education-economics

This is a very practical and very inspirational guide to developing and presenting health and safety training programs. The authors have conducted training for a wide variety of audiences and experience both good and bad sessions from both sides of the aisle. They provide both empathy and technical advice for people in similar situations.

Their emphasis is on participatory training: the basic thesis of the book is that Lectures are Boring and they provide a number of suggestions for breaking down the barrier between a trainer and their audience. They also provide exercises to help "Train the Trainers" and generate new approaches to delivering similar material to a wide variety of audiences.

In addition to general theoretical and abstract advice, the book addresses specific topics important to people developing training programs today, such as how to work with Generation X audiences, how to work with jaded audiences and the role of computers and the Internet in the training picture.

It is clear from the tone of the book that the authors love their work and believe in its value to themselves and the audiences they serve. Their focus on practical advice and breaking down traditional barriers facing health and safety trainers makes this a worthwhile investment for anyone facing the task of conducting health and safety training sessions.

This book is so helpful, especially for people who are uncomfortable with public speaking, looking for ways to liven up their training classes, and/or frustrated from the lack of participation or enthusiam from the audience. I have been struggling so hard with our training programs and this book has really given me some great ideas. It tells you how to format the training, get people to actually learn something, and even enjoy the training too (gasp!). I highly recommend this book. I have found it extremely motivational.

This book was actually written by my mom, it was inspired by the 1994 Mexican crisis. Although the title looks like the one of a suppuration book, this one is more like an essay about Mexico, it's economy, and how Mexicans (and foreigners) may find lots of opportunities of self-employment. The book has being presented in some academic forums, there are two places that pop out, the ITAM (Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico), and the Latin Book Fair in Chicago. So if you want to get a view of Mexico, from a different context, or you want to live there, or you want to invest there, or you want to find out more about self-employment, this book is for you.

Empleate Tu Mismo, is the advice the author gives her readers. Life time employment is rapidly disappearing in modern Mexico. Entrepreneurs are needed. The author gives a very well documented overview of the effects that the globalization process is having on Mexico's economy, as well as the current need for professionals and people who have the ability to work on their own and create value. In essence it is a very optimistic book and a valuable handbook at the same time as it supplies the reader both with input to understand Mexico's new reality as well as precise guidelines for becoming a succesful contributor to the creation of national wealth and a high wage earner HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!

This Book cover all of the methodology to create Virtual learning sites for Universities and Schools for the new era of education.

Crammed full of great ideas and strategies for those implementing these approaches.

George Roche, the author of this book, is the president of Hillsdale College, a school that has fought tooth and nail to keep the damaging hands of the federal government out of their institution. Roche wrote this book to expose why a school should try and avoid federal intervention through funding. The reason, quite simply, is the corruption and loss of control that the school will suffer as a result of this intervention.

The amount of information this book throws at the reader is absolutely astounding. By piling on statistic after statistic, Roche shows how corrupt our system of higher education has become. These statistics show how deeply in debt universities have become by greedily sucking up federal money, and then expanding their programs, facilities, and tuition discounts and financial aid programs. When funding is reduced due to a lackluster economy, schools are finding themselves in serious economic trouble. Many have to make massive cutbacks in programs and faculty to stay afloat. Some smaller schools have had to merge to survive. Some have closed their doors. Roche attributes all of these problems to the reliance of universities on federal funding. Roche shows how schools have become so dependent on funding by tracing a history of incremental encroachment by the government into education. Beginning with the Morrill Act through the G.I. Bill and the 1992 Educational Acts, Roche reveals a sinister plan to use federal monies to exert control over education. This control is expressed in such travesties as Affirmative Action, diversity studies, multiculturalism, and other infections that have sapped higher education of it's primary mission: educating America's youth.

Roche also examines how athletics has grown so powerful that it not only sucks up funds that should be going to academics, but that it is also loaded with corruption that undermines the academic potential of its athletes. He also exposes how weak the administration is in dealing with faculty and students. Roche explains that the president of the university is reduced to a fundraiser, and that any attempt by officials to make decisions that may have an effect on academics are often shouted down by faculty or student groups. Most college presidents last about three years before they are forced to move on in the face of opposition from their own schools. This is in contrast to a time when an administrator would stay for an entire career and actually be able to shape the vision of a school.

Roche uses mountains of sources to make his arguments. While this is an effective way of waging his battle, it also serves to make some of the reading extremely boring. I have a tendency to glaze over a bit when confronted with statistics, so some parts of the book were tough to get through. It is worth sticking it out, since the last part of the book is when Roche lambasts all of the politically correct junk that academe has been trying to stuff down our throats for years. Just try and read the list of "research" books that scholars have published over the years without laughing!

A good book, if somewhat dated. Worth reading.

Roche gets on his soapbox and writes a passionate and powerful book blaming too much governmental intervention for most of the problems facing higher education today. Extremely conservative and proud of it, he bashes political correctness, affirmative action, and other fun and controversial topics. While it's hard to swallow all aspects of his EXTREMELY broad theory, he does make a strong case for it that will make you stop and think. It's a fascinating book, a surprisingly easy read!

For many trainers or HR professionals out there, it can be difficult to discover what the organization's true training needs are. This book is designed to tell you exactly how to get the information you need to make the best decisions when determining what coursework to offer your employees. The book lays out, systematically, how determine how well your training department is meeting the needs of the organization and how to improve that.

My only complaints are that he gives you a copy of all the forms he shows in the book, but they are all mashed together in one long pdf format, which makes it harder to work with individual documents. In addition, the writing style can be slightly dry and confusing from time to time.

That said, I would still recommend the book for all training professionals looking to do need analysis.

Employers in all fields are challenged to find, develop, and retain top talent. Their people are their most valuable strategic resource, though many executives don't realize the importance of having highly competent people on their team. Too often employers allow themselves to be satisfied with less that adequate capacity.

As we have warned in our book, "Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People," this decade will see the most severe shortage of skilled workers in history. A major strategic advantage in this highly competitive environment will be the opportunity for training and education. Workers, dedicated to managing their own careers, will be increasingly hungry for training to build their skills so they can stay marketable. Sharp employers will invest huge amounts of resources to enhance the capacity of current employees to avoid the need to spend heavily to recruit qualified people from the outside.

No longer can employers just throw training at employees, like spaghetti, watching to see how much sticks. Now the focus must be on understanding exactly what is needed-to meet the needs of the individual employees as well as the current and future needs of the employer. This book is filled with powerful information that will enable wise employers to accurately assess training needs to those needs can be met in whatever ways are appropriate.

Note: this book is very focused. Do not expect to wander into topics like how to convince the boss to pay for more training or how to use computer-based training to teach skills. The power of this book is the tight focus on assessing training needs and your organization's effectiveness in meeting those needs. Using the methodologies presented in easy-to-understand practical fashion, the reader will be able to avoid the course-of-the-week training mentality. No more stress training just because it's Tuesday. No more customer service training because it's a nice thing to do. Focus now on true needs that, once met well, will influence the organization's bottom line.

Using this book will enable you to evaluate the effectiveness of your training function, assess various tools to determine the prioritized needs of your constituencies, and how to apply the information gathered to design a training program that will make a real difference for the organization. Resources are tight, so the better you are able to assess before you act, the more efficient you will be.

The text is supported by graphics showing forms to use, checklists to follow, and a book design that makes even this thick a book comfortable to use. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM with the forms and a step-by-step approach to this vital information gathering and assessment-before-implementation process.

While this book will be most useful for corporate training and human resource professionals, it will also be helpful for senior executives striving to understand the power of effective training. Owners of mid-sized and many smaller companies that don't have training directors will find this book to be a tool they can use to build and maintain a strong work team. Work methodically with this tool; take your time in reading and application. There's a lot here.

Roger Herman, Certified Management Consultant specializing in
workforce issues.

My husband and I own a small business and I am always trying to find out how the big,successful guys do it. This book has given us inspiration and practical ideas how to improve our approach to improving our bottom line. The chapter entitled "Don't Be Afraid to Be an Agent of Change" would be helpful to families and even to politicians. People who run failing school systems could definitely learn something from reading this book; maybe they would not be so afraid of school vouchers!

Erika Brown profiles 16 computer and Internet industry leaders in this informative and entertaining book. A senior reporter for Forbes, Brown brings a journalist's insight to each profile and seeks to extract the ideas and strategies that made each of these over-achievers successful. She packs plenty of information into chunks that seem a bit short for a book, but are at least longer than today's standard magazine profiles. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of her profiles is the way many of them reveal the dynamics between two powerful leaders at companies like Microsoft and Intel. We [...] recommend this book as a brief introduction to the men and women whom history will record as the titans of turn-of-the-century technology.

As a recent college graduate from Pennsylvania, I was lured to the DC area by the prospect of securing a job in a city with an above-average economy. However, like any young adult embarking on a first career, my knowledge of applying to jobs was negligible, especially concerning the DC job market. As a result, I bought this book in the hopes of learning more about the types of jobs that are available in this city. In short, the book did not disappoint me.

By reading the book, I was able to expand my knowledge of public policy, an area that many students often do not explore. The book showed me that you do not need a public policy degree to secure a job in this city; you just need decent grades, some small internships (not necessarily in DC), and lots of motivation.

The early pages of the book introduce you to the public policy field, the art of writing resumes and cover letters, and the skills involved in phoning and interviewing with prospective employers. These first 30 pages could apply to nearly any type of job, but the book moves on to provide about 14 useful contacts and search engines for finding a DC internship and about a couple hundred contacts for full-time jobs in Congress, federal agencies and departments, interest groups and think tanks, trade associations and labor unions, and the news media. With a chapter (and corresponding profile of actual employees) devoted to each type of public policy job, you learn the pros and cons of each type, thereby allowing you to eliminate certain jobs and to focus on securing job offers that are more suitable to your interests.

Overall, the book is one of the most informative about public policy, but I do offer a few tips to future readers. First, narrowing your job search to the more appealing types of organizations that offer policy jobs is smart, but do not be too selective. After all, the current economy, even in DC, is tough for job seekers, and your first DC job probably will not be the "perfect" fit; instead, it will be a good fit. (I secured a good position at a trade association that I never thought I would work at, but the work, people, and pay are great.) Second, when using the contact information provided by the book, be sure to first verify it at the organization's website. This book was published in 2000, so the names of many contact persons have changed since then. Finally, although the book provides two examples of vacancy announcements for the federal government, it does not include any examples of KSAs. It does include a couple examples of resumes that are suitable for jobs outside the government, but if these resumes were real, their applicants would not even be interviewed because the resumes are so short and unimpressive.

This book is great. If you're looking to get your feet wet in DC, or make it a career this book is informative, easy to read and helpful. It untangles the web and labyrinth of DC organizations, political organizations and the city.

Easy to understand chapters break it down, and make it simple. Highly recommended for the 'off the turnip truck' intern or the seasoned professional coming to DC.

I am a college professor who teaches a career course and found this book to be good enough to use in the classroom. It covers all aspects of the job search and does a great job asking insightful questions of the reader. There are many pages of fill-in-the-blank questions where the reader can prioritize, set goals, and conjure up strengths. It is a very practical guide in helping someone search for a job, whatever stage of their career they may be in.

This book gave me everything I needed to prepare a solid resume. Even when I was unsure about which words to use, "The Job Searcher's Handbook" had an entire list of words that got the attention of my new employer. I have loaned this gem of a book to at least 6 other people and all of them have raved about it. If anyone is looking for the comprehensive, easy to read guide to getting a job, changing careers, writing resumes, etc. "The Job Searcher's Handbook" is certainly it. Carolyn Robbins has a winner!

There are some profound ideas in this book about how a school should be run. I particulary enjoyed the "substitutions for leadership". If you are a school administrator you should probably read this book.

With this book, Sergiovanni has assembled a "covenant of shared values," a way of "expanding the value structure of and authority bases for leadership" in such a way that the reader can have a "powerful set of ideas for influencing what and how people think and feel."

Being an assistant English teacher-I teach English at the middle school level for the City of Naha, Okinawa, Japan-and having aspirations to eventually become a "full-time" teacher at the high school level, I chose to do a review on this book about the roll of leadership in public education. I feel that it is a very good book, both insightful and educational...although I did find it a little "over my head" in some of both content and the context in which it was written. This book, Moral leadership: getting to the heart of school improvement, would make a valuable addition to the guidance resource pool of anyone who cares about our children and the education system that is preparing them to be productive members of adult society.

About the Author-- Thomas J. Sergiovanni, Lillian Radford Professor of Education at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, has an extensive education history backing up his work: BA degree from the State University of New York in 1958, MA degree from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1959, and his Ed.d. Degree from the University of Rochester in 1966.

He has also built up quite an impressive work and experience history as well: he was an elementary school teacher from 1958 to 1964, a science consultant in New York state, a teacher in the teacher education program at the State University of New York, and he gave nineteen years of service to the faculty of educational administration at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign starting in 1966 (he chaired the department for seven years). He now teaches at the Trinity University in the leadership program and in the five-year teacher education program. He is the director of the Trinity Principals' Center as well as being the senior fellow at the Center for Educational Leadership. He has served in an editorial capacity for several teaching and leadership publications and has also published many other books about leadership and schooling: "Schooling for Tomorrow: Directing Reforms to Issues that count (1989, with John Moore), Value-Added Leadership: How to Get Extraordinary Performance in Schools (1990), and The Principalship: A Reflective Practice Perspective (1991, second addition)," are a few among his recent works. Along with all of this experience and education, Sergiovanni also apparently has "broad interest in school leadership and the supervision and evaluation of teaching," to bring to his aid in creating valuable resource materials for those involved in education.

Target Audience of the Book-- According to the author, in the introduction of the book, this work was basically intended to serve as a guide for developing moral leadership in schools, from the top down: superintendents, supervisors, principles, and any other persons at the upper levels of school management. The author's design was to provoke thoughts and raise questions in the minds of these people which would help them to analyze the leadership processes in their schools and to help them make adjustments to the leadership process that will in the end reduce the need for "direct" leadership in favor of "moral" leadership. He also makes point that this book can serve as a "counterpoint" to some of the textbooks, currently being used in university courses on leadership. He also states that the book would be useful for parents, school board members and policy makers. Because I am involved in the education process from the "teaching" point of the educational continuum, I see this book as being of particular value to other teachers and myself as well. If "leadership is a process," consisting of and reliant upon the presence of THREE distinct yet interactive elements: the leader, the followers, and the situation, then I feel that the information contained in the book-especially that concerning motivation of teachers, making a school a "learning community," and the importance of collegiality-is very pertinent to the views and understandings from a teacher's standpoint. This book is for anyone who cares about improving the leadership in our schools. Scope of the Work-- The aspects of leadership covered are very broad, from analyzing the traditional leadership rolls, to the tapping of higher and higher levels of human potential. It is written from the standpoint of managers and leaders and covers point by point the author's ideas of how to shift the environment of schools from that of a "factory" to one of community of leaning. The time period of the book, is of course modern, but the ideals expressed are timeless, those of using one's heart and compassion-"living school"-in leadership rather than just being concerned with the facts and figures involved-"playing school." I feel that this work will be of value as long as we have systems that require leadership, any systems, and not just schools. The viewpoint of the author, I feel, is that he is concerned about the leadership processes in schools that are presently accepted as the norm. The author would like to see school leadership shift to one that is self-motivated by teachers who want to do a good job, not one in that the teachers feel they have to as a result of dependency on "extrinsic" rewards.

This really is an excellent book for finding activities to add to your training sessions. There are a lot of great games in this resource. The games are listed by subject matter to make it easy to get right to where you want to go and the games are just as relevant as they ever were.

The only reason that I didn't give it a five is that I don't care for the typeset and overall presentation of the book, but these things are easily overlooked when you find a great new activity.

Don't be put off by this book's 1983 publication date. It is still one of the best sources of icebreakers and other training exercises. It's value?--the book's not just for professional trainers. It can be used by just about anyone who needs some ideas about what to do when you get up in front of a group--any group. It's not cluttered by lectures or lengthy explanations. You just jump right in and flip through the samples. It's even fun just to browse. This is the second in a series of training game books by Scannell and Newstrom. Look at one and you'll probably want all three!