Baby Boomers Fuel Thriving Health Industry
Bright Economic Picture, but High Medical Costs Hurt Consumers
By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES

July 17, 2008 —

Americans accustomed in recent months to a daily dose of gloomy economic news may find a silver lining in the health care industry as aging baby boomers fuel demand for drugs, health services and medical supplies, boosting the companies that make them.

Employers and investors have fought for relief this year as housing prices fall, gasoline and food prices rise and credit and financial markets continue struggle for stability.

But health care, which today makes up 16 percent of gross national product, three times as much as in 1960, according to Kaiser Foundation, is one of a handful of sectors like mining, farming and natural resources to thus weather the economic storm.

Every User Deserves a Personalized Interface
July 16, 2008

One size does not fit all, at least when it comes to user interface design. Researchers at the University of Washington have come up with a system to automatically generate interfaces that fit the users’ vision and motor abilities, making clicking easier.

In a paper presented yesterday at the meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the researchers described a system, dubbed Supple, that puts each user through a test of mouse pointing, dragging and clicking skills. The system then assesses the person’s performance and automatically generates a personalized interface that improves the user’s performance when using a specific program. This is particularly useful for people who have trouble controlling a mouse or a pointer, such as disabled and elderly people.

Thus, Supple will build an interface with larger buttons and expanded lists for users with cerebral palsy, who move cursors spastically. If the user suffered muscular dystrophy and had trouble in moving the cursor, the system would generate an interface with smaller buttons and a condensed layout.

Supple can reduce the performance gap between people with disabilities and those users who don’t have any by 62 percent. Disabled users also say they prefer the custom-made interfaces, a University of Washington’s press release says.
—Maria José Viñas

-- iTrack Jobs
-- Posted Jobs (but not specific to SI).

Obviously, the iTrack jobs are the main ones you should be looking at. These are jobs that our recruiting partners (4235 companies, but who's counting?) post for you to apply to and also some jobs that our staff pulls and adds to iTrack. But what are these Posted Jobs?

SI contracts iTrack from a professional organization called NACE (National Association of Colleges and Employers) who contracts the software from a vendor called Symplicity.

Formerly, the jobs posted in the "Posted Jobs" section came from CareerBuilder. We had the option to approve the ones that we thought were relevant to SI students and alumni interests. All others would be not approved and thus went to the Posted Jobs section.

Today, I received an email that notified us that the relationship with CareerBuilder has been discontinued, but replaced with something even better. Here's the message we received from our NACELink contact:

"I am writing to inform you that CareerBuilder has discontinued their previous feed to NACElink CSM sites, and the link has been removed from your instance.

However, the good news is that your students already have access to those job listings through our partnership with DirectEmployers Association (DEA). The DEA JobCentral.com site has partnerships with individual member companies and other job indexing sites like: Indeed, SimplyHired and Google. Through those indexes the CareerBuilder jobs are represented. In total there are millions of jobs that can be searched on by your students/alumni through the NACELink Extended Job Search."

If you are curious about other schools that use this system, you can see them all at: http://www.nacelink.com/nl_schools_list_c.php

I've always been a big fan of the index job search sites such as SimplyHired and Jobster. So, this is good news and we should be seeing more jobs that fall under the "NACELink Multi-School Postings" category that are relevant to your interests and career pursuits.

One subscriber on the WRK4US list, asked the following:

"Does anyone have any experience in telling potential employers that, if they don't have a PhD-level job, you're willing to take anything - -absolutely anything - to get your foot in the door? I mean, answering phones, stuffing envelopes, ANYTHING.

Are there any tricks or useful 'angles' to take in bringing this up?

After two years on the market (with an expensive professional career coach) I am seeing virtually no marketable skills in my PhD, including teaching, since my program offered no real teaching experience, no preparation for academe, and left me too specialized for half the jobs and not specialized enough for the other half.

In job applications and networking I've been aiming both low and high, narrow and broad, and haven't gotten a single nibble on any application save one.

My field is environmental studies (maybe off-topic - is wrk4us for Humanities?) but I'm in a specialization with zero job marketability. (No space for details here, but trust me.)"

As usual, the responses were varied and many:

The trick is to remember that you *do* have skills. One way to identify your skills is to list *everything* you've done in the past few years - classes you've taken, research you've done, community service activities, etc. - and then match up that list of activities with a skills list. University of Illinois Urbana Champaign has a really nice list of skills for PhDs. Then, when you go to write your cover letter you can cull from this list the list of skills you do have and their supporting activities.

***********

You can access all of these guides online through the UM Career Center at their Vault Library.

Beyond the books, Vault also maintains a resource in which actual employees of different companies write honest but anonymous testimonies about what its really like to interview and work at a company. See examples:

Microsoft (Program Manager)
Expect numerous rounds of interviews. Microsoft will keep interviewing you until a group says "yeah, we're interested". If you keep doing well on your interviews, they'll continue to "source you out" to groups. But don't expect to get placed quickly - unless you are a true expert in an area that has an opening that fits you perfectly. I interviewed in this last round, over 20 times. My final interviews consisted of one that was 9 hours long (non-stop), and the final one was 11 hours, with time for lunch (but you were interviewed during lunch - so I had just 10 minutes to gobble-down my food at the end - then I was off to the next one). I interviewed with Devs, PMs, Testers, Dev Leads, GPMs, and finally a PUM who's really the person who tries to convince you to come to Microsoft (you know you're doing well at that point). Most of the questions today are not about "solve this crazy problem", or "how many toasters can you fit in the Empire State Building". Instead, they want to know how you might have handled a tricky situation in your past; how you would handle a particular problem. Some will still give you a problem, but expect you to get up and show that you can attack it, and get to some conclusion.

Royal Dutch/Shell Group (Geologist)
Shell continues to have one of the most bizarre interview processes in the industry. One question I was asked was "What do you think of manned exploration of Mars?" This is supposed to give the interviewee an opportunity to show creative thinking with no preparation. In another previous Shell interview I was asked "What do you think about tourism?". I have no idea what weight these questions are given, but the thing that seemed to get me hired the first time was a series of essay questions I answered where I related experiences with selling bananas in the Caribbean. Apparently the answers they valued were those demonstrating creativity and out-of-the box thinking. Those stories were apparently circulated at Shell among my managers because I was often asked about it. Shell's campus recruiting is often followed up by a full day 'interview' at a Shell location, which is a day of exercises in teamwork, analysis, and thinking skills.

See the link here (and the opening text below) to read about our blog and the other top 10!

Top 10 College Career Services Blogs
Posted by Willy Franzen on Monday, June 30, 2008

A lot of people ask us, “Where do you find all the companies and jobs that you write about?” We’ve already told you about how we use Google, magazine lists, and television to find jobs, but we have a few other tricks up our sleeves as well. One is blogs - we use them a lot. Some of the most useful blogs are those published by career services offices at colleges and universities. They’re full of great tips and excellent entry-level job and internship opportunities. Although the blogs are usually geared towards the students of the school, they’re open to the public.

All of the sites we’ve included on our list of the Top 10 College Career Service Blogs are of great quality, but there weren’t too many blogs that we left off the list. That begs the question: Why aren’t more career services offices blogging? Is it lack of student interest? Many career services offices offer newsletters through e-mail, and some of these are published online, but why not use a blog for updates? It’s really easy to do, and it’s a much more flexible form of communication. We hope to see more career services offices pick up blogging. They can take a lead from the blogs listed below.

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Monday, July 14
12:00-2:00 p.m.
The Career Center
3200 Student Activities Building
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Are you involved in a records management-related project?
Are you a recent graduate of a records management program?

If yes, please send your news to Debra Kimok for inclusion in the July issue of The Records Manager, newsletter of the SAA Records Management Roundtable (RMRT).

We'd also like to know if you are a student of records management, or interested in records management, and are attending the SAA annual conference in San Francisco.
The RMRT annual meeting wiki page is http://www.ibiblio.org/saawiki/2008/index.php/Records_Management_Roundtable_Meeting

Tiny URL for the above: http://tinyurl.com/5hshqv

Past issues of The Records Manager can be found at http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/recmgmt/

Debra Kimok
Editor, The Records Manager

Investigating Employees' E-Mail Use

Morning Edition, June 18, 2008 · Co-host Steve Inskeep talks to Elizabeth Charnock, CEO of Cataphora. The California-based firm helps companies in legal matters by investigating patterns of employee e-mail use.

The E-Mail Age
E-Mail at Work: Tips to Keep You Out of Trouble
by Heidi Glenn

Ever wonder whether your boss is looking over your shoulder as you write e-mails from work? You're not being paranoid. Companies large and small have turned to monitoring employee e-mail, looking for everything from proprietary data leaks to cyberslacking.

E-mail creates the electronic equivalent of DNA evidence, according to the ePolicy Institute, which conducted, along with the American Management Association, surveys of e-mail monitoring among U.S companies. That means your electronic paper trail can be restored and reviewed — and can also be retrieved as part of a future lawsuit's discovery process.

Go to http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/061308-ibm-skills.html?page=1http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/061308-ibm-skills.html?page=1 to read the article at NetworkWorld and to access all the included links.

As part of an expanded outreach to college IT students, IBM is releasing a set of Web-based tools and resources to help them hone marketable skills in the fastest-growing IT job opportunities.

IBM is adding a section to the Web site of its long-standing Academic Initiative program, which until now has focused mainly on working with faculties who teach IT and IT-related courses. The new section is designed for students, with tutorials, games, skills assessments and online forums that can supplement, and be incorporated with, regular college and university courses.

“Our key concern is the ‘skills pipeline,’” says Kevin Faughnan, an IBM veteran who’s been director of the company’s Academic Initiative since 2004. The mega-trends of globalization and services-oriented economies are made possible by information technology, creating a growing U.S. and global demand for IT skills, he says. "The information system -- the hardware and software and networking ‘complex’ -- is what’s driving the services-oriented businesses,” he says. “They need young workers who have the skills to continue innovating."

As far as I'm concerned, LinkedIn is the single greatest networking tool in the world - ever. The problem is, not everyone knows how to use it to their advantage. Of all the people I've talked to about LinkedIn, most acknowledge that they're a member but only a handful are actually getting value out of the networking website. Most signed up because a friend sent them an invite and haven't really given it a second thought since.

The reality is, with more than 20 million business professionals on LinkedIn, you're missing out on countless business opportunities and the chance to build long-lasting relationships. Here are ten ways to get the ball rolling.

1. Your LinkedIn Profile = Your Resume
Instead of having a dedicated website with your resume, use LinkedIn to double as your online resume. Not only does it offer a world of more information that puts you ahead in the minds of employers, but it also boosts confidence in your credibility and can act like a qualified reference all by itself. Understand though that you need to put a reasonable amount of effort into creating an effective profile. Here Guy Kawasaki offers a primer on what it takes: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/linkedin_profil.html

2. Increase Your Visibility
Every minute LinkedIn is used a resource to find qualified people to hire or do business with. By adding the right keywords in your profile (such as the words someone would probably use to search for someone with your expertise) you're much more likely to appear at the top of search results. My LinkedIn profile is a good example of this (note all of the references to the areas of writing I specialize in): http://www.linkedin.com/in/logankugler

3. Grow Your Network Fast
Expanding the size of your network is a snap. Aside from being able to easily import your entire address book from most email clients and automatically view who is a LinkedIn member, you can search for other members by companies you used to work for, people you used to work with, and people who went to school with you. In order to use LinkedIn to its full potential, you should have at least 50 first degree connections.

4. Ask For Advice
Recently, LinkedIn added a feature called LinkedIn Answers and it's phenomenally useful. It allows you to ask virtually any business-related question across the collective knowledge of both your network and the greater LinkedIn network. For example, here are some questions that were recently answered:

• What should a presentation about a major acquisition include?
• How do I set a retainer fee for my consulting business?
• Which slogan do you like most?
• What should we pay a Chief Strategy Officer?

Its uses are infinite from anything to starting your own business to getting help with a marketing proposal to finding a mentor.

May 23, 2008 - Ann Arbor, MI - Leading internet marketing company Pure Visibility, Inc., has grown its team with three new hires: Analytics Muse Jessica Hullman, Information Superhighway Tour Guide Jason Young, and User Experiologist Michael Beasley.

About Jason Young, Information Superhighway Tour Guide
Jason earned his bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Temple University and came to the University of Michigan School of Information for his Master’s Degree in Library and Information Services. As an AdWords-certified librarian and web junkie, Jason cares a lot about information resources that meet people’s needs.

About Jessica Hullman, Analytics Muse
Jessica is tied for the most degreed person at Pure Visibility. She has two Master’s degrees, one from Naropa University in Writing and Poetics, and another in Information Analysis and Retrieval from the University of Michigan School of Information. She brings her creativity and writing skills in addition to her deep understanding of information design, web analytics, and data visualization to add to Pure Visibility’s quantitative user experience and web analytics team.

About Michael Beasley, User Experiologist
Mike completed his education at the University of Michigan School of Information, where he earned his Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction. Before that, he earned his undergraduate degree in English and Music at the University of Michigan. Mike was previously a usability engineer at Compuware and at Thomson Gale. Mike is currently president of the Michigan chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Organization and Associate Content Editor for UX Magazine.

About Pure Visibility

Pure Visibility is an Internet marketing firm in Ann Arbor, Michigan, specializing in Web site optimization and pay-per-click management. Founded in 2005, Pure Visibility helps national and local companies increase their visibility on the Web with its “Own Page One” strategy, which combines multiple forms of online marketing and web analytics to generate business and competitive advantage for their customers. Pure Visibility’s owners have been search engine marketing experts since 1997. Their company has continued leadership in the field of search engine marketing by employing one of the first 100 Google AdWords certified professionals in the world, and Pure Visibility is now a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant. Pure Visibility has recently been recognized for its growth by the National Association of Women Business Owners and the Michigan Small Business and Technology Development Center awards.

The University of Chicago is the sixteenth largest employer in the Chicago metro area with an international, multi-ethnic community of 10,000 employees. The University of Chicago employees support a mission of research and education creating innovative changes around the world.

The University of Chicago’s Career Fair focuses on professional staff positions requiring degrees and experience. This is a “meet and greet” opportunity to learn more about UC, departments and position types.

Participating departments include Networking Services & Information Technology (NSIT), Graduate School of Business (GSB), Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, Humanities, Development and Alumni Relations, Facilities as well as the Medical Center and more!

Career categories include information technology, finance, healthcare, communications, fundraising, research, skilled trades and administration.

Street parking is limited and further reduced by construction. All attendees are strongly encouraged to take public transportation.
CTA
Metra

To see all open positions and apply online, please visit UChicago Jobs at https://jobopportunities.uchicago.edu

The University of Chicago is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer (AA/EOE).

View This Summer at:
http://careercenter.umich.edu/students/gradservices/thismonth/index.html.

We hope to see you at The Career Center as your summer progresses!
--
Tom Lehker
Senior Assistant Director,
Graduate Student Services
The Career Center
3200 Student Activities Building
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1316
734-764-7460

Click below to read the events being offered.