Highest-Paying Occupations

Career One Stop is a great website of information about careers and occupations. There is so much information in there, and more being added all the time; I come across something new every time I look. Today, I found this page: Highest-Paying Occupations by Median Wages.

Learn More, Earn More

CTE teachers make a point of educating students about the advantages of continuing into postsecondary education, and almost three quarters of CTE completers take that important step. The chart below gives concrete evidence of just how important that step is.

Governor's Higher Education Legislation

Governor McDonnell announced his "Top Jobs of the 21st Century" Higher Education Legislation this week. This legislation is intended to increase access to higher education for Virginia students and enable our institutions to meet the goal of issuing an additional 100,000 degrees over the next 15 years. It aims particularly to increase "degree attainment in high-demand, high-income fields (e.g., STEM, healthcare) that are keys to top jobs in 21st Century economy."

Virginia can only meet this goal of increasing the number of college degrees in STEM and health care if we have strong STEM and health care related programs in secondary, middle, and primary school. We need to ensure that our students are graduating from high school with the background they need to enter these programs in college and succeed in the way that Governor McDonnell envisions. CTE can play a valuable role by insuring that our programs attract students, hold their interest in pursuing STEM and health care careers, and provide a rigorous grounding in these subjects.

Employment Data for Virginia’s Metro Areas

It is valuable for CTE professionals to keep up with occupational trends in their instructional area. Students and parents need to know what employment opportunities are like in each career area, so they can make good choices about their CTE courses, about further education, and about where in Virginia to search for new jobs.

Workplace Readiness Skills at the Virginia Workforce Council

On Friday, January 7th, Meredith Gunter and I had the pleasure of giving a presentation on workplace readiness skills to the Virginia Workforce Council. The Council is a business-led board that acts as the principal advisor to the Governor.

Manpower's "Global Employment Outlook"

Economists report that the employment situation in the United States is slowly beginning to improve.  Private sector employment increased in December, and unemployment rates are beginning to come down in a number of states and metropolitan areas, including Virginia. The unemployment rate in Virginia has fallen from a peak of 7.6% in January 2010 to 6.6% in November 2010. (Some of the decline in unemployment is still coming from people leaving the labor market, but some seems genuinely to be coming from improving employment conditions.) Much of the rest of the world seems also to be gradually emerging from this international recession. It is interesting to compare the employment situation here with that elsewhere.

Manufacturing Employment is Falling. So, Is U.S. Manufacturing A Failure?

When we read about outsourcing and falling employment, it sounds like American manufacturing about to disappear as all of our production is outsourced to other countries. But there's a lot of economic evidence that this isn't so.