploma; only 6 percent held a four-year college degree; and nearly 8 out of 10 new immigrants lacking a high school diploma reported that they could not speak English at all or not well, according to the ETS study.

That trend is reflected in Union County, according to The Union County Economic and Workforce Competitiveness Project, a study prepared in 2008 by the Heldrich Center.

“The county has a higher percentage of foreign-born residents compared to the state and these residents have lower educational attainment levels than the foreign-born population statewide and native-born county residents,” according to the study. Also noted:

  • Between 2004-06 Union County had a higher average percentage of residents who

had earned less than a high school diploma than the state as a whole, 16.6 percent vs. 13.8 percent;

  • The percentage of Union County residents who reported speaking English “less than very well” increased from an average of 14.7 percent in 2001-03 to 18.3 percent in 2004-06 while rates remained essentially stable statewide during the same period.

“It’s not like it was when people came over on steamships from Italy or Ireland or

Poland and sailed by the Statue of Liberty,” said Shirley Hollie-Davis, associate dean of the Center for Workforce Development at Union County College. “Those individuals really had to establish themselves as Americans, not like today. There are resources, bilingual classes, cable television. Today’s immigrants have chosen to be centric to their culture but are also assimilating into this culture.”

By Andy Gole

Where does the sales team need help? Ask salespeople  and company executives alike, they typically respond: time management.

We can improve salesperson time management with the fundamental distinction between safe and serious conversations, between safe and serious access to prospects.

Selling occurs through conversations. In a safe conversation, the salesperson will never get a stick of business. The prospect is in the conversation for a different reason – generally to get a third price, to check the incumbent supplier. In a serious conversation, the prospect has an urgent need and is willing to discuss it.

We want to be in serious conversations to maximize the use of our selling time. We measure the prospect’s seriousness by their behavior, by their commitment to the process. We call these behaviors payments in kind. Examples include checking our references, visiting our facility, introducing us to key decision-makers. Where we don’t have a one-call close, we look for this evidence that the prospect is serious and reasonably engaged in getting to know us.

Are you engaged primarily in safe or serious conversations?

Most companies recognize a serious conversation based on past experience. The bigger challenge is converting a safe conversation to a serious conversation. This is an essential business development task, driven by material difference.

A material difference is a difference strong enough to motivate a change in behavior.

In business development, we use material difference to:

 (1) convert a safe conversation to a serious  conversation and then

(2) show the prospect we are a strong fit for their needs by matching our material difference to their urgent needs.

Strong time management allocates time to first discover and validate the material difference then make strong material difference statements to qualify serious prospects

Many selling organizations become serious too late in the sales process, during the final stages of negotiation, wasting precious time. Effective time management means we use material difference from the outset to:

  • Qualify opportunity

  • Convert safe opportunities to serious opportunities

  • Earn the right to payments in kind

  • Condense the selling cycle

The reason we can convert safe conversation to serious conversation is that most prospects have huge problems but won’t tell us their problems until we show material difference – earn the right to a serious conversation.

Salesperson time management is actually the smaller time issue in business development. The bigger time problem is how prospects, and particularly top executives, manage their time.

Many executives manage their time in blocks, allocated on past experience. This leaves precious little time for exploring and implementing innovative ideas. Executives are so focused on the short term they don’t seek out, sense or exploit opportunity – the basis for breakthroughs.

This problem is compounded by top management cost reduction initiatives, piling more work on the organization to minimize overhead, forcing the organization to focus on existing critical issues. It becomes impossible for most managers to see the forest for the trees.

In this regard time is the final frontier. The greatest material difference we can offer a prospect is creating time for them, putting time back in their lives. We need to convince prospects to create an exception from their “block time management” process, earning the right to their time for exploring innovation through our material difference.

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Andy Gole has taught selling skills for 14 years. He started three businesses and has made approximately 4,000 sales calls, selling both B2B and B2C. He invented a selling process, Urgency Based Selling®, with which he can typically help companies double their closing or conversion ratio. Learn more about Andy’s method at www.bombadilllc.com or by calling him at 201.415.3447.

The Myths Vs Reality of Temporary Work

Fazio, Mannuzza, Roche, Tankel, LaPilusa (FMRTL), LLC, Cranford, participated in their 2nd Foundation Fighting Blindness Jean Day, supporting firm member Tara Lotito in the Race to Cure Blindness. FMRTL members were encouraged to wear denim in exchange for making a donation. Race to Cure Blindness is a fundraising program where participants utilize a marathon, triathlon, bike race or other racing event as a platform to raise money for the Foundation Fighting Blindness.

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The Trinitas Comprehensive Sleep Disorders Center, with locations in Elizabeth and

Cranford, has been named one of eight participants in the National Sleep Foundation’s “NSF Gives Back” program. Trinitas will distribute free continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) equipment, donated by Philips Respironics, to uninsured or underinsured patients at its center.

Trinitas Comprehensive Sleep Disorders Center is one of only two New Jersey facilities in the special program.

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Union County College (UCC) recently announced that Dr. Margaret  McMenamin has been named president of the college, replacing outgoing president Dr. Thomas Brown, who is retiring. McMenamin previously was executive vice president of Brookdale Community College in Lincroft. While at Brookdale McMenamin’s accomplishments included an academic restructuring, development of an academic master plan and a college-wide assessment.

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E53 Federal Credit Union has changed its name to Motion Federal Credit Union and adopted a new tagline, “Moving Dreams Forward.” Motion Federal Credit Union will soon open a new building in Linden.

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Berkeley also announced the appointment of Teri Duda as senior vice president, government affairs. Duda most recently was senior vice president of external affairs at Berkeley. She holds a bachelor of arts degree from San Diego State University and a master’s of arts degree from the University of Wisconsin.

You have to feel sorry for those poor saps in Arizona. There they are seeing all kinds of problems from illegal immigration. Crime is up. Demand for government services like education and health is up. There ought to be a law against it!

Suddenly it dawned on the people of Arizona that there is a law prohibiting people from entering the country without a valid visa. So let’s enforce that law, they said, and passed SB1070, requiring law enforcement officials to enforce the federal law.

For doing what they thought was both right and good, the residents of the Arizona have been branded pariahs. What they forgot was to do what was smart.

Now the people of Utah – and I never thought I would be saying this – are doing what is smart. They are separating the issue of the need for foreign workers from the issue of immigration. Though we have always treated these two issues as one, they are, in fact, very different.

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Utah’s plan is to make work permits readily available to foreign workers. The state could thus screen, tax and track the workers. Only people coming to work would receive the permit; families would be left at home. The permit would be for a defined period and would allow workers to return home for visits with their families.

It’s a pretty good idea. And it comes from the most Republican state in the country.

Alas, I don’t expect the Utah plan to go very far. After all, how can a state supersede the authority of the United States government and issue its own work permits? It is an elegant solution, and a smart one, but by itself it is unlikely to go anywhere.

It may, however, change the debate. It is time that we stopped talking about immigration reform and started talking about work visas. This will be hard. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants and we have this idea that everyone else in the world is just dying to raise their kids as Americans.

Truth be told, if you have some money there are a lot of places around the world that are very nice to live in. With money you can get your kids a decent education and healthcare.

Most people come to the U.S. to make money to send home and plan to go back. At first they think their stay is temporary. Then, because they know they won’t get back in if they go for a visit, they just stay and stay and eventually become immigrants.

Work permits would allow them to be the short-term workers that they want to be.

But what if we just solve the problem by doing without all these workers? Won’t this also solve unemployment in our country? If it weren’t for all these illegals, couldn’t we put our own unemployed back to work?

How many of you mow your own lawn? When was the last time you painted your own house? Which of you would encourage your children to spend their summers doing back-breaking work on a farm? I actually sent my son to Colorado several years ago to spend the summer working on our family sod farm. He still hasn’t forgiven me for the experience.

The work performed by people who are in this country illegally is critical to our economy. No one else is going to do the work they do. So if we need them, isn’t the Utah solution the more sensible option?

There is an old rule that says if the majority of people are going to do something whether or not it is legal, it is both sensible and more efficient to make it legal, tax it and make money off it rather than spend money fighting it. I take my hat off to Utah for seeing this.

James Coyle

President

Unanimity in Trenton is rare. Outside support for motherhood and apple pie, consensus of opinion in New Jersey government is as common as hair on a billiard ball.

Yet every member of the New Jersey Legislature recently agreed on passage of a bill that would make permanent and statewide the pilot Interdistrict Public School Choice Program, which allows students to attend school in districts other than where they live. Even the New Jersey Education Association has remained neutral on the bill.

It seems that educating a child is right up there with mom and pie a-la-mode. Since 2000-2001 the School Choice Program has allowed students from any town to attendschools in 15 state-approved districts, including Kenilworth in Union County. Currently about 900 non-resident students attend schools in one of these districts, according to the Star Ledger.

While students from any district are able to opt into the program, geographic proximity limits participation.

If the approved bill becomes law, any school district will be able to participate and students statewide will have the option of attending school out of district.

The Legislature deserves an A+ for supporting the measure and now it awaits Gov. Chris Christie’s signature. He should sign it – for the good of the kids and, equally important, for the good of the state.

Because choice is good.

Whether choosing a clothes store, restaurant or barbershop, consumers have the great advantage of choice. The ability of customers to take their business elsewhere ensures healthy competition among product and service providers while allowing consumers to evaluate and select which of those providers best fit their needs.

The Interdistrict Public School Choice Program allows a few students and their parents the same power of choice – essentially to shop around for the product and service that best fit their needs.

Widening that option to all students statewide can only have a beneficial impact on the state’s education process.

New Jersey has a strong public school system, by many standards and evaluations. SAT math and verbal scores are increasing while writing scores are staying level, and New Jersey scores are consistent with national averages.

Yet that is not the full score. Per-pupil spending in New Jersey increased 7.9 percent last year and many residents and government officials questioned whether taxpayers got their money’s worth.

More than 1,500 New Jersey students are waiting for tutors, according to Literacy Volunteers of New Jersey – clearly they feel they need help they are not getting in the classroom.

Equally troublesome, last year the New Jersey Business and Industry Association (NJBIA) reported that 81 percent of polled employers said the availability of skilled employees was the most important issue for their business yet only half of those polled were satisfied with the job the state was doing to address this concern. NJBIA also reported that only one-third of employers were satisfied with high school graduates’ readiness for entry-level jobs while less than one-third were satisfied with many of the core competencies required in the workplace, such as verbal communication skills, math and science skills, critical thinking skills and written communication skills.

In other words, while New Jersey’s students may be scoring well in class, they often are not testing well in the workplace.

Businesses frequently cite the quality New Jersey’s workforce as a reason they open, relocate or stay in the state. Protecting that resource must be paramount for state leaders and educators.

Allowing students statewide to shop around for the best education will help achieve that.

When high school students enter their junior year they and their parents frequently begin the college shopping process – evaluating colleges and universities based on the quality of the product, their price range and the students’ qualifications and needs. The quality of primary and secondary education those students received often goes far toward defining those qualifications and needs.

Likewise, the quality and pay of the jobs non-college-bound students will find after high school graduation also often are dictated by the standard of education they received in high school and elementary school.

So why should students and their parents not be able to start that shopping process earlier, when it potentially has the greatest impact on their futures?

Their parents would not tolerate being told where they had to shop, dine or have their hair cut. A child’s education is much more important.

By Domenic Giandomenico

The poor jobs report released for the month of July offered yet another bleak reminder that our economy is not quite out of the woods, with our current unemployment rate stuck at 9.5 percent. The tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be like this.

According to Obama administration officials, there are about 3 million jobs that employers are unable to fill due to a vast shortage of workers with skills. Anecdotally, as I travel across the country speaking with business leaders, I can corroborate those claims, if not suggest that number should be higher.

To put that number into perspective, if we were to successfully train Americans to take those jobs, our unemployment rate would shrink instantly by 2 percent – still high, but far better than the situation in which we currently find ourselves.

It is indicative of the state of our education and workforce training systems that we have hardworking Americans out of work needlessly. These unfilled jobs range from middle-skilled jobs – such as energy line workers and health care laboratory technicians – to high-skilled engineering and researching jobs. They are all well-paying, family-sustaining occupations, and they are vital to the growth of our nation’s economy.

Employers like Intel have been forced to move their operations overseas, to places like China and Germany, because we have squandered the precious advantage we had in education. Intel’s chief executive officer, Paul Otellini, said recently, “As a citizen, I hate it. As a global employer, I have the luxury of hiring the best engineers anywhere on earth. If I can’t get them out of M.I.T., I’ll get them out of Tsing Hua” – Beijing’s version of M.I.T.

Many people point to the emerging “green jobs” as a potential savior to our nation. Unfortunately, we’ve seen even some American manufacturers shift their production of things such as solar panels to Germany.

Typically when jobs get outsourced people speculate that it’s due to taxes or cheaper labor costs. In the case of Germany, however, the average German manufacturing employees make approximately 25 percent more than their American counterparts, and the two nations have nearly identical effective corporate tax rates. Add the costs associated with conducting a multinational operation and the rising costs of fuel for distributing the products and you’d be hard pressed to find a less cost efficient way to do business.

The key difference between the two nations is that Germany significantly outperforms the United States on international education benchmarks. When you’re trying to produce such sophisticated equipment, that difference can make a substantial impact on the capacity of the labor pool to fill those jobs.

Germany’s current unemployment rate is around 7.5 percent – or exactly what ours would be if we didn’t have 3 million unfilled jobs due to skills shortage. While there are many factors that contribute to employment rates, the numbers seem less than coincidental.

The American skills gap only projects to get worse over the coming years. A June report issued by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce indicates that by 2018 nearly two-thirds of our available jobs will require some form of education beyond high school – ranging anywhere from a certificate program to a graduate degree. The same report predicts that we will fall short of those needs by at least 7.7 million people.

It is this stark reality that President Obama had in mind when he recently said, “Education is an economic issue, if not the economic issue of our time.”

Companies around the world are increasingly making access to an adequate talent pipeline their top factor in deciding where to build or expand their facilities. We must make it a priority to provide not only a world-class education to each and every one of our children, but also to ensure that our adult workers are given the tools necessary to compete globally.

Anything less and we risk our status as world economic leaders.

By Richard Telofski

In the business news, you’ve read that companies are inviting their customers into social media so they can “get closer” to them. On the surface, this seems like a wise undertaking. But as the saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.”

Many news articles paint a rosy business picture of opportunity of social media. But fewer draw a picture of the nasty business threats lying in wait in the free-wheeling, relatively liability-free, virtual crowd that is social media.

Yes. It’s a crowd.

When your company organizes people on the social web, be it in Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or wherever, you form a crowd, with all the potential for crowd behavior that

implies. Assembling a crowd in social media allows people to say what they want, when they want, how they want, and stretch the truth as far as they want about your business.

And it gets worse. Consider that this “semantic threat” to your business is even greater because there are many people out there on the “anti-social web” who just don’t like companies.

That anti-company sentiment exists should come as no surprise to you. Indeed, no in-depth studies are needed to back up this assertion; let me support it introspectively. How many of you highly adore the company that provides your electricity, or the makers of your food or the shoes you put on your kid’s feet? My guess is that few of you answered “me.” Perhaps the only question here is the level of anti-company sentiment each of us holds, and hides, inside.

Given an instinctive dislike of large, “red tape”-based organizations, it seems highly probable that, at any time, the folks your company has assembled in social media can get a “little too close,” turn and semantically bite you on your corporate backside.

Bad, yes, but it doesn’t stop here. There are professionals in social media waiting to leverage this ambient anti-company sentiment in the groups you have organized. Who are they?

They are activists that target business.

In recent years, environmental and social activists have swarmed into social media to

present their “cases” against companies – maybe your company or its suppliers or customers – to a waiting and, at least somewhat, sympathetic anti-company audience.

When your company organizes people on public social networks such as Facebook or MySpace, you supply anti-corporate activists with a ready and waiting group of people whose social media voices can be whipped into a fervent semantic crowd action and turned viciously against you.

A prime example of such an activist crowd action occurred earlier this year when Greenpeace turned the Nestlé Facebook fan page, with nearly 100,000 Nestlé fans, to that activist’s advantage in an ongoing dispute. Little like this had occurred before and the incident, because of its irony and the extreme social media crowd behavior that resulted, was featured in the national and international news. The elevation of the incident out of social media and into the mainstream press inflicted further public relations pain on a company who was not “careful what they wished for.”

Can activist semantical co-optation occur even if your company does not organize customers on a given social media site? Of course, it can. Your company can be a target for activist action at any time, on or off the social web. But why carelessly make it easier for them?

Before your company engages in social media, carefully weigh both sides of the social media equation and prepare and plan for this semantical threat, making it more difficult for the cooptation of your customers.

By planning ahead to deal with this threat, and others that lie within social media, you can find that you can “be careful what you wish for.”

Richard Telofski is the founder and president of The Kahuna Content Company, Inc. a competitive strategy consultancy. Telofski is the author of four books, including the newly released “Insidious Competition.” Visit him at  www.InsidiousCompetition.com