Meeting notes: December 21, 2011

Jobs that we want to target

JC reviewed the list of the jobs in demand, starting with the Maine Dept of Labor Jobs in Demand list

There were over 200 professions on the list. This needed to be further refined to specify ten jobs that, based upon current vacancies and economic predictors, will likely be the highest growth jobs in Maine over the next several decades – or, rather, the jobs that will be most in demand. In order to do that, Jay used a multiplier based upon the growth rate for that job, the number of annual openings for that job, and median wage.

There was a further stratification for jobs based upon the individual’s level of education –

high school degree or less
associate or certificate degree (less than 4 year college)
college degree
eyond a college degree

The latter two categories can also capture those who are making a career change. Later in the meeting MD suggested we add a 5^th category for entrepreneurs. JC confirmed that the fed description includes a category for enterprisers.

ONET – Current MDF project is focused on non-traditional student

Crafting a Document/Website

Official federal job description – includes a component for “categories of jobs.” These included a number of different questions. We discussed picking about 6 or 7 questions to ask each student – and keep them consistent for each of the jobs we identified.

JB – Within the website, there should be one tab that explains the genesis of the project, the how the project was assembled and the logic behind each of the decisions (i.e. why we chose these 10 jobs, why we chose these 6 questions, etc.).

JC – There is a benefit to showing students what the jobs are that dovetail with their interests. But beyond that, we should also show them the types of opportunities that are out there (i.e. showing students a video of a similar aged student doing a project of a technical nature).

Questions for the Video

What do we want the sparkers in a particular job to articulate? (ranked in order of importance by the group). We started out with as many as 9 questions for them to respond to:

What do you do?
What do you find fun or interesting about your job?
What advice would you give to someone interested in this type of work?
What is the salary and availability for this job?
What inspired/motivated you to select this career?
What work did you do in school that is relevant to your work now?
What’s the most challenging part of your job?
Why do you do this in Maine?
If you were hiring someone for this job, what characteristics would you look for?

We then did a mock interview to find out how long the responses to these questions would take and which questions elicited the best responses. We were able to further refine these questions to ensure that they provided the best explanation about the “Spark” for that particular job and whittled the number down to 3.

What do you do?
What do you find fun or interesting about your job?
Why do you do this in Maine?

We will direct Leadership Maine alums to put together their own video based upon these questions, up load it to YouTube and then the video will be added to the Spark cite.

Discussion about editing the clips

DK (by proxy – JC) indicated that having a smaller number of questions (he proposed just 1) would result in a clip that requires less editing and will result in a response that is more consistent across all jobs discussed. JC also raised concerns that editing these individually will take a lot of time. It will be easier to have them uploaded directly without editing. That behooves us to have questions that will elicit a full and effective response. It was generally agreed, given time constraints, that we avoid editing the clips.

Categories of Jobs (listed in order of predicted future demand)

Top 5 jobs in each education level with proposed interviewees from ST’s spreadsheet and our discussion: http://bit.ly/t6imbQ

HS Diploma or less

Sales reps for wholesale and manufacturing
Sales reps for other services
Lodging Managers
Police and Sheriffs
Bookkeeping, Accounting, Auditing
Dental Assistants

Discussion

MD – Some existing challenges with particular professions:

Networking/Computer Systems – Tech training is substandard. CEOs have actually gotten together to set their own set of training standards.

Nurses – Problem educating a sufficient number of nurses for the state is that there is a gap in getting them trained for the bachelor’s level because there are not enough nursing faculty to teach at the bachelor’s level. These teachers need a master’s or doctoral level education and most nurses are likely going to make less as a teacher (even after the cost of their additional education) than if they stayed working as an RN.

Assigning Sparkers

Dan will interview the Chief of Maine State Police
Bridget will interview a mental health professional
Maggie will interview Will Thomas and a representative from Kepware
Don will interview Eric Steele, M.D. (assist from Jason)
Newell will interview a Sales Rep from Coke or Pepsi
Julie will interview VP at Hancock Lumber

Parking Lot Ideas (to be discussed at the next meeting)

Testing Audience Response
Discussing Roll Out. Educate Maine (the new entity that is the combination of two education policy groups) are rolling out a program on parent involvement
Description of who we are, what is Spark, and whether this goes on the web
Next Meeting

Brief discussion about getting together at lunchtime at our January 6^th LM meeting

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