Women stay in school longer, get married sooner

Statistics Canada has released a research paper based on responses from the Youth in Transition Survey (conducted every 2 years) that looks at the differences between the genders as they enter adulthood.

The following passages in italics are from the Daily announcing the release:

However, a higher proportion of men left school and started working on a full-time basis earlier than women. In contrast, a higher proportion of women left the parental home, formed a relationship and had children earlier than men. Throughout the eight years, a higher proportion of men worked full time and still lived with their parents.
-and-

Participation in all types of postsecondary education was higher for women than men. Even though participation rates for both sexes increased over the years, the gap between men and women persisted.

By the time they were aged 26 to 28 in 2008, participation rates were 8 percentage points higher for women than men in university, and 7 points higher in college.

There was also a statement about how men get into the labor market earlier, and another article I read about the research paper stated it was because men choose "marketable" programs (like business and engineering) whereas women choose social sciences and fine arts.

Research Paper:

• Education and Labour Market Transitions in Young Adulthood

Data Sources:

• Youth In Transition Survey

Carnage is not a great word to describe the economy

Expect cuts to public services.

50 useful Firefox extensions for job seekers

JobProfiles has provided a list of 50 useful Firefox extensions for job seekers. Not all of them are specifically for job seeking, like BugMeNot, but some of these tools could be pretty handy for speeding up searching and purposeful surfing.

Spotted on CareerHub Blog

Professional membership numbers down, due to recession

The ALA has reported that memberships in the professional association are down due to the recession. Membership (both new and renewing) is down 2.8% for the ALA as a whole, but the article reports much larger drops for PLA and RUSA.

Now, I am quite pro for professional memberships--if the dues are reasonable. Sometimes they are not--and you find out that the association is operating in the red and has been for several years. I also don't tend to join professional associations that have a discriminating salary scale. I think a due is a due and you should spread it out evenly amongst the membership since we are all, supposedly, getting the same benefits.

The drop shouldn't be a surprise: I think that if individuals are paying for their own memberships (as students obviously are) that they tend to renew them--and be pretty picky about where their money is being spent. If your employer was paying your membership fees and they have cut back their budgets, professional development gets cut, or people share the benefits of their professional membership as best they can, like sharing copies of magazines or forwarding emails from a listserv that is normally closed to members. (I also haven't gotten my American Libraries in a while: what gives?)

Can you claim your professional dues on your income tax? I can, so I tend to remember to renew since I put my tax stuff together at about the same time I renew with the ALA--think about that, professional associations that only let me renew December 1st, or some equally stupid month, where I also have to pay school fees or buy presents. Giving some more flexibility in payment times might encourage membership.

So, I am not surprised that membership numbers are down, but there may be other ways to counteract the small loss, like giving people who were members in good standing for more than 5 or 10 years, a free year, cuz you love and value them, and extending the period that you can be called a new librarian--since, according to the article, students are still signing up.

When will the job market recover?

JobBait has provided an analysis, historical and two forecasts, about when the job recovery will occur.

If you are interested in their data and how they reached the conclusions in their analysis, they will be holding a webinar on July 21, 2009, about the analysis. If you work with patrons who are wondering about the job market, or are interested in labor market analysis yourself, you may want to sign up for the webinar.

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.

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Applicant Explorer

Thanks to Jobacle, I found out about a partnership between Bing, Microsoft's new search tool, and CareerBuilder, an online resume and job posting service, to offer Applicant Explorer.

Applicant Explorer will allow a resume database subscriber, an employer, to look at an applicant's digital footprint while examining their resume. It is meant as a tool to help decide if the applicant will fit into the corporate culture. According to the video that describes the service, Applicant Explorer will call up information from publicly available sites, including social networking, blogs, forums and other services that will give a "clear picture" of a candidate.



Alright, there are some problems with this, though a few can be overcome with a clear policy on how to run background checks. First, you can't run a background check on your favorite applicants--and just those applicants. Your background check may end up showing information that could be protected--like sexual orientation, race or a disability. The last two may be clearly visible in a profile picture, so if a candidate thinks that you have decided not to hire him or her based on the picture that you found. You have to check everybody--just like you would if you were conducting a real background check that had a policy behind it.

And just how do you know whose digital tracks you are following? Are we assuming, 1) that I gave up all my handles with my resume for the privilege of posting on CareerBuilder? (Ummm, go find Bozeman, MT and read what happened there.) And 2) if I don't give up my handles, and you just use my name, are you sure that is the real me you're reading about online?

Sometimes, I really wonder if people think this stuff through. What does sailing tell you about my "fit", if being nauti is not a bona fide job requirement?

Cross-posted on co-agitating.

Try not to think about work on the weekends

Andrew G.R. who writes for Jobacle has a post on US News and World Report about how our weekends are not for work.

Now the tendency when you are fresh in your job is to always identify yourself with your job title--sort of as if it had become your new last name. We like to show that we have realized our educational dream--heck, that we have a job is awesome. We are also proud of our work--usually--and rightly so. Librarians do lots of cool stuff and I won't write the epic of our awesomeness, especially when preaching to the choir. But Andrew is right about one thing:

Take some time off from your job.

Some of us are breaking our student habits where weekends meant work. We did our paid labor on weekends, and we weren't used to time off. We were used to finding a minute to not work at our two (or more) jobs, as students and workers. Very few students have days off and you hear them guiltily confessing, I took the night off. Good news, you aren't a student anymore. Unless you were smart enough to start scheduling your breaks, it takes time to break the habit of always running to the next assignment or to arrive on time for a shift at [paid] work.

A "weekend" is a luxury for many of us--we don't get two days off in a row. New librarians are usually given the weekend shift and know that they have arrived when they get their first Saturday off without begging for it. But we can find a period of time, longer than one day, to forget about our work, not develop ourselves and just watch TV, go to the gym or dancing, and not use our profession as our last name. This can give us some perspective and a mental break.

Heck, I'm blogging about libraries and work: I'm a work junkie. But I take days off from it when I can't find anything to write about, or when I need a rest period.

But being a librarian does creep into my leisure activities. I read a controversial book, which I picked up because of the buzz, not a true attraction to the book, and think, hmmm, someone will challenge this book for exactly this passage. I might even take notes, as opposed to just enjoying the book. It's homework, not pleasure. I think the author might agree that they wrote it to inform and please, not for me to feel it was my duty to read their book. (Unless it was William Bennett.) This means excluding books that include in their prefaces or dedications, the phrase for your edification.

Or I take my work home with me over the weekend to catch up--although I know my weekend is already packed with family stuff, or leisure activities. I bring the stuff along to read or write about while I'm waiting for my friends to show up at Starbucks--or feel guilty that I didn't read it on the train there and back. Carrying it with me doesn't mean I dealt with it, it just means that I packed it along.

How much work are you packing and not dealing with?

You should think about what it means that you can't get your work done during work hours: a) you need more time to get your work done, so you need to talk with your supervisor, b) you need to cut back on all of the extra projects that you have taken on in addition to your work, or c) get off Twitter, Mr. Mayer.

So, take a break. You need one.

Looking for a job, into a job

ERE.net includes a post today about Daniel Seddiqui's project to work 50 jobs in 50 states, 50 job in 50 states in 50 weeks is his tagline on his Living the Map website. (You can see video and read more about the project in the ERE post.)

Now, of course, nothing would stop a librarian from taking a tour of library opportunities, or other jobs, to gather information and maybe spin it into a job. But it also means that at libraries, we will have an influx of career guides and manuals where people either do an immersive journalism piece, like Scratch Beginnings, or Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, or more reflective, personal writing, like Diary of a Job Search, which was on the WSJ site before it was made into a book.

Lone bloggers, some funny, some mundane, may get picked up by major papers or websites, though it is more likely that a media outlet will get a recommendation for a writer with a track record as a regular blogger, and spin their blog into a feature. The trick is to post with only a mild amount of bitter--which might get harder and harder, the longer you look.

The Huffington Post currently has a call for people in the New York area who are on UI but are looking for work. It might not lead to a gig, but might let you get on a national soap box.

More Yahoo! Pipes

I've made some more Yahoo! Pipes which include instructions on how to modify them to meet your needs. Enjoy!

And if you make more, please comment and add the address to your clones or revamps.