Thursday, June 30, 2011

Equation


I dedicate my spiel to all immigrants, who care about their careers in America.

Just days away from July 4th, I want to write something patriotic... I don't want to question myself about my patriotism, I just want to write about
something really AMERICAN.

Equation is a mathematical statement that asserts the equality of two expressions. Today my talk about highly controversial and complicated
equation - employment one, where one expression is employers, another one is employees. One is hiring, another one wants to be hired.

Couple weeks ago I noticed a very challenging article on CNBC.
It's about new hiring effect. According to Eric Spiegel, chief executive in the US for Siemens, the German engineering group, "the problem exposed weaknesses in education and training in the US. Siemens had been forced to use more than 30 recruiters and hire staff from other companies to find the workers it needed for its expansion plans, even amid an unemployment rate of 9.1 percent." Finally, someone began to talk about education and training. O, yes, immigrants workers need to be trained and educated more than anyone else.
But who will provide training opportunities for us?..

Being an IT professional, I feel a pain of many workers who can not find a real job without additional training and education. IT workers must train and retrain themselves constantly. It feels like an endless, sometimes chaotic process: more you know, more you have to learn. Most of recruiters and hiring managers DO NOT care who will train and educate workers. From my personal experience, IT folks train themselves using many different sources such as free software, tutorials, videos, forums, books, local user groups. And I think, it's not enough nowadays. I was contracted with Siemens for 1 year and was surprised how they used to choose full-time employees and contractors. Moreover, I did not notice training classes for full-time employees either. Most of work was done by well-qualified contractors. As I was told, hiring contractors saves a lot of money for company. Therefore company tries to save money on training and education. I'm not surprised, Siemens used 30 recruiters to find a right people from OTHER companies for certain positions. Siemens is not only one company which choose cost over the training and education.
How to find a right company which used to invest into training and education?

It's quite difficult question for most workers especially for immigrants. We're looking for companies, where we can be trained, educated and accepted as an immigrants.
I'm not a first or last person, who writes about difficulties of integration into American life. I'm sure, that most of us are doing the best job as possible, but we still immigrants. What I know for sure, we need more attention than regular American workers, and we deserve it.
Is America still land of opportunity?

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