Tag: jobs

  • 5 Ways Your Church can be Good News to Unemployed Young Adults

    A Bureau of Labor Statistics report released Wednesday said 745,000 more job seekers between 16 and 24 years old were unemployed from April to July. That compares with an increase of 571,000 among the same age group last summer.

    In July, the share of young people who were employed was 48.8%, marking a record low for the second straight year. July is traditionally the peak month for summertime employment. Another Summer Chill for Youth Employment- USAToday, August 24th 2011

    Photo by London Permaculture via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    If I do the math correctly this means 51.2% of Americans between the ages of 16-24 don’t have a job. Half of people 16-24, when they are physically strongest and most able to work… can’t find a job.

    You can’t care about the youth of America and not wonder what you can do. You individually. You as a leader in the church. And you as an advocate for the young adults in your community. You can do something. You have to do something.

    We live in a post-Christian society. Young adults have heard of the church. They likely know who Jesus is. But, in many cases, they won’t have anything to do with Jesus or the church because both seem irrelevant. In short, before they are willing to hear the Good News of Jesus Christ they need to know that the Gospel really is good news for them. If you can help them find employment– that’s good news.

    Here’s 5 ways you can be Good News to unemployed youth in your community

    1. Start a childcare fund for single parents in your church struggling financially. One of the biggest challenges a single parent faces is consistent and affordable childcare. (Affordable doesn’t mean free.) If you set up a fund to employ 3-4 people through your church to either watch children in their homes or to set-up a 10 small daycare facility in your church, you’d be surprised how easy funding could come together. This would help single parents and it would help the young adults you’d hire to run the program. (There’s Federal/State grant money available for this kind of thing as well. Ask a librarian for help.)
    2. Sponsor a local grant for small businesses in your community to offset the cost of hiring part-time help between the ages of 16-24. One of the best motivators you could offer to small business owners in your community is a grant to offset some of the costs of employing a person. Work with your local Chamber of Commerce to help get the word out, pitch the concept to business people in your church, and ask your congregation to rally behind the fund. Keep it simple. If a small business hires a qualifying young adult, you verify that they worked 500 hours, you award the employer $2,000.
    3. Host job readiness seminars in your church. While the unemployment rate is shocking, equally shocking is the amount of young adults who are unemployable. Partner with Junior Achievement, the Chamber, and other like-minded local community organizations to put together a series of helpful seminars for job readiness. Teach the basics like, interview skills, resume` building, work expectations, etc. (Again, there’s grant money out there for this kind of thing.)
    4. Hire someone in your home. We’ve just completed our second summer of having a regular, summer babysitter. Last summer we hired someone full-time who also lived in our home. We found that was a bit too much for us, so this summer we “shared” a full-time babysitter with another family in our church. No, we couldn’t afford it. But this sacrifice was worth it– and helped us out a ton. Maybe you don’t need childcare? Hire someone to do yard work or complete the projects around the house you’ve wanted to do but can’t find the time.
    5. Start a job pool. A church is a great connecting point. If you acted as a connecting point between people looking for work and people who need work done, you could help a lot of people. More than simply having a job board… Set-up a simple screening process, set work expectations like timeliness and appearance, and coordinated both supervision and payment between people in the community who need work done and young adults looking to do work. If that’s too much work for your staff to handle ask a business person in the congregation or members of the local Chamber of Commerce to sponsor a 10 hour per week position from May – September to coordinate.
    Will you commit to helping find employment for people ages 16-24 in the next 12 months? 

  • Level of Difficulty

    Does your skill level match the level of difficulty in your ministry?

    I’ll admit it. I’m a recovering video game junky. Up until Madden 2005 I used to incessantly play anything football EA Sports produced.

    One of the fun things about the Madden games is that you can adjust the level of difficulty to match your skill level in the game. So, if you were new, you could set it to easy and still have a good time. Then, theoretically, as your skills improved you could turn the game up so that it remained challenging.

    One of the great injustices in the ministry world is that there is often a disconnect between the skill level of a staff member and the level of difficulty in a ministry setting.

    In general, those who have a low skill level (new to ministry) are only able to get jobs in ministry locations labeled difficult or expert. Meanwhile, veteran church workers tend to flow towards jobs on larger teams in healthier ministries where the level of difficulty is significantly better matched to their skill level. (Not easy, per se. But ministries which match their skill level.)

    In the past few years I’ve had countless conversations with pastors in way, way over their head. They’ve been in ministry a short amount of time and are in situations with no support, politics leaning hard against them, and socially isolated from people who think like them. They slump their shoulders as we sit down for breakfast, “Adam, am I crazy? Why does serving Jesus hurt this bad?”

    Why are these people hurting?

    Because they are in ministry settings where the level of difficulty is a miss-match.

    The Way it Works

    We have a Darwinian approach to ministry jobs. Our church culture dictates that the newest, greenest, and least capable among us serve at the gnarliest of ministry sites. A youth pastor takes her first time job, replacing a youth pastor fired for sleeping with a student. A worship pastor hired from a larger church to lead a ministry from traditional worship to contemporary. A senior pastor right out of seminary replaces a long-tenured wise owl who retired after 40 years of successful ministry. A children’s worker will accept a calling to a church plant where they have to go out and raise their support while somehow trying to create a children’s program from scratch.

    All expert level ministry jobs performed by newbie staff members. They don’t stand a chance.

    A large majority of these newbies will get washed out of their first jobs in the first 2-3 years. Battered and bruised, about half will lick their wounds and find non-ministry vocations before they’ve even paid off their seminary loans.

    Yet, a small minority will learn their lessons from these impossible ministry situations and move to more healthy levels of difficulty. Eventually, through survival of the fittest, a small minority manage to work their way into roles that are matched with their skill level… or maybe a little mismatched so that they are in jobs significantly easy compared to their skill level. (You know who you are.)

    In other words, those of us with high levels of expertise gravitate to the easier jobs while our success in roles made to look easy encourages countless others into the flames of despair at the hard jobs.

    The Way it Ought to Work

    Ministry experts should flow to the expert level jobs. Jobs in healthy ministries should hire more newbies for shorter periods of time in order to increase their skill level and help match them with jobs that best suit their long-term skill level and interest.

    This would perpetrate a mantra of healthy churches helping unhealthy ones instead of visa versa.

    But that would be too much like right.

  • Jobs and Millennials

    Scott Nicholson needs a job. Or so reports the New York Times in a recent article. The problem isn’t that Scott can’t get a job. It’s that Scott can’t get a job he wants. Here’s one situation that lead to a job offer he turned down.

    It was in pursuit of a solid job that Scott applied to Hanover International’s management training program. Turned down for that, he was called back to interview for the lesser position in the claims department.

    “I’m sitting with the manager, and he asked me how I had gotten interested in insurance. I mentioned Dave’s job [his older brother who makes $75k, this job offer was for $40k] in reinsurance, and the manager’s response was, ‘Oh, that is about 15 steps above the position you are interviewing for,’ ” Scott said, his eyes widening and his voice emotional.

    The article documents the lamentations of a self-described “hard worker” as he searches for his first real job, post-undergraduate education. It seems two realities are hitting him hard while avoiding the third.

    1. His expensive undergrad degree and good grades didn’t earn him squat.
    2. Even though his parents are connected, there’s no high paying job waiting for him post-graduation.
    3. He has no debt, his grandparents paid his way through school, and his parents are footing his kennel fees indefinitely. This is a blessing and a curse.

    What I find interesting is this desire to hold out for the right job. Scott would rather not work than work a job he doesn’t like.

    It’s not just Scott who does it. It’s kind of an upper-middle class phenomenon in America. College graduates hold out for a dream job that doesn’t really exist. Meanwhile, hungrier and harder working students trying to climb the socio-economic ladder continue to take more advantage of a system that rewards hard work… thereby disadvantaging lazier, idealistic, rich kids who are looking for a fast-forward.

    It’s a cultural disadvantage facing the suburbs right now. Somewhere, somehow, they have bought into a lie that pursuing the American Dream is easy. And a good job is their birthright.

    A trip into American history only reveals the opposite to actually be true.

    I wrote last May that there was bad news coming for the suburbs and Scott’s story only adds an illustration to the point. The problem isn’t that there aren’t jobs. It’s that there aren’t jobs that recent graduates are willing to do.

    That’s two separate problems.

    Don’t be a moron

    1. Life is not a made for TV movie. We’ve never lived in a country that grants recent college graduates wishes for easy street. If you want the American Dream you have to do it just like the next guy… you take it.
    2. You are not Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, or one of these 20 year old billionaires. See, they didn’t just wake up billionaires. They worked their butt off and earned billions of dollars with their good ideas. But it also took time, they got lucky, and they are smarter than you.
    3. Starting at the bottom is not humiliating. It’s the only strategy that works. See, the economy depends on people starting at the bottom and working their way up. Likewise, how else will you learn? It’s not like college prepares you for the real world.
    4. There’s nothing wrong with chasing dreams. Heck, I’m still chasing the same dream I started pursuing as an 18 year old! I’ve come pretty far– but I’ve still got a ways to go! But understand that the chasing of dreams can take a lifetime of steps in the right direction while avoiding many pitfalls. If your life were a novel, it’d suck if you reached your goal in chapter 1.
    5. Desperation is the key ingredient to success. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told parents… the best thing you can do to your post-college graduate is to stop feeding them, stop paying their bills, and make them either pay a real rent or kick them out. The smelling salt of items 1-4 above will never be accepted until a person wakes up to the reality that they are the ones who have to make something happen. If they don’t hustle, they don’t eat.

  • Slow Exhale

    Yesterday, Youth Specialties let go of about 40% of its workforce. It was a day that suckety, sucked, sucked. And than I thought about it and it sucked some more.

    Since YS is a small close-knit company I know every single person who was let go. You read about a company cutting jobs and it never seems personal… just a ticker on the bottom of the screen on MSNBC as I drink my morning coffee. This was very personal and too close to home.

    Today begins the slow exhale. In a couple of hours I begin to deal with the realities of “now what?” Yesterday is in the past and there is a lot to do in the hours, days, and weeks to come.

    Today I take a deep breath to breathe the new air of today. There is no other choice. The task at hand is to equip and encourage youth workers.

    Literally, this morning I will reshoot the podcast that was to go live yesterday and we will get right back to work. I will look into the camera and remind everyone… “What you do matters.” It does. It matters a lot.

    Marko posted this on his blog today… it captures what I feel about today.