CA Career Cafe: Join a Professional Association

CA Career Café

"The way of the world is meeting people through other people.”

• Robert Kerrigan

Did you know?

Joining a Professional Association while still on campus can help students learn about their prospective career paths and offer a wealth of experiential and networking opportunities. Professional organizations exist for almost every profession from artists to zoo keepers. These non-profit organizations host meetings, conventions, and virtual workshops. Introduce your students to Professional Associations via the California Career Café where students can access Cool Connections, a Professional Association database.

Try this…

• Ask your students about Professional Associations…

What is a Professional Association?
Can you name some Professional Associations?
Why join a Professional Association?

• Share your own Professional Association experiences.
• View video.
• Access this Professional Association database and identify associations related to your discipline.
• Distribute the Student Activity, review the directions, and complete.
• Discuss the possibilities and power of networking cards.

Add an Experience!

Have students try the Connect to a Professional Association student lesson on CaCareerCafe.com. Encourage students to make a personal connection via phone, email or in person using their networking card as part of their introduction.

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San Francisco tech job growth leads nation

Sep 30, 2013, 11:03am PDT  San Francisco Business Times


Bloomberg
San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee.



Patrick Hoge Reporter- San Francisco Business Times

The city of San Francisco led the nation in tech job growth for the last five years, according to a new report released today by the Bloomberg Technology Summit, which San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee is co-sponsoring this year with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

San Francisco’s tech employment rose 51.8 percent over the 2007 to 2012 period, according to the study by South Mountain Economics, which focused particularly on New York, which has also seen significant employment growth in the tech/information sector, including traditional tech companies as well as media and information companies.

“San Francisco comes out number one in terms of growth of the tech/information sector,” said study author Michael Mandel. Brooklyn (Kings County) and Wake County, Fla., came out number two and three, with 21 percent growth and 18.2 percent, respectively, while Santa Clara posted gains of 15.5 percent.

Mayor Lee recently said there are 1,892 tech companies in San Francisco, up 3.6 percent from the prior year, representing 45,493 jobs.

Mandel speculated that one reason why San Francisco and New York City saw such strong gains is because both are centers of media and information companies.

“The way that i think about technology, the current growth wave, is that it’s not pure tech anymore. It’s really pure tech converging with information,” Mandel said. “That may explain why San Francisco has done so well in this round.”

Growth in the tech/information sector enabled New York to increase private sector employment by 4 percent between 2007 and 2012, even as national private sector payrolls fell by 3 percent, Mandel found. In fact, he said because of the growth of the tech/information sector, New York City’s share of the nation’s private sector employment now stands at its highest level since 1992.

California's unemployment rate increased slightly during August to 8.9 percent, up from 8.7 percent in July. Unemployment nationwide, by comparison, was 7.3 percent.

Unemployment in San Francisco, by contrast, fell to 5.6 percent in August from 6 percent in July. Statewide, San Francisco, Marin, and San Mateo continue to hold the lowest unemployment rates.

New York City’s tech/information sector grew by 11 percent from 2007 to 2012, adding 26,000 jobs and $5.8 billion in wages to the local economy, which in turn fueled private sector job growth that was four times that of the New York suburbs over the period, the study showed. The Big Apple’s tech/information sector supports 262,000 jobs and contributes nearly $30 billion to payrolls, making it the second largest driver of the New York economy.

Also Monday, the Bloomberg Technology Summit released a companion study by the Boston Consulting Group, which interviewed more than 50 tech executives from New York and San Francisco that showed both cities have fostered tech sector growth by developing five key conditions: growing a strong talent pipeline, supporting a vibrant tech community, leveraging local early stage capital, expanding tech infrastructure and office space, and engaging with existing industries.

In San Francisco, for example, Mayor Lee holds weekly events at local tech companies, and he led the successful effort to eliminate payroll taxes for companies in the central city.

The second annual Bloomberg Technology Summit, which aims to help other cities learn from New York and San Francisco’s successes, is being co-sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology & Innovation (sf.citi), a trade group of San Francisco tech companies.

The first session of the summit is taking place in New York on Monday, while the second will be held in San Francisco next March. A newly announced third session will be held in London next year as well.
Patrick Hoge covers technology for the San Francisco Business Times.

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Why we hate the new tech boom

Friday, Sep 27, 2013 04:45 AM PDT Salon.com

Our new masters aren't going away -- and neither is a two-tiered employment world which makes inequality worse

By Andrew Leonard


Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos (Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri/Beck Diefenbach/AP/Matt Sayles/AshDesign via Shutterstock/Salon)

Is it time to get nervous? On Sept. 20, a pair of Silicon Valley start-ups enjoyed spectacular “pops” on their initial public offerings. Shares in Rocket Fuel, an advertising technology firm, rose 94 percent, while shares in FireEye, an Internet security company, shot up 80 percent. Uh-oh! A headline in the San Jose Mercury News kicked off the hand-wringing: “Jaw-dropping stock debuts by FireEye, Rocket Fuel are already raising questions about a new tech bubble.”

There’s a good reason for jitters: If there’s one thing the San Francisco Bay Area fears more than a big earthquake, it’s the sound of a tech bubble bursting. Economic devastation is never fun.

And it certainly feels bubbly, to anyone who remembers what it was like the last time it got crazy. Traffic is getting worse, again. New gourmet restaurants, fancy beer gardens and high-end boutiques are proliferating. Unemployment has plummeted. Gentrification is in high gear. Rents are absurd. Enormous amounts of money, wielded with douchebag arrogance, are sloshing around town. Hell, there’s even talk that Kozmo.com, the same-day dot-com-boom delivery service that burned through $230 million without ever even making it to IPO day, is coming back.

The difference between earthquakes and tech bubbles is that the former arrives without warning while the latter comes accompanied by sirens and a motorcade that you can hear in the distance for years in advance. When it comes to tech bubbles, the Bay Area is always on typhoon alert. But the craziest thing about the current craziness is that the closer you look, the fewer reasons there seem to be to load up on survival gear and run for the hills.
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The current freneticism is a very different animal from the original dot-com boom. For one thing, the companies racing to go public this September actually have revenues and what passes for real business models, something that was very often simply not the case in 1999 and early 2000. For another, 60 percent of the U.S. population is walking around with networked supercomputers in their pockets that they are constantly using for all kinds of commercial purposes. That’s not hype — that is the essence of 2013.

So, OK, we shouldn’t be nervous, at least not about the possibility of a sudden tech economy crash. But we should be scared. Because the solidity of the current tech boom goes a long way toward explains a pressing mystery: Why so many people seem to hate the tech economy so much right now. Class tensions are undeniably much more fraught than they were the last time the tech economy ran amok. There is an us versus them zeitgeist brewing that is far darker and angrier than the ridicule that was once directed at the Pets.com sock puppet. If you listen hard to Twitter and Facebook and random comments threads, you can almost hear people rooting for the bubble to pop.

Why? Why do we hate the new tech boom?

The answer has two parts. First, there is unsettling realization that the middle is losing economic ground while Silicon Valley execs babble on about “changing the world” for the better. Income inequality is growing ever worse, and it is increasingly clear that one of the forces fueling this trend is the technological innovation flowing out of the Bay Area. Second: The very fact that this boom is not a bubble, and will not suddenly vanish, means we can’t ignore it, or laugh it away. This is the new normal, and for those not lucky enough to have catered foodie gourmet lunches in brand-new downtown office complexes, the new normal sucks. Back in 1999-2000, the ridiculousness of what was happening was so obvious that it was hard to take it seriously. Everyone knew an economy boom built on online pet product company IPOs was doomed. Sooner or later, the bubble would pop and sanity would be restored and all those annoying dot-commers crowding your favorite bar or restaurant would go back to where they came from. The traffic would finally ease up.

But that’s not going to happen this time. The current boom isn’t a flash in the pan, doomed to disappoint arriviste gold miners. It’s here to stay. A mature Internet economy is generating huge riches, and it is remaking the face of San Francisco and the larger Bay Area in the process. But unless you really, truly want a job chauffeuring the new rich around town, or delivering their same-day groceries, or pouring their flights of craft beers — jobs that, incidentally, won’t pay enough to afford you an apartment anywhere in San Francisco — this new boom may not seem worth cheering about. Might as well root for it to fail.

Seven Bay Area tech companies filed to go public in August. Thirteen tech IPOs are scheduled for the last week of September, alone. The rush to market is a logical consequence of the fact that technology IPOs have been doing particularly well of late, performing better, reports the Wall Street Journal, than at any point since 2000. In mid-September Nasdaq reached its highest mark since September 2000, though the exchange is still a long way from its peak in March 2000, just before the bubble burst.

Any time you hear the words “since March 2000,” you have the right to start reaching for the Alka-Seltzer. The spring of 2000 saw phenomenal wealth destruction. Publicly traded technology companies were losing 90-95 percent of their market capitalization in a matter of months. The prospect of that happening again, and destroying the economy of California — and probably the entire U.S. — all over again, is unappetizing. Thus the worried headlines.

But if you go back and start sifting through the press coverage of the dot-com boom, you realize very quickly that we are far from anywhere near the level of insanity that dominated 13 years ago.

In 1999 there were 308 technology IPOs. But by mid-September 2013, only 22 technology IPOs had launched all year. Even taking into account the horde of companies going public at the end of September, we still aren’t within a country mile of the dot-com peak. Indeed, venture capital financing has fallen through the first half of this year. In the second quarter of 2013, VCs spent around $2.6 billion. In the second quarter of 2000, VCs spent $9.3 billion.

There’s also a huge difference apparent in the quality of technology companies into which VC money is being funneled. A list of the biggest blowouts of the dot-com era — Webvan, TheGlobe.com, Pets.com, eToys, DrKoop.com, Kozmo, FreeInternet.com, Flooz.com, Boo.com, MVP.Com, Go.com, Kibu.com — is a roll call of companies that quite often went public without any history of generating meaningful revenue and with only the sketchiest of business models. Pets.com raised $82 million in February 2000, and filed for bankruptcy nine months later! By comparison, Facebook, reviled last year for supposedly the worst Internet IPO of all time, is now trading at higher than its initial share price offering, and boggling analysts with robust mobile advertising revenue figures.

The blatant chicanery of the dot-com boom IPO scene was impossible to ignore at the time, although that didn’t stop the suckers from rushing in. In many cases, the obvious goal wasn’t to build a business at all. The imperative was simply to stage an IPO so as to cash in on investor-driven speculative fever. The IPO was just a gambling vehicle.

That’s still true, of course, but to a much more limited extent. When you look at the tech companies that are currently going public, it’s hard to see many similarities between them and DrKoop.com. (1998 revenues: $43,000. June 1999 IPO: raised $90 million. August 2000: delisted from Nasdaq!) Rocket Fuel and FireEye offer an excellent window in. For starters, it’s hard to imagine safer bets in today’s economy than the domains of advertising technology and Internet security. Even better, both companies actually have products that customers are currently paying for!

“Both Rocket Fuel and FireEye have exhibited the growth IPO investors crave,” reports the Mercury News. “The latter has more than doubled its annual revenue in each of the past two years, while Rocket Fuel managed to double revenues to more than $100 million in 2012 and rake in nearly as much in the first six months of 2013.”

Actual profit, not so much, but you can’t be too picky!

Other Bay Area IPOs that launched in late September included firms specializing in cloud-based telecommunications management, enterprise memory storage, fiber-optic networking and Internet phone services. Basic infrastructural stuff that is obviously necessary for the expansion of the Internet economy. You might reasonably be able to characterize the current mini-stampede as “frothy,” but it is not the stuff of tulip-mania or the delusions of crowds. It’s business as usual. It feels grounded in reality.

But you know what else is grounded in reality? How about the fact that if you want to rent an apartment in the Mission district of San Francisco, you would need to work the equivalent of 5.5 minimum-wage jobs to afford the average $2,920 rent. Make that 7.5 such jobs if you want to live South of Market, where so many tech firms are headquartered. Also grounded: the shocking decline in the percentage of San Francisco’s residents who are African-American — nearly 20 percent in just the decade 2000-2010. All over the Bay Area, according to Joint Venture Silicon Valley, average incomes are rising, while median household incomes are falling — a strong sign that the wealth created by the thriving tech economy is not getting evenly distributed.

Unemployment is obviously and thankfully down — but serious questions remain as to the distribution of the new jobs. It’s a familiar story nationwide: The last couple of decades have seen the middle class get squeezed, and new technological innovations that have resulted in the automation or outsourcing of jobs are a big part of that narrative. The rising antagonisms directed at the tech economy’s nouveau riche are a direct consequence of a couple of decades of seeing “Star Trek”-like technological advances accompanied by a measurable fall in individual living standards.

The unkindest cut of all? Food writer John Birdsall returned from a Portland, Ore., food festival and reported that the Bay Area’s vaunted “populist craft foods” scene might be as “extinct as the $1,500 flat.”

Maybe when today’s tech bubble goes the way of the last one, and the white-linen four-tops disappear from Valencia Street, maybe then San Francisco will get the populist craft cooking a lot of us want to thrive here. Until then, hey: Fares to Portland really aren’t that bad.

With reasoning like that, one can understand why some people might be hoping for the bubble to pop, even if that would inevitably mean higher unemployment and closed restaurants and vacant office buildings. It’s beyond annoying to think that Facebook and Twitter millionaires are driving up the price of a kick-ass burrito. But what’s even more annoying, and potentially rage-inducing, is the nagging worry that the bubble isn’t going to disappear, that the Bay Area is fundamentally changing. In that scenario, the enduring power of the tech boom turns out to be far more troubling, and meaningful than the fraudulent scamming endemic to the first dot-com boom.

Of course, San Francisco has always been a boom and bust town populated by get-rich-quick hustlers. That’s part of the city’s DNA. That’s why the city exists in the first place. And for a city that thinks of itself as “progressive” there’s an odd sort of conservatism visible at work in the anguish over what is being lost. As Farhad Manjoo argued in a recent San Francisco Magazine cover story, the real challenge is to figure out ways to move forward, to funnel tech-driven economic growth into improvements in the region’s housing stock, transportation infrastructure, and social services so as to raise the standard of living for everyone.

Manjoo’s piece sparked a strong critical response and an ensuing spirited back and forth. A big driver of the backlash was the perception that Manjoo wasn’t acknowledging the unequal distribution of the benefits of the tech boom. Yes, it’s great that unemployment has dropped so much, but job polarization that groups a smaller and smaller number of workers at the high end and a growing number of workers at the low end is hardly the grist for outbursts of ecstatic enthusiasm. At this point in the evolution of the Internet economy it is not irrational to question the ways in which technological progress is contributing to growing class disparities. In fact, the San Francisco Bay Area may turn out to be the ground zero for resolving that paradox. A liberal region is wrestling with the illiberal consequences of the Internet revolution.

No wonder tensions are high. Because this is no bubble, no fickle gyration of the business cycle. This is the story of the 21st century.



Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21

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StartSomethingToday.org Challenge to Inspire Student Entrepreneurs

Dear Teacher/Administrator:

Are you looking for activities to help your students succeed? Or maybe land the perfect job? Then participate in the StartSomethingToday.org Challenge. It is designed to inspire student entrepreneurs to achieve business ideas while providing an opportunity for students to learn entrepreneur and business development skills sparking business creation and workforce development.

It’s sponsored by WebProfessionals.org, a membership supported organization and SkillsUSA the leading Career Technical Student Organization with 300,000 members in the U.S. The StartSomethingToday.org challenge is a part of the broader STEMTOSTEAMIE.org initiative to promote innovation and student entrepreneurship.

Why is it important? 

•Entrepreneurs create job growth
•Future jobs depend innovation and entrepreneurship
•It will fix Americas stalled economy

What the experts say
“Growth doesn’t just happen, and it’s not necessarily driven by demand. Growth comes from innovation and from entrepreneurs who create demand.”. Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, the leading data collecting organization.
“The quick math on this: Among 30 million students in the U.S. middle schools and high schools, there are approximately 90,000 who have rare genius-level entrepreneurial talent. America needs to find them all. Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, the leading data collecting organization.

“The StartSomethingToday.org challenge will empower and equip students in career pathways ranging from healthcare, energy, art and design, construction, information technology, retail, green, financial and professional services and social entrepreneurs with the proper technology tools, resources and strategies needed to produce a successful business.” said Bill Cullifer, founder WebProfessionals.org

Who’s eligible? 

All students are eligible to participate regardless of educational or career interest. There is no cost to students or teacher and the rewards are plentiful.

What’s required to participate?

Conducted completely over the Web, the StartSomethingToday.org challenge provides students with an award-winning start to launching a business idea, plan and pitch to business and industry professionals and win recognition and introductions to potential investors. Students are responsible for writing their own business plans and pitching their businesses with a 3-5 minute YouTube.com video.

What are the benefits?

Students and the teachers who participate will receive free entrepreneurship training; free business plan development training; and mentoring.

Winners will receive an opportunity to pitch their ideas to potential investors.

When does it start and end?

Registration is open now and the deadline for challenge entries is December 1, 2013

Additional Detail and information on how to participate: For more information and to participate, go to http://startsomethingtoday.org For more information, contact Bill Cullifer at 916 989-2933 or by email at bill AT webprofessionals.org.

What is the STEMTOSTEAMIE.org imitative?
By adding three key elements, STEMtoSTEAMIE.org aims to expand and convert the fields of study representing Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) into a more inclusive and necessary field (STEAMIE).

Best,

Bill Cullifer
Executive Director
http://www.webprofessionals.org
bill@webprofessionals.org

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