Five Predictions for the Job Market in 2011

Five Predictions for the Job Market in 2011 - Vault

As far as job creation goes, there's little doubt that 2010 has been something of a disappointment. While we saw a couple of glimmers of light, it says a lot that the only thing that moved the headline number downward was temporary Census hiring. As we head into 2011 with an unemployment rate of 9.8 percent, and some 15 million people out of work, it's more apparent than ever that we're not going to see any kind of rapid improvement in hiring. But that doesn't mean that things aren't going to get better—it's just going to take some time. And there will, of course, be opportunities for those who know where to look for them.

Without further ado, here are five predictions for the job market next year:

Unemployment: Here to Stay

This time last year, we predicted that getting unemployment below 9 percent would represent a "serious achievement." Unfortunately, that still stands for 2011. With the economy only just creating enough jobs to keep up with population growth—and government job-creation measures seemingly off the table—a rate of 8-point-anything is increasingly looking like nirvana.

More Professionals Head East

More American students looking to go into finance will be studying the Chinese language, because that's where the majority of financial services-related opportunities will be.

The trend will extend beyond banking to the accounting and consulting industries as well.PricewaterhouseCoopers intends to double its headcount in China over the next five years, meaning it will hire 10,000 new employees by 2015. And thousands of Deloitte's planned 50,000 new hires in 2011 will join the firm in the Far East.

Vocational Occupations Become More Popular

Skilled occupations that pay well yet don't require a higher-level education will become more desirable. That means more plumbers, more CPAs, more medical technicians. As enrollment and tuition rise at traditional four-year colleges, more people will look for lower-cost alternatives—say, community and for-profit colleges—that will allow them to gain vocational certification or training for those jobs without taking out crippling student loans.

Companies Keep Taking the Profits

If it ain't broke, don’t fix it. Many companies posted record profits on the back of cost savings this year, and are likely to continue that behavior into 2011. Having gotten used to doing more—and making bigger profits—with less in the way of manpower, if companies do decide to shovel any of their cash back into the economy next year, it's more likely to be for mergers and acquisitions than large-scale hiring programs.

So who's hiring?

Despite the doom, there are still some growing career fields. Healthcare is an obvious (and longstanding) one, but as the various provisions of Obamacare start taking effect—or being starved for funding—there are serious opportunities for consultants and policy experts as well.

Tech is another field that is likely to continue growing—with a particular emphasis on cyber security, thanks to government spending aimed at curbing the threat of cyber-terrorism and hacking.

Finally, 2011 may well be the year that "green jobs" switches from buzzword to reality—with the majority of new positions in green manufacturing and technology.

How Important Will Corporate Social Responsibility Become?

CSR 2010: Corporate Social Responsibility Shifts From the Cubicle to the Boardroom - Vault

With Corporate social media policies that enable corporates to let their employees write about their work within their corporations, corporate social responsibility will become a major issue on CEO level, I think!

Alice Kerngold seems to confirm this paradigm shift in her newest blog at Vault:

The benefits of corporate social responsibility for companies have been discussed for years. So when CSR advocates were challenged in 2010, they were bored, weary, and frustrated: "Come on, how long do we have to explain this to you?"

While the challenge might have sounded repetitive, there was a new shift in the CSR discussion. Because the conversation moved from the cubicle to the board room.

Until recently, the discussion about CSR was siloed within mid-level offices for human resources, philanthropy, and public relations; the company resources involved were minimal.

Today, it's the company CEOs who are interested in CSR; they're considering the potential benefits of CSR to advance the corporate mission and strategy and showcase the brand. Consequently, CSR is eliciting significant corporate resources with a worthy impact on shareholder value.

A Historical Perspective: CSR is Siloed

In the 1980's and early 1990's, CSR was merely a term that some companies used for their newly integrated volunteerism and philanthropy programs. Support staff or middle management might note just a couple of the benefits – like "teamwork"—to appeal to their bosses for a modicum of support.

A more comprehensive list:

• a) Human Resources: Personal and professional development, recruitment and retention, fostering engagement among people from diverse backgrounds, pride in company, and teamwork
  b) Marketing: Appeal to customers, company reputation, media promotion, and cause-related marketing
  c) Public Relations: Relationships with businesses, community, and government, and company reputation
  d) Philanthropy/Foundation: Employee pride, improve the community where employees live and work, company reputation, align with causes that are relevant and meaningful to employees and also the company's purpose/product

In this earlier iteration, these company "CSR" programs:

• • Were not integrated across human resources, marketing, public and governmental relations, philanthropy, and so on
• • Had no overall strategy with involvement from senior executives
• • Had no particular connection with the company's mission or brand
• • Had no senior executive driving the programs to maximize their value in terms of public, community, and governmental relations; media; and human resources
• • Were not assessed with serious evaluations and analysis of the benefits to the company, and the company's social impact
• • Had no meaningful leadership from the CEO, much less the board of directors
• • Were not considered with regard to shareholder value

Additionally, companies were missing out on–and continue to–a tremendous leadershipdevelopment opportunity.

Engaging Executives in CSR

For two decades, a core component of my approach to CSR has included training and placing executives on nonprofit boards through a purposeful and very high quality matching process. Through board service, companies benefit by providing unique, fulfilling, experiential leadership development opportunities for their executives and professionals, while also helping to build more effective boards of nonprofits that will advance the nation's and the world's NGO/nonprofit sector.

Twenty Years Later: CSR as a Corporate Strategy

Today, for a select group of visionary and opportunistic business leaders, CSR is becoming more fully integrated into the company's core strategy. In such cases, CSR is aligned with the corporate mission and showcases the company's brand, while also providing the above-mentioned human resources and public and community relations benefits – but on steroids.

Today, the CEO is engaging her senior leadership team and her board around CSR, and the CEO and the board are articulating how their company's approach to CSR can indeed increase shareholder value in the long term.

Today, a company commitment to CSR involves auditing and, if necessary, refreshing the company's approaches to corporate ethics, board governance, leadership development, environmental conservation, community engagement and NGO/nonprofit partnerships, supply chain management, and human rights, among others. Two obvious examples include PepsiCo–"Performance with Purpose"–and Walmart.

I contend that CSR is becoming such a force, that soon, if a company does notinvest in CSR, that company's board and shareholders will ask how and why the CEO and his team made such a strategic decision.

That failing to have or integrate CSR into a corporate strategy will no longer happen by default – that one way or the other, CSR will be on the board's agenda.

--By Alice Korngold

Alice Korngold consults to global corporations on CSR, trains and places corporate executives on NGO/nonprofit boards, and consults to NGO/nonprofit boards. She is the author of "Leveraging Good Will: Strengthening Nonprofits by Engaging Businesses," (Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, 2005) and blogs for Fast Company.

More corporate social responsibility in a totally connected world will also enable us to enable corporate multicultural responsibility, that should become more than sending some of your overseas executives on cultural competency training!

6 Ways the Recession Has Changed Hiring Practices

6 Ways the Recession Has Changed Hiring Practices - Vault

Aman Singh article in Vault has caught my attention after having read the most recent study of the The Hackett Group that concludes an "Acceleration of Offshoring Trend Driving Loss of Millions of Finance and IT Jobs in U.S. and Europe".

How has the recession affected HR policies at companies nationwide in the last two years?

As employees who had hunkered down during the recession once again start actively looking for growth opportunities, and in many cases, change employers, how are companies gearing up their retention efforts?

It seemed this problem is so acute that at a recent conference for HR executives, many executives confessed in private conversations that they had recently been pulled from other operational duties to assist in talent development and management.

Titled Talent Management: Getting and Keeping Your Best People, the panel featured HR executives from companies that together manage approximately 350,000 employees worldwide. They had a lot to offer—both on the question posed above, and on several other pressing HR questions of the day.

The panel:

--Moderator: Scott Stevenson , Director of Talent Management and Organizational Design, PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory (PwC)
--Bob Bennett, Chief Learning Officer and VP for Human Resources, FedEx Express
--Sayed Sadjady, Talent Management and Organizational Design Leader, PwC Advisory
--Helena Gottschling, SVP for Leadership and Organizational Development, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC)

Highlights:

Employee Disengagement Isn't Leading to Employee Attrition

Stevenson indicated that while increasing percentage of employees were seemingly disengaged at work—especially in the last 24 months—they also made up the majority of the workforce that wasn’t actively job hunting.

"Between 2007 and 2009, the percentage of a disengaged workforce went from 10 percent to 33 percent. But this 33 percent were the ones not leaving either! Which leaves us with a big realization: One out of every four individuals leaving the company is a high potential candidate. This figure marks our biggest challenge yet," he said.

At FedEx, the focus has always been on internal promotions "and that has helped us tremendously in the last couple of years," Bennett offered, adding that current CEO Frederick Smith started at FedEx as a carrier. However, Sayed Sadjady put the onus of voluntary attrition on the demographics of their workforces. "The average age of a PwC employee is 28 years," he said, adding that job hopping at that time in one's career is considered normal these days, even necessary for employees to move onto better opportunities.

From Recruitment to Leadership Development Programs

For RBC's Helena Gottschling, the last two years saw a significant shift in priorities (and budget allocation) from external recruiting to internal training. "There has been a heightened amount of attention on how we are managing our talent and exploring the diversity of skills, generations, and capabilities already in place at RBC," she said.

Both Bennett and Sadjady were in agreement, adding that having been in the thick of the recession had forced many heads to start looking for potential internally.

Whose Responsibility is Leadership Development: The Employee or the Company?

According to Gottschling, professional development must be a partnership: "Individuals must be eager to develop. And companies must be equally proactive on providing the facilities and opportunities to match this eagerness."

For Bennett, however, this accountability has shifted in the last two years. "At FedEx, development no longer means promotion," he said, explaining that as of 2010, all employee information (resume, work history, traits, achievements, goals, etc.) is fed from one single database that connects to the entire system of job posts, career development opportunities, etc. This puts the onus on the individual employee.

Indicating that the traditional process of hiring, onboarding, goal setting and eventual development—a predominant feature of the professional services industry—has undergone a gradual integration in other industries and at PwC as well, Sadjady said that the "process has become much more ad hoc and need-based than a calendar-based objective."

Role of the Chief Human Resources Officer is Changing: HR's Seat at the Big Table

Gottschling emphasized a significant shift in leadership's attitude toward the participation of the human resources chief in operational and overall strategizing. "And the last two years have made this ever more prominent," she said, adding, "Goal setting and setting projections across departments are no longer the predominant functions of the finance department."

She also pointed out that because the "drivers of engagement had changed dramatically in the last two years," the HR department has risen in importance to deal with long term goal setting and projections. "Also, the development needs of today's workforce are so unique that it has become much harder to look even three years ahead," she offered.

Bennett alluded to this trend as well, indicating that the functionality of human resources is gradually shifting from a discretionary dispensability at companies to a prominent leader in any discussion on company strategy, goals or mergers and acquisitions.

Employee vs. Employer Value Proposition: What Sets Companies Apart as Preferred Employers?

For Gottschling, value propositions must cut across functionalities and all employees. "The No. 1 driver for a managing director in our capital markets group, for example, could be compensation, but for a customer service representative in one of our branches, the No.1 driver would be her relationship with the supervisor or whether she feels valued at the company, or even the company's reputation," she explained.

Bennett gave high points to corporate culture and detailed four key requisites for a value proposition:

1. Employee goals must be aligned with company goals.
2. Employees must feel that they make a difference.
3. Employees must have the ability to grow with the company.
4. Employees must know they are trusted and have a voice in the company.

"Everything we do and the people who do the tasks can be replicated. But corporate culture cannot be duplicated. It is the one thing that sets a company apart. And this is driven by employee engagement," he said.

The Partnership of HR and Diversity

Charting the course diversity has travelled both as a priority as well as a driver for engagement and growth, Sadjady said, "Diversity was initially driven by compliance and corporate governance. Then diversity became a necessary demand from the client base. And today, diversity of experiences, abilities, skills and backgrounds is a crucial component of overall success." [Related: Why Diversity is a Necessary Job Skill, not an HR Policy]

At RBC, Gottschling added, "For me, the Chief Diversity Officer is my CEO. Our diversity is emphasized in every function of the company, from hiring, leadership development, identifying high potential candidates, as well as earmarking opportunities for expansion."

Finally, as Bennett put it, "Diversity today is a business need, a requirement." This puts the onus primarily on the human resources department to push for and leverage the potential of a diverse workforce. And now that HR executives are beginning to crack the ceiling to the C-suite, disgruntled employees who feel unvalued or noncontributory to company initiatives and strategy, can hope to have a voice on the big table.