Job Development in Rural Areas

09/09/2011 – Job Development in Rural Areas

Job development in rural areas

Event Date: September 9, 2011Presenter: Allen Anderson, Employment Management ProfessionalFacilitator: Norciva Shumpert, Marc Gold & Associates, Southeast TACE

Overview

Norciva Shumpert (NS): Hello, everybody.

This is Norciva Shumpert, I'm with Marc Gold & Associates and Southeast TACE.

Today we are doing job development in rural areas.

I'd like first very much to welcome each and every one of you to the 2011 Southeast TACE webinar series.

The Southeast Regional TACE Center's mission is very clearly to improve the quality and effectiveness of vocational rehabilitation services and enhance employment outcomes to individuals with disabilities and you guys know our eight states; we serve Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and South Carolina.

However, I'd like to welcome all of you that might be from another area that is a part of.

What is happening with us today is a lot of sharing around job development.

So I want you all to know that Southeast TACE is really committed to job development.

TACE is a collaborative effort with our DBTAC and Southeast ADA Center, so we are part of the Burton Blatt Institute of Syracuse, NewYork.

So we've got lots of partners that bring us together so that we feel like we're offering you a collaborative effort of information.

We are hosting a lot of webinars this year.

I guess you guys heard the latest one on Social Security issues.

You are getting one for transition, I know we've got the series that we're working with coming up soon on working with people with correctional backgrounds.

So there's an awful lot.

So I would encourage you to go to the website and to check out all the instructions and materials to each of the webinars.

I know now by just looking at the number of participants we've got, many of you have figured out how to go about archiving or going to the archives so I would encourage you if you do have an interruption in today, go back to the archives so that you can get the rest of the information.

Just a quick note about our webinar system.

Celestia is our wonderful support person and is there to help us, but unfortunately, those are the things that we needed to have done prior to the call.

So in the future if you're having some communication problems right now, it won't really we won't really be able to stop the webinar and help you unless it's disrupting the entire line.

So I would encourage you that in the future you go ahead and get on the day before, get your computer connected so that you make sure you have the internet connection, the web browser and that you've downloaded the Elluminate software that you're going to need to have in order to make the session work.

So those kinds of things, I'm hoping that you guys are with us today and that you're ready to hear more about job development.

We are going to be looking at your chat questions, would like for you to kind of keep those questions focused on the topic.

And I will be collecting those while Allen is presenting these and then throughout the period of time if there is an opportunity, we'll break and answer some questions for you.

If not during the session, we'll definitely do it at the end of the session.

So please be thinking of things as you're listening to our presenter today.

Today I'm really excited, I actually taught with Allen for the first time back in March of this year, Allen Anderson is the president of Dover Training Group, employment management professionals in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Allen is an international speaker and an employment program designer.

He specializes in creating solutions for generating employment outcomes for people with employer barriers.

And one of the things, guys, that we really hope to have throughout our job development exchange is folks like Allen presenting to us and then listening to different perspectives about job development.

Allen uses a strategic approach to employment outcomes that focuses on the employer relationship and the howtos of building and maximizing this connection.

He has a reputation for innovative practice models and techniques to manage virtually any level of employment barriers and entry into the workforce.

Allen has been a job developer.

So let me just stop right now -- of our 80 or so participants on board here, how many of you actually do job development?

Can you raise your hand?

While I continue introducing him please raise your hand if you're a job developer so that we get a sense of how many of you are job developers on this call.

All of us have a role in job development, you've heard me say this in the past; Mike Callahan, Ellen, Abbey, all of us that are looking at folks so that you understand that all of us have a role in job development.

You may be lending your connections, you may be lending and supporting a job seeker go through the process of job development, but many of us have to address and include job development as part of our job or else it never happens.

So I'm really excited to see at least a third of you are really saying this is your job, that a piece of this is what you've got.

So note that Allen is a job developer, in his past and he’s director of job placement now of his company and of training companies. He's developed numerous training programs for job development professionals and the programs are typically in marketing and selling skills for job development.

He's got lots of articles.

I want you to go to our website, we do have several of those that he's given us the opportunity to post on your behalf to visit with.

We'll be putting these on the job development exchange as I begin to collect all of the various different webinars and presenters and the handouts that we've got, we'll be collecting that so that you guys can go to a onestop on our website to find job development information rather than look at each webinar.

Thank you very much for raising your hand now. I think Celestia, we can take those off.

And at this point I'd like to really welcome Allen to our presentation.

He has worked a lot with VR agencies.

He has been all across the United States.

In the south he's listed South Carolina and Georgia as as several of the places.

He’s worked in some of the places that I've certainly been around into also, and that's in Colorado, Oregon, and Michigan, along with some of our southern states.

Allen is going to take us through a set of information and so take your notes and if you would go ahead and put your information in the chat area as you're thinking it and I will try to collect those throughout this training session.

We are set to go for about an hour and a half of presentation, maybe some questions in there, but we'll definitely have time at the end to each of you to open the floor up for further questions.

Again, I'm Norciva Shumpert with the Southeast TACE and we welcome all of you as part of our job development exchange.

Allen?

Let me turn it over to you now.

Slide 1 – Title Slide

Allen Anderson (AA): Norciva, can you okay, so Norciva, can you hear me?

I just I want to do an audio check here.

NS: I can hear you clearly.

AA: You can hear me fine, right? Okay, great.

Well, Norciva, thank you, and thank you to TACE for the -- setting up this webinar.

It's something that I think is going to provide some good information to the folks who are signing in or have already signed in on job development in the rural areas.

So why don't I just start and we're going to go to slide number two, the challenge.

Slide 2 – Challenge

Let me just move it myself here, the challenge, slide number two.

What I wanted to do here at the beginning was to kind of outline some of the basic issues that job developers face in rural job development, so let me just walk through the five issues I've identified on this slide.

The first one is the fact that there is limited jobs in the rural communities.

Now, that shouldn't be a bit of a surprise to anyone, but what it means for us is that the marketplace, even if we are able to get into it, is a much more highly competitive marketplace.

Fewer jobs, often more people wanting to get some of those jobs and employers having because of the fewer jobs, employers having not more choice in who they hire, but probably being a little bit more selective in who they hire.

So a more highly competitive marketplace is one of the first challenges that we face in rural job development.

One of the second challenges we face is that employers generally have people in mind because the rural communities are smaller and everybody kind of knows each other, and jobs are valuable in those rural communities, so employers know the kind of people who are available, they have people in mind, which means if you approach that marketplace and you're not one of those people the employer has in mind, they don't kind of give you serious consideration.

So it's a bit of a closed market.

More closed than we would see in the urban setting.

The other thing that's significant with the employers having people in mind is that the employer or the job itself can become what we call a commodity.

Which means employers kind of see them as more than just jobs, they see them as things that they can trade for with other people for favors for the future.

So if I hire somebody there's often the chance that that hiring will deliver something to me from that person or that other person's connections, something for me in the future.

The rural community, third point, is often closed to outsiders, meaning that it's not so easy to approach; it's not so easy to get in.

Mainly because not that people don't like outsiders in rural communities, but because in the rural community they kind of feel that they're going to fill their employment hiring needs with people they already know and to turn to somebody who is from outside that community is going to cause probably more issues than it's going to solve, at least initially in the minds of the employer.

So the marketplace appears to be a bit more closed and job developers from the outside often feel a bit rejected by that particular marketplace.

It doesn't mean that's what's going to happen, but that's how people feel.

We've often had that with job developers who have been assigned from an urban setting, their head office is in an urban setting and they've been assigned to rural community, and when they go to that community, they find they just can't break in.

Another major challenge with the rural community is that the job market can potentially disappear forever, which is my fourth point.

What that means is that the job market -- if you do a bad job or the job market begins to disapprove of your candidates or your services, the whole market can close on you.

And you just can't get in.

I've had a couple of small communities where I worked in Oregon where the approach to the marketplace has caused the marketplace to become the job the employers to be become very skiddish about the organization and the candidates they represent to the point that the whole community kind of just says no, no thank you, I think that's not something that we want to have anything to do with.

So it's potentially a disaster for us if the market closes like that and it takes a fair amount of work to try and bring it back.

We have methodologies for bringing back markets that are closed but we would probably rather than them not close at all and more open up at the beginning than have them– haven them try to bring them back because we've used a negative approach to get in.

Rural communities, the fifth point, are also dealing with the poor economy probably a little more heavily than other people are.

They don't have as big a market and employers become more circumspect on their hiring decisions. They may demand more, they may be more uncertain about a hiring decision.

They may want to reduce the risk significantly.

That's only because the rural community can be hurt a lot more by a poor economy.

Now, poor economies will hurt everybody, but an urban market-- there's often places to expand to that don't exist in the rural community.

That becomes a challenge for that rural community as they try to get through that poor economy and that hiring decision becomes a more important hiring decision, or a more important business decision than often it would have been in the urban community.

So fundamentally a job market where the jobs are primarily hidden, fundamentally a job market where there's going to be some initial employer resistance, some suspicion about people from outside the community and a place where the employer may be a little bit more in trouble and therefore may not be as open to the whole hiring decision at all.

So with that in mind, we have to kind of redesign our solutions, the kinds of strategies we’re going to use for the rural markets.

Slide 3 - Solutions

So let me take it to the next slide, slide number three, which presents just a quick overview of the solutions that I'm going to suggest and walk you through over the next hour and a half.

All right, so slide number three, solutions.

The first strategy solution is that we have found that to work in the rural market because it is so much more competitive and because it is so much more hidden you really do have to understand how to do job development in its -- almost its purest form and to be more effective at it.

It is not a kind of let's wing it, let's just go in and try type of marketplace, you really have to know what you're doing. And we're going to or I'm going to give you some of those strategies in a few minutes.