Daughter just got laid off

My daughter got the bad news this morning. Not totally out of the blue, but still bad. Seems the crappy economy has hit the printing business big time. She had already started a backup plan to go back to nursing school, something mom and pop had already advised her to do. Problem is, she has just started school.

If anybody knows of a job for a Graphic Communications major/business minor in the Richmond, Va area, let me know.

She should look at web design. Being good with Photoshop and Illustrator may be enough to get in the door. As web work gets more specialized, she may never even need to know any HTML or CSS, let alone any programming stuff.

Tim Baxter wrote: She should look at web design. Being good with Photoshop and Illustrator may be enough to get in the door. As web work gets more specialized, she may never even need to know any HTML or CSS, let alone any programming stuff.

Believe it or not I had actually thought about that. I will pass it on. Thanks.

Baxter is right on the money with this one.

My housemate at school has a great job doing web design for an insurance company in upstate NY. They often rope him into doing many graphic design / promotional items. He said a month of training in PHP would have been all he would need to do the job, no other programming knowledge required. If your daughter had additional graphic communication skills, that would be all the better.

Pay is good, my housemate gets paid irresponsible amounts of money for a 21 year old punk with an associates...

If she can handle it, nursing is a VERY stable area for employment. I suspect she could probably do better pay wise. Heck, around here they were recently giving signing bonuses.

Sounds like nursing would be a great pursuit at this point in time. This article was in our paper this morning.

Nursing industry desperate to find new hires By DINESH RAMDE AP Business Writer

Please, please accept a high-paying job with us. In fact, just swing by for an interview and we'll give you a chance to win cash and prizes.

Sounds too good to be true, especially in an economy riddled with job cuts in nearly every industry. But applicants for nursing jobs are still so scarce that recruiters have been forced to get increasingly inventive.

One Michigan company literally rolled out a red carpet at a recent hiring event. Residential Home Health, which provides in-home nursing for seniors on Medicare, lavished registered nurses and other health care workers with free champagne and a trivia contest hosted by game-show veteran Chuck Woolery. Prizes included a one-year lease for a 2009 SUV, hotel stays and dinners.

"We're committed to finding ways to creatively engage with passive job seekers," said David Curtis, president of the Madison Heights-based company.

Recruiters like Curtis may have little choice. The long-standing U.S. nurse shortage has led to chronic understaffing that can threaten patient care and nurses' job satisfaction, and the problem is expected to worsen.

The shortage has been operating since World War II on an eight- to 10-year cycle, industry experts say. Each time the number of nurses reaches a critical low, the government adds funding and hospitals upgrade working conditions. But as the deficit eases, those retention efforts fade and eventually the old conditions return, often driving nurses into other professions.

"We recently had a hiring event where, for experienced nurses to interview — just to interview — we gave them $50 gas cards," said Tom Zinda, the director of recruitment at Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare in the Milwaukee-area city of Glendale. "We really try to get as creative as we can. It's a tough position to fill."

Recruiters across the country have tried similar techniques, offering chair massages, lavish catering and contests for flat-screen TVs, GPS devices and shopping sprees worth as much as $1,000.

Even strong salaries aren't doing the trick. Registered nurses made an average of $62,480 in 2007, ranging from a mean of $78,550 in California to $49,140 in Iowa, according to government statistics. Including overtime, usually abundantly available, the most experienced nurses can earn more than $100,000.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts about 233,000 additional jobs will open for registered nurses each year through 2016, on top of about 2.5 million existing positions. But only about 200,000 candidates passed the Registered Nurse licensing exam last year, and thousands of nurses leave the profession each year.

Several factors are in play: a lack of qualified instructors to staff training programs, lack of funding for training programs, difficult working conditions and the need for expertise in many key nursing positions.

Cheryl Peterson, the director of nursing practice and policy for the American Nurses Association in Silver Spring, Md., said employers must raise salaries and improve working conditions.

"The wages haven't kept up with the level of responsibility and accountability nurses have," said Peterson, whose organization represents nurses' interests. Chronic understaffing means nurses are overworked, she said, and as burned-out nurses leave the situation spirals for the colleagues they leave behind.

Some hospital departments where experience is vital, such as the emergency room or intensive-care unit, simply cannot hire newly minted nurses. So managers in those areas have even fewer staffing choices.

Nurses qualified to teach aspiring nurses are scarce chiefly because they can make at least 20 percent more working at a hospital, experts said.

"It can be hard to turn down that extra money," said Robert Rosseter, the associate executive director of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing in Washington, D.C.

Many recruiters have looked for employees overseas, and about one-fourth of the nurses who earned their licenses in 2007 were educated internationally, most in the Philippines and India.

Some health organizations go out of their way to recruit as many nurses as possible even when they're overstaffed.

Residential Home Health, the home-nursing company in Michigan, is always looking to hire, Curtis said. Even with 375 clinical professionals on staff, his recruiters are eager to sign up as many as 50 more nurses and therapists, hence the Chuck Woolery event.

Zinda, the Milwaukee-area recruiter, said creative recruiting helps to introduce nurses to his hospital. Besides offering interviewees $50 gas cards, he has provided $100 gift cards to the local mall, and created a Facebook page to target younger nurses.

Attracting good candidates is about offering good working conditions, he said, but creative recruiting goes a long way in generating a buzz.

"Bottom line, you need to get people excited about what you're offering," he said. "If you don't, they can easily go elsewhere."

Sorry to hear that...my print budget went to ZERO in 2008. We are maintaining only digital literature, marketing and advertising. We are however looking at a whole new website, so I agree that would be a good direction.

Tim Baxter wrote: She should look at web design. Being good with Photoshop and Illustrator may be enough to get in the door. As web work gets more specialized, she may never even need to know any HTML or CSS, let alone any programming stuff.

Strange. I have been working on a Multimedia Certificate at the local community college. (I also have quite a few auto body and auto repair courses complete there, but that is another story.) I am primarily doing this because I am a Litigation Paralegal and I do a lot of trial presentation work involving slides and digital video. I just wanted to get up to speed on stuff I was already doing. I took Photoshop but don't really use it at work. I also learned quite a bit of html that I never use at work, but use to update my dog rescue web site. I love editing video with Adobe Premiere but do it mostly for fun. My dogs playing, etc. Do you mean to say that if I am ever forced to change careers someday, this stuff might be worthwhile?

Could be. Sounds like you'd be a good candidate for learning Flash, too. Even if you never use it online, it can be used to make some really kick-ass presentations.

My wife completed her AD in nursing in May 2008 and passed the test to get her RN shortly thereafter. She went to a local community college (formerly a technical college) and the program was grueling, but it prepared her well for the NCLEX. Her job is demanding, but there appears to be no shortage of jobs in the medical field.

Another plus is that she started out making almost as much as I do (with a BS in mechanical engineering and almost 6 years of experience).

I would say keep her on the nursing path, if she becomes a nurse she can basically get a job anywhere for the rest of her life. The problem with going into web design work is well everyone is doing it, there are millions of kids in school getting their certificates and degrees in this and there is/will be a glut of these people. Just like the big IT push a few years ago, it was the big paying job and all of a sudden there are a million people doing it and the job salaries go down and its harder to get a job in that field. Heck even my mom is doing web design work and she knows next to nothing about computers or even about real programing she does everything in a graphic interface.

Tim Baxter wrote: Could be. Sounds like you'd be a good candidate for learning Flash, too. Even if you never use it online, it can be used to make some really kick-ass presentations.

I did a little Flash in my Multimedia Intro Course, but not enough to figure it out. The best thing about being a Student is being able to buy the entire Adobe Suite for the $600 Student Price instead of the multi-thousand dollar price they usually charge. One of the legal video programs I use, Trial Director, allows you to drop Flash files into the video presentation you present to the court. The hard thing is talking the Law Firm you work for into springing for both Flash, Trial Director and a computer with enough horsepower to run the programs.

An acquaintance of mine does what you do for a law firm here in Kansas City. Sounds like interesting work.

Web development is a great field to get into. I do stuff right now that would pull in five figures every couple of months if I were to team up with a graphic artist and start a small web dev company instead of being the IT S&M slave in a crappy government job. But that's the one thing I like about this job: The gratification of going beyond the call of duty and getting the important stuff done combined with the freedom to slack off and be an shiny happy person

I pushed web design to being a side job so I could have a decent paying government job. ;) Too many people with a hacked copy of Frontpage w/themes making cheap webpages in their basement, offset by a few top pros making high end corporate websites, making it hard for those of us in the middle. Few people seem to want to pay for the design portion at the middle to lower end, thinking that they can either get a kid to do it cheap or do it themselves, and at the higher end, they want degrees with multi years of experience doing all the techy parts of webdesign that have nothing really to do with "design" and graphics.

So I make do with doing logo design/business card layout, and the graphics for webpages as a side business.

I'd say nursing would be a better career path.

The thing is, web design is splintering rapidly. The days of the "Webmaster"--one guy who could do it all--are over. Excepting myself, of course

These days, there's just too much to know. You need someone who understands servers, someone who can program, someone who understands information architecture and usability, someone who can wrangle content, someone who can handle the visual elements and someone who can handle the front-end markup. That's bare minimum. Most likely you need a database guy and and a few other warm bodies, too. Finding anyone who can do all that is nearly impossible, so more and more places are splitting it up. Which means people with little web experience but good graphic design skills have an opening. Problem is they'll be competing with a whole bunch of print people trying to move over.

Nursing will be a rock-solid profession for at least the next 30 years.

Tim Baxter wrote: An acquaintance of mine does what you do for a law firm here in Kansas City. Sounds like interesting work.

I actually have a Paralegal Certificate and an MBA with a specialty in Law Firm Management so I am a bit underemployed right now. In this economy you have to take what you can find. Having graduate level accounting classes helps with interpreting and presenting financial information.

I am also a community college class junkie. I would rather take classes than sit at home and watch TV. I had to print out a combined transcript of all my College work recently and it ranges from Accounting and Financial Analysis to Welding and Auto Body to Advanced HTML and Digital Video. It's a college counselor's nightmare, but since I have as many degrees as they do, they let me take anything I want.

I still don't know what I am going to be when I grow up.

Getting into the health INSURANCE industry would be a good thing, too....

But probably wouldn't make any use of her education. My company is hiring like MAD and they aren't afraid to hand out raises to keep us here, either. The upwards mobility is almost insane as well.

Tim Baxter wrote: The thing is, web design is splintering rapidly. The days of the "Webmaster"--one guy who could do it all--are over. Excepting myself, of course

I think another problem with this (and one that my own company has experienced) is the "eggs in one basket" issue. Lose (or have to let go) that one person, and you can be screwed... by spreading responsibilities among multiple people, it reduces the reliance on a single person.

A year after letting our web guy go (much to many's dismay....) our internal corporate intranet is still berkeleyed up...