News Release from The National Career Development Association
September 09, 2011

Last night, President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress to speak about job creation -- one of the most crucial elements to spurring the economy and getting America’s workforce back on track. With the nation’s unemployment rate consistently hovering above nine percent, it has become more important than ever for American citizens to utilize career counseling services that assist job-seekers to make conscious career choices, identify opportunities for learning value-added workforce skills, and find a career that will lead to job satisfaction and productivity.

The National Career Development Association recently commissioned a national survey, performed in conjunction with Harris Interactive, which assessed the perceptions of today’s workforce on the effectiveness of career specialists.

The feedback from the survey is very clear: career practitioners are a vital resource for the livelihood of our nation’s workforce and are underutilized relative to their potential need.

In the 2011 Poll, only one quarter (24%) of adults report that they have already visited a career practitioner and 86% of those found them to be helpful. Only 37% of respondents reported making a conscious choice when choosing a career while over half (56%) took the only job available, looked interesting at the time, or chose based on the influence of parents/relatives or friends.

Click here to learn more about NCDA’s 2011 National Survey on Working America.

FEDERAL HIRING REFORM!

By Elizabeth Newell enewell@govexec.com
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 

President Obama on Tuesday released a long-anticipated hiring reform memorandum, replacing requirements that federal job applicants respond to essay questions with a résumé based approach more in line with private sector practices.

The human capital officials in the audience erupted in applause when Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry announced the elimination of knowledge, skills and abilities statements. "Now, for the first time in history, you will be able to apply for almost every federal job with a simple résumé and a cover letter," Berry said. "This will save applicants millions of person hours as well as money."

Berry said Monster, the company OPM hired to run the USAJobs website, has prepared the site to accept résumé immediately.

The memo also does away with the rule of three, where managers must choose hires from among the top three applicants, as determined by an earlier scoring and selection process. Instead, agencies must use a category rating approach to keep the best qualified applicants in a pool of potential hires even if officials have selected another candidate for the vacancy in question. "Right now, once you made it through the meat grinder of this process, all these good candidates, who are well qualified -- they're best qualified -- we throw them out and make them start over again," Berry said. "We're going to stop that and now allow departments to immediately draw out of that pool."

Read the rest of the article here...

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Our federal government is hiring tens of thousands of new employees
at a steady pace, with job openings available for every interest area and at virtually every agency.