It’s no secret that everyone is going green these days.  People are working to reduce their carbon footprint and lessen the negative impact their families and businesses have on the environment.  I was fortunate enough to attend the Oklahoma Alternative Energy Conference held in Oklahoma City, OK.  The conference which was held December 2nd & 3rd, 2009 explored the future of natural gas, wind power, and alternative energy efficiency as the industry grows not just in Oklahoma but throughout the United States.

Last year while gas prices were at their highest in recorded history, the topic of alternative energies and other renewable resources surged to the national spotlight as businesses, industries, and consumers looked to reduce our oil and gas dependence while protected their pocketbooks.  Conservation was a key in 2008 as Americans were found to consume 25% of the world’s oil.  Oklahoma along with other south central states, have been a leader in U.S. Oil and Gas Industry.  And as oil and gas prices grew so did the popularity in exploring alternative energy strategies.  Oklahoma leaders like Boone T. Pickens introduced the Pickens Plan which sought to reduce the U.S.’s dependence on foreign oil while creating new jobs and growing alternative energy programs within the United States.

People like Kylah McNabb who works for the Oklahoma Department of Commerce is an advocate and promoter of the alternative energy industry within Oklahoma and moderator of one of the panel sessions at the conference.  Kylah who is a Wind Development Specialist was hired in April of 2009 and works to create a solid partnership with both Career Tech and the Oklahoma Department of Commerce with the goal of advancing the industry while developing training programs within the state.

Oklahoma’s CareerTech system is working to engage industry partners while incorporating existing programs such as basic math and computer skills, machine skills, and AC/DC electronictheory. New programs for safety, general wind energy and climb tests are being created, McNabb said.

McNabb also encourages prospective job seekers or those who are interested in learning more about educational and career opportunities within the industry to visit  the Oklahoma Department of Commerce website, Oklahoma Career Tech and the American Wind Energy Association.

Take a look at my video interview with Kylah as we discuss this new and emerging technology and where job seekers can learn more about careers and training programs.

Photo Credit Jonathan Haynes

Schnake Turnbo Public Relations firm based in Oklahoma City and Tulsa announced earlier this week that they are hiring a Director of Social Media. Yes, I said Director of Social Media. And of course, the position was announced via a youtube video which at present time has 400 plus views in addition to the numerous tweets, online comments, and blog posts that the position announcement has also generated.

This announcement and position comes as no surprise to those of us who advocate the use of social media for personal and business branding and marketing. It is a testament to the fact that managing your online brand is more important now than ever. How you to choose to brand yourself could result in a new position as the Director of Social Media.

The buzz this announcement has generated has resulted in multiple newspaper articles, water cooler talk as well as the viral and public relations frenzy. I’m looking forward to seeing how ST goes about announcing their new Director Social Media possibly via live podcast available through multiple social media channels.

With so much buzz generated from this announcement, what do you think is the best way as a potential candidate to grab ST’s attention? Certainly, a tradition resume won’t do.

January’s jobs report was just released this morning with 598,000 job lost and unemployment at 7.6%. Most consider the silver lining to be the progress regarding the new economic stimulus package. For the unemployed or recently unemployed, here are the details on how it will affect your unemployment and benefits:

• Weekly Unemployment. This stands to increase by roughly $25 per week federally. Some states are pushing to supplement and increase their own unemployment benefits separately as well in the form of a state separate stimulus package.
• Extended Unemployment Benefits. Unemployment typically lasts 26 weeks. The proposal seeks to extend the ability for individuals to receive an additional 20 weeks of unemployment for those who file until Dec. 31, 2009 instead of the original March 31, 2009. The extended unemployment benefits are available to those that reside in states with unemployment percentages greater than 6% which includes 34 states as of Dec. 2008.
• Access to Subsidized Health Insurance. The average cost of COBRA is $1,000 per month. The bill would allow subsidized premiums of 65% for a year. The benefit would apply to those who lose their jobs between September 2008 and the end of 2009. Those who income is 200% the federal poverty guidelines could be eligible for Medicaid. The benefit, paid for by the federal government, would apply to those who lose their jobs between September 2008 and the end of 2010. Interested in what the Federal poverty lines are? Click Here.

Want to know more. Visit www.cnnmoney.com for the entire article and more information.

Number of Americans filing for state unemployment benefits rises to a 26-year high of 586,000, according to Labor Department.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of Americans filing for first-time unemployment benefits rose to a 26-year high last week, according to a government report released Wednesday.

The Labor Department said that initial filings for state jobless benefits rose to 586,000 for the week ended Dec. 20. That was an increase of 30,000 from the 556,000 revised figure for the prior week, and up from a recent high of 575,000 claims reported earlier this month. Wednesday’s report revealed the highest number of jobless claims since Nov. 27, 1982 when initial filings hit 612,000. Economists were expecting jobless claims to rise to only 558,000, according to a poll by Briefing.com.

This week, the report was released a day early due to the Christmas holiday on Thursday.
The weekly jobless claims report can give economists one of the most up-to-the moment reads on the state of the U.S. economy. And the increasing number has some worried that consumers may further tighten their wallets.

“It’s likely to get worse before it gets better,” said Carl Riccadonna, senior U.S. economist with Deutsche Bank.

In fact, consumer spending fell for the fifth straight month in November, according to the Commerce Department.

“Without consumers turning around, the economy’s not going to turn around,” Riccadonna said.
Over the past four weeks, new unemployment claims have risen to an average of 558,000 a week, up 13,750 from the revised moving average of 544,250 reported last week.
The four-week moving average is designed to smooth out some of the week-by-week fluctuations in initial claims statistics, and give a broader view of the U.S. job market.
The number of people continuing to collect unemployment declined to 4.37 million in the week ended Dec. 13, the most recent data available. The measure was a decrease of 17,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 4.39 million.

Over the previous four weeks the number of people on unemployment averaged 4.32 million a week, the government said.

The number of new jobless claims rose the most in Oklahoma, rising by 1,590, the Labor Department said.

North Carolina saw jobless claims fall the most, by 20,526, due to fewer layoffs in the construction, manufacturing and materials industries.

A weak economy causes companies to layoff workers, which causes people to tighten their spending, which weakens the economy even further.

It’s a “negative feedback loop,” said Riccadonna, and one of the only things that can get us out of it would be a “‘shock and awe’ fiscal stimulus package” from the federal government.

President-elect Barack Obama said last week his administration would try to generate 3 million jobs over the next two years as part of an economic stimulus plan that some economists estimate could cost as much as $800 billion.

–www.cnnmoney.com

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The economy shed 533,000 jobs in November, according to a government report Friday – bringing the year’s total job losses to 1.9 million.

November had the largest monthly job loss total since December 1974.

“This is a dismal jobs report,” said Keith Hall, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at a congressional hearing. “There’s very little in this report that’s positive. This is maybe one of the worst jobs reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics (founded in 1884) has ever produced.”

The just-under 1.9 million jobs lost in the current recession, which began in December 2007, surpasses the 1.6 million jobs lost in the 2001 recession. That’s noteworthy, because jobs were cut in droves in 2001 during the dot.com bust, which followed a white-hot employment market during the tech boom of the late 1990s.

But the job market expansion leading out of the previous recession was drawn out and tepid, so the jobs lost now are more at the core of the nation’s economy – a perilous sign.

According to the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report, the unemployment rate rose to 6.7% from 6.5% in October. Though lower than economists’ forecast of 6.8%, it was the highest unemployment rate since October 1993. The rate is compiled in a separate survey from the payroll number.

Revisions

Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast a loss of 325,000 jobs in the month.
Revisions to the two prior months brought more dismal news. October’s job loss was revised up to 320,000 from 240,000, and September was revised up to 403,000.

The revisions brought the 3-month job loss total to 1.3 million. That’s equal to two-thirds of this year’s total job losses and the third highest, three-month job loss total since World War II.
November’s report provided the first glimpse at employers’ reaction after the peak of the credit crisis, reached in mid-October. With credit largely unavailable and expensive, consumers scaled back their spending, dragging down manufacturing and construction businesses.

Travel has also been trimmed, with would-be vacationers opting to stay close to home.
Job losses were spread across a wide variety of industries: manufacturing, leisure and hospitality, construction and even, in the midst of the holiday shopping season, retail.
Also seeing sharp declines were professional and business services, a category seen by some economists as a proxy for overall economic activity, and financial services, at the heart of the current crisis.

Deeper cuts likely to come

With the economy in a recession and most economic indicators signaling even more difficult times ahead, economists say job losses will likely deepen and continue through at least the first half of 2009.

Citing weak economic conditions, a slew of large-scale job-cut announcements came this week. On Thursday alone, AT&T (T, Fortune 500), DuPont (DD, Fortune 500), Viacom (VIA), Credit Suisse (CS) and Avis (CAR, Fortune 500) announced cuts that totaled nearly 23,000 jobs lost, most of which will take place over the next several months.

According to a report by the outsourcing agency Challenger, Gray & Christmas, planned job cut announcements by U.S. employers soared to 181,671 last month, the second-highest total on record.

Temporary employment, including workers employed by temp agencies, fell by 100,700 jobs last month, the highest on records that go back to 1985. That could mean even more full-time payroll reductions to come, as employers often cut temporary workers before they begin cutting permanent staff.

Tig Gilliam, chief executive of placement agency Adecco, the nation’s third-largest employment agency, said employers are trying to position their companies to weather the ever intensifying economic storm.

“CEOs are trying to get their businesses better positioned for the start of the year so they’re not constantly chasing the slowdown” he said. “December will be another very tough month.”

In another sign of weakness, a growing number of workers were unable to find jobs with the amount of hours they want to work. Those working part-time jobs – because they couldn’t find full-time work, or their hours had been cut back due to slack conditions – jumped by 621,000 people to 7.3 million, the highest ever on records that date back to 1955.

Underemployment at 12.5%

The so-called under-employment rate, which counts those part-time workers, as well as those without jobs who have become discouraged and stopped looking for work, soared to 12.5% from from 11.8%, setting the all-time high for that measure since calculations for it began in January 1994.

But there was hiring in some economic sectors last month. Government hiring has stayed strong throughout the downturn, adding another 7,000 jobs in November. Education and health services also grew payrolls, which grew by 52,000 employees.

The average hourly work week fell to 33.5 hours last month. Economists expected the workweek to hold at October’s level of 33.6 hours. But with a modest 7-cent gain in the average hourly salary, the average weekly paycheck rose by 52 cents to $613.05.

Obama: Time for stimulus

With 2008 already the worst year for jobs since 1982 and on pace to become the worst since 1945 – and second worst on records that date back to 1939 – support for a second stimulus package to boost the job market has grown among economists and lawmakers.

The prior stimulus package, in the spring, sent tax rebate checks to millions of tax filers. It helped the economy grow in the second quarter, but it did little to stem the tide of job loss in the country.

But the proposed stimulus package, supported by President-elect Barack Obama, would focus on aid states and municipalities as well as consumers, adding millions of infrastructure jobs for Americans.

“Our economy has already lost nearly 2 million jobs during this recession, which is why we need an Economic Recovery Plan that will save or create at least 2.5 million more jobs over two years,” said Obama in a statement. “There are no quick or easy fixes to this crisis, which has been many years in the making, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better.”

Experts say a two-part stimulus package is the right way to stem the tide of mounting job losses.
“First, you have to get consumers to spend, since 70% of the GDP is tied to consumer spending, and then you need job stimulus like highway projects to maintain economic job growth,” said Gilliam. “This number is so bad that Obama will have to do something drastic soon.”
In the meantime, Bush administration officials say the priority remains restoring liquidity to the financial system.

“We have to get the job done that we can while we have time left in office, and that is restoring credit,” Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez told CNNMoney.com. “This is the key first step to restoring growth and restoring jobs.”

The White House echoed the Commerce secretary. “We need to focus on the causes of the economic downturn in order to reverse this trend in job creation, said Dana Perino, White House press secretary. “We intend to continue our aggressive efforts to restore health to our credit and housing markets.”

–www.cnnmoney.com

**Article courtesy of www.online.wsj.com

Unemployment in the U.S. has hit a 14-year high as companies cut back. That has sent masses of laid-off workers flocking to the Web in search of opportunities — and job sites have been stepping up to meet the challenge.

New job sites with names like MarketVendorJobs.com have sprung up to take advantage of growing user interest amid the economic downturn. Established sites, such as CareerBuilder.com, have also started rolling out new features to improve the relevance of job listings for candidates and make their résumés stand out, among other things. And some sites, such as Vault.com, are providing career counseling and other new services.

Ryan SnookBusiness-networking site LinkedIn last month began offering online outplacement services to companies so that laid-off workers can more easily find their next gigs. It also has introduced technology that better matches its members with appropriate jobs. Using an algorithm, the site searches words within a job posting and then matches up members who list skills that fit the job. In January, the company plans to debut a feature that makes it easier for users to notify members in their online network that they’re searching for a job.

Meanwhile, Glassdoor.com, a salary-review and employee-review Web site, this month retooled its home page so that jobs listed near the users’ hometown and relevant job categories immediately pop up when an individual logs on. Vault.com has created a $999 service for job seekers to get two 45-minute career-coaching sessions over the phone to help them land a new job.

But some consumers may be overwhelmed by the number of job-search sites and all their new features. Scores of career sites are competing for clicks, so users must master multiple search tools — only to discover that sometimes there is redundancy in the listings. Career counselors advise job seekers to learn advanced search strategies on several sites so that only relevant results are displayed. They’re also told to find niche sites that focus on an industry or region to further narrow their search.

Alice Ziroli, 46, began looking for new jobs online earlier this year when the pharmaceutical company she worked for shut down its local sales division. But when she trolled sites such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com, she says she found their offerings too vast.

“I didn’t find them user-friendly,” says Ms. Ziroli. She eventually found a job-search engine called Indeed.com, which has a simple Google-like home page and allowed her to narrowly specify her job-search criteria. Last month, Ms. Ziroli started a new $65,000-a-year job — slightly more than what she made before — as a sales representative for a hospice-and-health-care company just 18 miles from her Diamond Bar, Calif., home.

Adding New Features

A CareerBuilder.com spokesman says that, in this environment, the more features that a site offers the better for a job candidate. Monster says it is rolling out improvements to its site early next year with features that will make it easier to upload résumés and apply for a job online.

CareerBuilder.com

CareerBuilder.com and other sites are adding features to improve the relevance of online job searches. Still, job-search sites are experiencing a dramatic spike in usage. The total number of minutes that Internet users spent on such Web sites jumped 13% in October from a year earlier, while the total number of job-site pages viewed rose 20% in the same period, according to comScore Inc., a market-research company based in Reston, Va. Overall, the number of unique visitors to job-search sites is up 12% in the past year, more than the 5% increase for the Internet as a whole.

“Engagement with these job sites is a lot higher now,” says Andrew Lipsman, a comScore spokesman. “It’s not just how many people are on these sites but how much time overall they’re spending on them.”

Job-oriented sites are capitalizing — literally — on the newfound interest. Glassdoor.com late last month got $6.5 million in new venture-capital funding, just four months after its June launch. LinkedIn also announced last month that it had received $22.7 million in new funding from strategic investors such as Goldman Sachs Inc. and McGraw-Hill Co.

Niche Job Sites

Some job-search sites cater to certain industries. Dice.com, for instance, is targeted at technology professionals. Its sister Web site, eFinancialCareers.com, is tailored for finance-industry workers — an area that has been particularly hard hit. In September, eFinancialCareers.com launched an emergency toolkit that bundles tips and articles on how finance workers can network, customize their résumés and interview better in order to land
a new job.

Other sites try to stand out by providing more career-improvement data and features apart from just job listings. With numbers submitted by users, Glassdoor.com offers salary data for positions at numerous companies. So based on nine submissions, individuals searching for engineering-manager positions at Google Inc. would see that total compensation for such a job might add up to $241,000, including salary and bonuses.

And some sites are now emulating features found on social-networking sites: CareerBuilder.com in February launched BrightFuse.com, where professionals can network and interact with one another. A CareerBuilder.com spokesman says BrightFuse.com will add new features next year to highlight each member’s skills, such as allowing writers to upload samples of their work.

One thing career sites haven’t been able to perk up for job seekers is the total number of job listings. As of earlier this month, the number of job listings on Dice.com was down 9% for the year so far, compared with the same period in 2007, says a spokeswoman, who declined to reveal underlying numbers. At Indeed.com, the number of open positions has stayed flat at about five million jobs over the past year, says Indeed.com Chief Executive Paul Forster.

‘A Mixed Picture’
“It’s very much a mixed picture” out there jobwise, says Mr. Forster. “There’s a lot of weakness in certain areas, such as in the mortgage, retail, financial, construction and hospitality industries. But some areas like defense and health care are strong.”

Marc Hirsch, who started looking for a new job six months ago, says many features on the job sites helped him. The Roanoke, Va., resident, who has a background as a chemist, used LinkedIn, CareerBuilder.com and Indeed.com to get job alerts sent to him and liked how many of the listings came with salary information and estimates. “There was a lot of garbage that came back” through the online searches “but some quality opportunities too,” says the 52-year-old.

Ultimately, though, the job sites proved to be just a starting point for him. Through one job listing he found on a career Web site earlier this year, Mr. Hirsch got his résumé sent to General Electric Co. While the company didn’t have anything suitable at the time, GE kept his name on file.

When a position as an applications engineer came open, GE contacted him and he got the post, he says.