good morning and welcome to what's going on my name is robert feldman and i will be your post today and with me we are lucky to have a professional by the name of  consummate expert in the fields of career counseling and career changing and coursework and welcome glad to be here can you tell our audience a little bit about what you and you know and profit group do because it's not a simple form you know but one with a group called the professional development collaborative and we were a nonprofit started at the height of the great recession there were literally thousands and thousands of people on cloyd in massachusetts looking for work and one of the barriers they were encountering was a lack of certain skynet skills that they needed to upgrade themselves on but to the prices for acquiring those skills was oftentimes astronomical and yet at the same time there were literally thousands of folks who had tremendous depth of knowledge and skills who were unemployed and could be actively teaching others and collectively raising the skill level of our population and we said let's get together and create a nonprofit that will provide quality professional training using industry experts oftentimes right from the ranks of the unemployed but today more or less most of them are working and we contract with them to do the do the work and we've been going strong since two thousand and ten providing again rescaling reach the willing of people adding to their base of skills helping them become employed but doing at a price that people can afford so they do they do the people who take your courses and receive additional training or i don't call cross training for a minute they get any help from the government to do that is really a subsidy as you know we all actually we we were our nonprofit was helped along by something called the senior community service employment program they provided us with a couple staff people to help us organize and produce these events other than that though none of the folks that actually took the courses they had to pay out of pocket and for this but we kept the prices very low we are run by volunteers no one receives a salary and it's just through our collective efforts that  we produce these classes and people can afford to take and that's that's the difference between say the professional development collaborative and other groups now when we began most of the folks that took our courses were unemployed and many of them still are but today we're also starting to get companies sending us their staff to be trained and we're getting folks that are in the labor market but they know hey you know in six months my project could be over my contract could end and i'll be back in the in the labor market looking for work so today we're in this era of what i call lifelong learning whether you want to or not and people are literally forced all the time to upgrade their skills and we work we're there to help them know the the turnover rate now on average is about four years that is the average person gets a job works it and after four years they're thrown back into the unemployed labor force and they have to hunt for a job it used to be a decade ago was eight years and of course during the if you were a boomer the tenure of companies was ten fifteen twenty years and so there's a lot of the folks that are fifty five and older had a long time tenure at a company and then to be thrown out of work of course then they're hit with issues of age related discrimination which makes their job search a little tougher but know this because people  cycling in and out of the labor market today there's a constant need to be growing your skills to become reemployed so education is really important at the same time during the great recession companies cut their training budgets by fifty percent so companies today like someone to have all the skills they need right at the get go just to hire them you've got to have the skills rather than bring them on board and say we'll train you because hey there might be gone in a couple years so why should a company pay for that training when they could if they could get someone who's already got it's hard for the public i think to understand the mentality of  lot of these larger companies that are closely hiring or looking for you know and you read about there's a whole bunch of high skilled tech related jobs that are constantly unfilled so get filled in more open up  and i would say to myself why aren't they aiding in the training of these people the jobs would fill up the vacancies now would fill up that much quicker i would think it's it's a good question i think  certainly maybe some companies are realizing that they need to do that other companies are just saying hey it's the government's job or the burden should be paid by the individual you've got to put the money out to take these courses to keep yourself employed and that's the challenge for people because so many folks nowadays are still could be in their forty's and still paying off student debt and they don't want to pay another six thousand dollars to a for profit school to learn if specific skill set and this is where we come in because we can provide just enough training that you could put that skill like agile scrum or you could project management you could put that on your resume and get yourself an interview it just seems like a if you look at the labor market say over the last thirty years has been such a significant changes as how people who are unemployed or looking for work for the first time approach on the job seekers well i mean this is the changes that i've mentioned which is that we're recycling in and out of the labor market but also there's been a whole revolution in how people are recruited today it's a lot through social media  when we were first looking for work it was through the newspaper you go to the sunday papers you'd look for the ads and you'd send in an application that way although networking was important then and it still is important now but a lot of the way you find out about jobs today is all through the social media and this disadvantage is a lot of older workers who aren't as facile with how to use social media  so your first job was as a license clinical social worker so he well i've been a social worker for years and prior to that i was a teacher and something of a historian i wrote a book called not so long ago oral histories of older bostonians but i couldn't make a living in history and i went into social work mental health work i worked at psychiatric hospitals and went to social work school part time and when i graduated there was at that time this was the eighty eight eighty nine mass miracle and the federal government was putting money into a program that hired social workers and psychologists to states but at least money was coming into this state i got hired and i was at to different career centers where people who are unemployed but also in crisis and that what people don't realize about the job isn't just knowing how to do a good job hunt it's having might say the psychological reservoir of confidence to go out and do the job search and when you lose a job it just terribly impacts people's self esteem and their confidence and so being there you might say to have someone to talk to about the more personal issues the drop in confidence the how do i build up my self esteem was in the attitudes of people would come in as no jobs out there no one's going to hire me because of my age attitudinal issues that we could help people work through and get some perspective on it we made a difference in terms of people landing a job how about the with the same be said of veterans of wars of a recent ongoing never ending wars we were churning out veterans injured and not injured coming back into the economy and having a tremendous difficulty it seems finding work yeah well you know one to put a plug in for the services that are there every career center in the state has a designated veterans representative and those guys and gals to a terrific job being there for the veterans but as for dealing with the psychological challenges i'm not sure and i hope i hope that there's some kind of program available for veterans because you know you hear all kinds of stories of the traumas that people encountered and how they can impact your ability to be effectively functioning and when you're back in the civilian world so one of the things when you're used to being  environment where people kind of tell you what to do you get back to the states now and you've got to take all the initiative and it's tough for people fortunately we have the sort of mini crises in the veteran hospitals for physical and psychological limbs throughout the country and and i think washington they want to do the right thing have terrible problem cutting through no matter how many doctors they hire in a minute how many good administrators the high are cutting through the inertia of the bureaucracy so that people aren't waiting for months to be treated for something over two months and unfortunately i don't know this but i have a feeling that because a lot there are a lot of programs at the hospitals regarding re entering into the community one sure he'll door or physically fit and i got a feeling that they're not that much better doing that than they are treating the direct medical issues you know and i have no idea that's not an area of my own i will say this that we have you know in all different ages making taking advantage of our classes and certainly there are veterans among them and so they need they know they need to grow their skills young people do older workers need to grow their skills so we don't discriminate no one gets a special advantage just the same scholarship level price we keep the prices as low as possible for horses and that's good that's good how about let's talk f about another category which i have a personal interest sure individuals who are in the looking for a first time job or who are having difficulty holding a job because of some intellectual   conditions that they can't work with and work at but this seems to be a dearth of a lack of people trained in the that area to help them with getting a job and or maintaining a job because the issues come up now and it's sometimes difficult to talk about but you can't go work for someone and be honest without telling them look i have problems in the syria so it's not a physical thing it's more something about processing ability or learning ability well i would suggest that they see a career counselor because these are issues that career counselors deal with every day and that is the barriers to becoming reemployed and there i was part of a program at one point called the resource partnership which provided employment counseling for people with psychiatric disabilities and it was very effective very helpful in helping people overcome those barriers and become reemployed but the funding for that lost so i don't know where those programs stand nowadays it's it's challenging for folks for sure and again what the professional development collaborative does is provide educational venues for people to grow their skills and anyone can take them up in times you might have someone who could be disabled in some capacity but very intelligent can take a course and gain that  and find employment so for example we had a a woman who was had done and been an executive secretary administrative assistant secretary and she had done a lot of event planning  her jobs but never had the job title of event planner right and then she was thrown out of work she was over fifty five and she was having difficult times she took our event planning course put  resume could talk the talk when she came to the interview and she got a job at the pine street in and we've had folks that took software development related courses like her agile scrum course or a project management course and that enabled them to both talk the talk when it came to an interview it gave them something put on their resume and it helped them land work and again in some respects whether it's a psychiatric issue or it's a personal handicap or it's just being an older worker if if you have the right credentials and you can talk intelligently  practice how you present yourself you'll do a much better job of landing a job unfortunate always the job market to me is always a microcosm of much larger issues that existence sure i in dealing with like mental health we we as a country and i'm sure a lot of countries like that don't want to deal with mental health and don't really want to have the talk it's not the talk it's many talks we're we're we're awkward about it we're afraid about it we're seeing it all that well in the papers because of guns and gun control and mentally ill people getting guns clearly that's an issue but the issue of mental health therefore the you know just as well there's certainly a need for that for sure because i get referrals because of my background at the resource partnership and as a social worker i understand the emotional and attitudinal issues that get in the way of people getting work the psychological side so it's important for people to to get some help finding work now again that's not something the professional development club but it does we were there providing the in demand skills right in this day and it's just a whole area of life that kind know sits out there like a weighted issue without it we don't like to talk about those things yeah roger you know it gets you know brushed under the you know the table maybe we should offer a course on that will help raise are if you talk to people seriously you talk about it anyway we all have someone and are extended family if they're not mentally ill but maybe slightly challenged or maybe they're married to someone who's family you know  people are all through the community but they say you know pretty much well you know i don't want to i don't want it to be all doom and gloom because we're at the height of a labor market recovery there officially only about four percent unemployment and there's no better time than right now for anyone to get out there looking for work and that the initial encounter of a person with an employer is  through their resume and so if they have the right skills they have a shot at getting an interview and so i would encourage anyone despite their challenges if you have some issues of lack of confidence or fears of discrimination check with a career counselor but also to spend some time what kind of skills do you have and can you bring to the labor market the right sets of skills  retooling out to the community so we can actually offer this free and maybe go to veterans groups or go to other venues that would make a lot of sense i would think for the corporations they could tax wise duction it would help them and maybe even influence groups like yours who'll be doing training that would get people prepared for their corporation you know they may have specific skills that's right well let's talk about the labor market we've got this red hot for four point one percent unemployment now you know historic and all that stuff because we should start seeing real inflation th usually goes along with a really low employers what do you think is the real i mean there are a lot of people that don't get you know how the government is numbers you know i mean people just i've tried for two years so i can't get a job so no one knows what because i'm out of the market where you know that's what happened during the great recession is that the and the percent of people participating in the labor market declined by several percents so that the point of measurement of unemployment is well it's at the lower level now those that are looking for work there's only four percent but if you go back a decade that number of people who were eligible for the labor market might have been three or four percent higher which means you know twenty thirty forty fifty million more people and that's the difference today so that if the same level of labor force participation was evident today before in two thousand and seven the unemployment rate would be much higher today and then what you have today is this recycling in and out of the labor market so there isn't the economics security people don't have that anymore it's your you've got a job and then six months later a year later you're out of a job again they call it the gig economy and some people it works well for them but for a lot of folks the big economy and like i say and even if they have jobs the in and outs this is what's evident is this tremendous amount of wage stagnation because because the companies can get away with it know i'm recalling voltaire's candied any ends by saying till the garden where you are meaning that the professional development collaborative can address all these issues but what we can do is we can address that through the efforts of our volunteers and i want to say i hope maybe people see this they'll say hey i'd like to volunteer with that group i can take courses there at a reduced rate and i can contribute to the general wellbeing by helping out this group because they're providing needed skills for people in transition and that's so i want to encourage people to volunteer if they would and what we're doing are a little bit you know a much bigger project a that's about all we could handle what exactly makes a difference it's made a difference for a large number of people who have been helped to get a job well maybe get more people from operation able to work for you and let the government know for it because it is funded you know them and that could increase your productivity in europe so what what you do well maybe it's a good time to mention that program the senior community service employment program it's run by operation able here in the boston area but there's different groups that run it in other parts of the state and they provide supported employment to folks fifty five and older who are having trouble finding work and it's a it's a great resource for people if they want to you know if you needing help with the job search you finding age barriers and you need to kind of supplement your income then i'd suggest that they apply for the senior community service employment program i think it's a great idea you know how how one do people once they get involved with your nonprofit take courses or an average length of time they spend with you before they move on well  so it's if you've got a job especially if you're just tired you're reluctant to take time off to go to a course but we're finding out that because of how people are recycling into and out of the labor force that we're getting folks who are working but want to keep growing their skills because frankly either they're scared or they just are excited about a particular topic so one of two of our most popular courses right now i happen to be in the technical side sales force learning that software customer relationship management software and the google analytics which is what you do if you have a website and you send emails via mass marketing google analytics will tell you how effective your marketing is and so there isn't a website owner or marketer who doesn't want to know google analytics but by the way we also have project managements been very popular we have courses like negotiations we've are favorites like event planning interruption to event planning we have community speak with confidence so we have courses that are more soft skill and we have courses that are more high tech oriented and it varies you know we live in a lot of our folks here are high tech people so they like the technical courses but then there's all those human service folks that  courses in communication skills marketing skills writing skills management skills so we have a course called the art of proactive management which is which is essentially a course in how to be a good manager and if you've ever worked in a certain kind of work environment you know that you can often encounter bad management people people who mean well but don't know how to effectively draw the best from their staff and so this course really helps people do that so most of our courses are pitched at a very high level rate we're going to wrap up soon but i want to assure you of this will not to go into global issues but where do you think in the crystal ball here but anyway but you're close to the what i'd say is that you know in the past we've had a recession on average every seven years so we're now in our eighth year of recovery and we're kind of only just one little crisis away from it do you railing ok so we have a massive amounts of student debt which could precipitate a crisis we have bubble markets again happening in real estate any of these fact or international crisis any of these factors could tip the economy tip the economy towards recession and then again all of these issues come before big time  and unfortunately our government because of our recovery from the last recession is sort of out of tools in their toolbox because they relied so heavily on fishley keeping interest rates at one percent yeah so and it's worked a great deal but other things are working too but you can't go back if we stack tipping over the next four months and you're at one and a half percent there's not much in there supply  demand equation too you know it's more i would say micro right but we've got to i know i want to thank you for coming in because your programs more people need to know about