Upcoming Courses on Economic Gardening

WebJunction is offering a series of three seminars on "economic gardening": helping entrepreneurs, using business databases and library outreach. These seminars will probably be very useful to reference librarians, since they will sometimes get the question, How do I start my own business? especially if the person has given up looking for work.

Dice launches Dice Learning

Dice is a job board for techy oriented positions--usually (but not always) programming--and they have now launched a learning portal called Dice Learning that will connect users with course offerings in technical skills--networking, security, PHP, for example. The courses are prepared by third-party providers, and it doesn't appear that you can register directly from the site; you need to ask for more information. (see the comment below: apparently you can register directly from Dice Learing)

They have webinars, seminars, and e-books. You can also find courses for certification, like CISCO or Microsoft. You can select from instructor-led courses or choose by state to find a course in your area. There was a dearth of free courses (I'm a librarian, I can use dearth in a sentence); even the skills assessment costs $2, but I was able to find a free course which will be offered on August 11 called Enhance your skills, which attendees can use to see what IT employers are looking for.

Dice Learning and Dice are mashing up the job postings on Dice with the courses on Dice Learning, so you can take courses in an area that matches the desired skills set. You can also rate courses that you have taken or make comments. You do have to have a profile with Dice to interact on the site. I think this type of mashup is very innovative and can help people who are trying to upgrade their skills or get into the labor market.

Spied on ERE.net

Add a media literacy course?

According to this article on Inside Higher Ed, plans are underway to create a body of freely available online course material, aimed at the high school or community college level. The clearinghouse would be hosted by the US government.

Media literacy and research courses, anyone?

Good economy for con artists

We get this question: are those make money at home offers good? Should I give them my banking information? Yikes! when we hear the last one.

There are some job boards for telework, like Virtual Vocations, that offer legitimate work--possibly the same rate for scams as a newspaper classifieds--but there are many, many scams. Six companies in Van Nuys (CA) were just charged for consumer fraud (story in LATimes), and yes, the scams they were running included job scams.

If you are running any training in Internet job searching or get asked questions about work at home jobs or even questions about repairing credit, you may want to stay up to date on Operation Short Change.