April 18, 2013
Hot Tech Salary and Trend Highlights
 Choice Salary Tech Ranges – Info from Robert Half 2013 Technology Salary Guide from the Robert Half 2013 Technology Salary Guide
“Money may not be all IT employees consider when choosing to join or stay with your firm, but it’s certainly one of their key benchmarks.”
Attracting and retaining top tech talent requires a concerted plan. To attract the best and brightest, companies must be dynamic and growing, and must provide a work environment and benefits that motivate employees.
A lot of leading edge tech companies offer gyms, free healthy lunches, child care, transportation, flextime, work from home, and professional development opportunities in addition to good health insurance, 401Ks, and options. As the market improves, the competition over top talent only becomes more acute. Whether actively looking for new opportunities or not, top talent is being pitched on a consistent basis. In addition to these perks and benefits, your employees are shopping salaries. (more…)
November 15, 2012
The Technology of Voting:
What does the Future Hold?
The electronic age has transformed voting options and voting tallying enormously. Widely adopted and ever evolving, electronic voting supervised physically in polling stations has improved efficiencies enormously.
(more…)
October 30, 2012
Priority IT Jobs from Redfish Technology 10/30/2012
This week our top technology recruiting priorities are for QA Engineer – Cloud; Marketing Manager – Web Application Security; Customer Success Account Manager – SaaS; Director of Channel Sales – Healthcare Software; Architect – Audio Platform; Android Developer – Mobile Retail Marketing; Sales Account Executive – eCommerce; Product Marketing Manager – Integrated Risk Management; FPGA Designer – Converged IP; Technical Product Manager – App Security; and … (more…)
June 7, 2012
“Battle For the Internet”
I really enjoyed the seven day series of articles that the Guardian put together under the title Battle For the Internet. In a nutshell these are the topics the clusters of articles explore and address under the sequential themes.
1st Day: “The New Cold War”
– Exploring forces and issues surrounding an open or closed internet.
These articles explore the forces that seek to censure and close the internet. The forces that would control public information and the use of the internet include the usual suspects of the governments in China (controllers of the “Great Firewall”) in some countries in Arabia and Eastern Europe, but interestingly Apple and FaceBook are named as would-be tenders of “Walled Gardens”.
The forces striving to liberate the internet for all include subversive groups like WikiLeaks, and establishment established groups such as US government-funded technology project “Commotion Wireless”. Commotion Wireless enables any smartphone user to connect with other smartphones to form a “mesh network”, or impromptu internet, and hence defy censorship efforts allowing communication in stealth mode. (more…)
February 23, 2012
Featured Placement
 Patty O’Hear Patricia O’Hear,
Software Engineer Web Applications
Integrated Workplace Management System
This privately owned global enterprise real estate software company tasked Redfish with finding a Software Engineer to grow their global development team. The company is on the leading edge of advanced Web 2.0 development and has been recognized as the fastest growing Integrated Workplace Management System on the Software Magazine’s Software 500 List and on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. This career development opportunity requires collaboration with the global Development team, Quality Assurance and Client Support to bring new functionality to market and resolve client defects.
Patty found Redfish online through our extensive industry recruiting presence and dialed in on this opportunity. A recent graduate from Roger Williams University, she has a BS in Computer Science and a solid history of Java programming throughout her academic career. Patty has demonstrated excellent creative solutions-oriented thinking, leadership, teamwork and communications skills. She, and her co-author Thy Nguyen, were published in 2010 “Computer Forensics and Combating Cyber Crime”, following her presentation at the National Council for Undergraduate Research (NCUR) Conference, Missoula, MT. Patty led a team through a year-long senior project winning 2nd place the WERC competition, an international consortium for environmental education and technology development, in Las Cruces, NM; and winning 3rd place in the Roger Williams University Academic Showcase.
“Working with Beth from Redfish was amazing. She was understanding, dedicated, and knew exactly what I was qualified for. I could not ask for a better job to start my career right after graduating. The job offer was between me and another person and Beth pushed me through into the position. It’s nice to know someone put so much time and effort into ensuring that I got this job and that I was happy even after my hire. I have learned so much already and continue to grow excited about my job every day. I am extremely grateful to Redfish and Beth for helping begin an amazing career.” – Patty O’Hear
For more Featured Placements, see the Employer pages on the Redfish Website.
December 20, 2011
Priority IT Jobs from Redfish Technology
This week’s top IT career opportunities are for SaaS Account Executives, Director Inside Sales Cloud, Healthcare Software Channel Director, Enterprise Software Business Consultant, Product Marketing Enterprise and Infrastructure Solutions, Director of Software Development, Django/Python Developer, IT Sys Admin, Linux Software Engineer, and many more. (more…)
November 30, 2011
The Mo Fish are bristling!
Redfish Technology (the Mo Fish) supports the Movember mustache madness!
 The Mo Fish. Redfish is bristling for Movember Clean Tech has never been so unshaven …
IT has never been itchier …
Hiring has never been so hirsute!
During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces, in the US and around the world. With their Mo’s, these men raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men.
The Redfish Mo Bros and Mo Sistas got on board to help raise awareness for men’s health. Our office is bristling and hirsute for the month of Movember.
To learn more about Movember and Mens’ health issues, visit the Movember website.
To learn more about our awesome team of IT & Clean Tech executive search experts, visit the Redfish Technology site.
November 3, 2011
Tech Trends
Technology Investment Creates Jobs, Prosperity
Technology investment nurtures innovation and creates economic prosperity. This statement has been proved time and time again. In competition with the Soviet Union’s space program, the U.S. invested heavily in science, engineering, aerospace, and technology, and they pay off was strong innovation, huge job creation, and the birth of new industries in which the U.S. was the clear leader for decades. Today high tech products are the U.S.’s largest overseas export, making up 17.8 percent of all U.S. exports and supporting more than 900,000 U.S. jobs. Most nations are doubling down on their technology and innovation strategies and investment in an effort to win in the telecommunications, energy, and IT industries; securing dominance in key industries of tomorrow will grow jobs and prosperity for the winners.
Investment means allocating funds but it also means creating and acquiring talent. The U.S. has fallen behind in domestic Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education – while 33% of the workforce requires these talents, Americans obtaining degrees in these fields falls below the mark. Foreign-born innovators and entrepreneurs have been instrumental in many of the cutting edge firms and technologies that have brought prosperity throughout the history of the U.S. A Kauffman Foundation study found that 25% of science and technology start-ups founded between 1995 and 2005 had either a foreign-born chief executive or lead technologist. In 2005, these firms produced $52 billion in revenue with 450,000 employees. Opening immigration to highly skilled and educated will feed and grow innovation and jobs here in the U.S.
Technology innovation leads to national economic prosperity. According to a study by Christine Qiang of 120 nations between 1980 and 2006 estimated that for each 10 percentage point increase in broadband penetration, a high income country’s gross domestic product goes up by 1.3 percent. According to TechAmerica’s Phillip J. Bond, president and CEO, on the average each tech job supports three jobs in other sectors of the economy and the multiplier effect is 5-to-1 for information technology jobs. Information technology accounts for more than a third of U.S. gross domestic product growth and nearly two-thirds of corporate capital investment. Currently there are 375,000 information technology businesses in the U.S. employing over 5.9 million people; by 2018 IT jobs are projected to grow by 22 percent.
Recommended reading from Redfish Technology:
Competition for Talent, Immigrants Have Historically been Innovators, Job Creators.
Tech Provides Map for Nation’s Future
Technology and the Innovation Economy by Darrell M. West, Vice President and Director, Governance Studies at the The Brookings Institution
November 2, 2011
 - Gary Patten
Featured Placement
Gary Patten,
Regional Account Executive
Software as a Service
A top SaaS client enlisted Redfish Technology to find and enroll top software sales talent for an important regional market. The company is a dynamic, growing leader in their sector, providing Software as a Service solutions nationally and internationally. Identifying this senior level account executive position as a key hire, the company needed a hungry, seasoned sales executive with non-transactional, complex solutions experience.
Gary is an Enterprise Sales Executive with hunter instincts and a decade of experience. He has a proven ability to generate new business, form key partnerships, and develop new territories, as well as penetrate large accounts helping his clients to implement business strategies that serve broad and vertically focused markets. Achieving President’s Club, he has consistently exceeding quota and built a solid track record in SaaS and Unified Communications enterprise solutions sales.
“Rob and his colleagues at Redfish did an excellent job for me in not only finding me a great job opportunity, but also aligning me with a great career. Rob is knowledgeable about the clients he represents and the markets they are in. My experience with Redfish was most definitely the best I have encountered among recruitment and staffing agencies. In addition to being down to earth, Rob and his team are professional, personable, and punctual. I give my highest recommendation to Redfish for anyone seeking to enhance their career within the software/tech industry.” – Gary Patten
For more Featured Placements, see the Employer pages on the Redfish Website.
October 27, 2011
Competing for Talent, Immigrants Have Historically been Innovators, Job Creators.
A recent Wall Street journal article entitled: “A Better Idea for Green Jobs” should serve as a good reminder of our long history of immigrants creating innovation, building new companies, and starting tens of thousands of new jobs in the process.
The article reports that according to a Kauffman Foundation study, 25% of science and technology start-ups founded between 1995 and 2005 had either a foreign-born chief executive or lead technologist. Vivek Wadhwa, a Duke University researcher, reported that in 2005 those firms produced $52 billion in revenue with 450,000 employees. The majority (52%0 of Silicon Valley start-ups were immigrant led. (more…)
September 22, 2011
The Rock Stars of Silicon Valley
By Dominique Soenens, Vacature Magazine
 © Griet Dekoninck Is the talent war over?
Not in Silicon Valley. In the technological heart of the U.S., software engineers enjoy the status almost of a rock star: companies fight to land them, their wages rose last year and they are sometimes prone to the most amazing extras.
End of June. It’s smothering hot in Palo Alto, the university town in the heart of Silicon Valley. People are strolling lazily down University Avenue, the tree-lined street that cuts the center in half. On the covered patio of Starbucks, a good stone’s throw from the prestigious Stanford University, almost everybody is busy strumming on his laptop. Whether it’s a work meeting, a video meeting or a young start-upper working on the next big thing, a terrace with free Wi-Fi is a suitable area for many who work in the technology valley.
“I have a meeting soon, I just stopped in here with a friend,” said the 26-year-old technology consultant Jordan Buller, a laptop and coffee within reach. “I studied computer science at the University of Virginia and came here because of the nice job offers that I’ve received. That was three years ago when the economy is badly made. Now it is much better. A lot of people are being recruited, and the demand is high, not only for people that graduated at top universities like Berkeley and Stanford.” Many people come here. Did I dream of a business? Of course, everyone in Silicon Valley dreams of a business. I just have no concrete plans.”
Whether dreaming of their own project or not, engineers live (again) in a golden era in Silicon Valley. Figures published in the NY Times indicate that this year alone, nearly 150,000 new technology jobs will be created in the U.S.. Over the last year, wages of top engineers – especially software engineers – have gone up. While the salaries for IT engineers have barely increased since the outbreak of the recent economic crisis throughout the rest of the U.S., a Dice salary survey of American experts indicates that salaries in Silicon Valley grew in 2010 by an average of 3 percent. And this year, that percentage is much higher, by a whole lot.
“We’ve really seen the war for talent erupt over the last eight months,” said Andy Nacsin of Redfish Technology, a recruitment agency specializing in the high technology and clean technology sectors in Silicon Valley. “Wages have since gone up by about 10 percent. Companies are offering bonuses and shares, many companies are seriously pushing these to attract the talent they want.”
Translated with Google Translator.
Read the original article “De rocksterren van Silicon Valley” by Dominique Soenens
http://www.vacature.com/de-rocksterren-van-silicon-valley
August 12, 2011
Recruiters Circle Cisco Like Sharks Amid Job Cuts
By Joseph Walker
Cisco Systems Inc.’s announcement last month that it would lay off 6,500 workers from its global work force was welcome news to technology recruiters, who say it’s an opportunity to poach top employees uncertain of the company’s future, Fins.com reported Wednesday.
“It’s simply blood in the water,” said Jeff Winter, founder of GravityPeople, a San Francisco-based technology recruiting firm. “There are recruiters that will immediately start calling Cisco, soliciting their engineers and inciting fear that Cisco’s on its way out.”
Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based networking company and Cisco competitor, has seen a larger influx of resumes from Cisco employees in the last two months, director of global talent acquisition Brian Pototo told Fins.com.
“They’re not necessarily cutting their top performers,” Pototo said. But “it does create that uncertainty among the people who are the top performers. You might be able to shake them loose.”
Mike Sienkowski, president of Sausalito, Calif.-based tech recruiting firm BirdDog, Inc., said that he’s also had more Cisco employees contact his firm or respond to job openings recently. While he expects that most of those laid off will be underperformers, he sees an opportunity to poach more highly coveted employees at the company.
“The people I’m after, Cisco keeps close and watches very closely, but they’re more susceptible to my calls now,” Sienkowski said.
Cisco said last month the layoffs would include about 15% of the company’s executive staff, from the vice president level and up. Sienkowski doesn’t think that most companies will be eager to hire former Cisco executives. “They’re probably very expensive dead weight,” he said.
Other companies that may look to recruit from Cisco include Juniper Networks Inc. and NVIDIA Corp., said Alan Shapiro, a principal at Technology Search International, a San Jose, Cailf.-based recruiting firm.
Of the 6,500 job reductions, about 2,100 will come from an employee buyout program. The company’s second quarter earnings announcement included $453 million in charges for a voluntary early retirement program and $214 million for employee severance, as well as other charges,
Two recruiters who interact with Cisco employees said the early retirement package was available to those whose age plus years of service at Cisco equaled 60 or more. That aligns with an internal memo circulating on the Internet. Cisco declined to comment for this article or on the specifics of its buyout program.
For one senior director-level Cisco employee who took a buyout after 15 years at the company, Cisco’s downsizing was a blessing in disguise, said Rob Reeves, president of Redfish Technology, Inc., a technology recruiting firm with an office in Silicon Valley that is helping the employee look for his next job.
“It was a golden handcuffs situation,” said Reeves. “Other companies wouldn’t pay him what Cisco would pay him, but at the same time he was being under- utilized in his role at Cisco…he was plateaued in his career.”
The former Cisco employee is currently in late-stage job talks with several companies, Reeves said.
Because of Cisco’s large size — it currently has 71,825 employees — it will be difficult to make sure that only dead weight is laid off, Shapiro said.
“I wonder if Cisco upper management has actually taken a look at the resumes of the people they’re laying off, because if you’re laying off that many people, you’re putting a lot of talent on the street that could compete directly or indirectly with Cisco,” Shapiro said.
-By Joseph Walker, FINS.COM; Joseph.Walker@dowjones.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires 08-10-111858ET Copyright (c) 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110810-721081.html
August 11, 2011
IT Employment Trends
Redfish is seeing competition for key technology roles, which we discuss in Executive Recruiter, Andy Nacsin’s article “Winning the Tech Talent War”. Hiring and job postings are continuing to grow overall as evidenced in recent reporting on IT jobs.
The TechServe Alliance just published its IT Employment Index for June, showing an increase of 132,800 (up 3.39%) from June 2010. Overall in Q2 of this year the number of IT jobs has increased, as it had since December 2009, however the month of June slipped slightly by 300 from the month before. IT employment is at 4,051,200; an increase of approximately 133,000 jobs since June 2010. Indeed.com reports that Information Technology job postings have increased 44% over July 2010 (8% over last quarter), and clicks on those jobs have increased 7% since July 2010. (more…)
August 10, 2011
The Future of Energy Efficiency and Demand Response is Embedded Technology
by Gary L Hunt
 Gary L Hunt Congress recently debated whether to overturn the rule banning the incandescent light bulb. The bill did not get the 2/3 vote needed to advanced. Environmental advocates cheered this ‘enlightened action’ but failed to mention that more than a majority of members voted for the bill.
Does that mean the majority are rejecting energy efficiency?
The push for energy efficiency has been around at least since Jimmy Carter was president and there are true believers. It’s not that energy efficiency isn’t important—it is! It’s not that we don’t have opportunities to be more efficiency—we do! In the United States residences consume about 20% of all energy used and a lot of it is wasted.
Why we turn-off our energy efficiency enthusiasm:
- Energy Efficiency is a big hassle.
- Energy Efficiency savings are not worth that hassle for most customers.
- Energy Efficiency programs are intrusive and want to change our lifestyles.
While most utilities are required by regulators to be energy efficiency cheerleaders, they get paid when we use energy not when we save it. A few states, like California, have ‘decoupled rates’ shifting the rate of return utilities earn away from commodity energy sales and more toward achieving performance targets. This helps better align the interests of utilities and customers but it isn’t sufficient to get the energy efficiency potential available.
California is again a case in point. The big three California investor owned utilities recently filed their smart grid deployment performance reports with the California Public Utilities Commission. The reports suggest that utilities are mostly focused on demand response and have begun implementing peak day pricing to encourage customers to respond to high energy use periods. But energy efficiency and especially encouraging home area networks and other strategies to put all that smart meter technology to work to enable “self help” has been a big bust. Perhaps that explains why Google abandoned PowerMeter and Microsoft scrapped HOLM for lack of customer interest.
 CA Art Rosenfield Effect of EE Rules on Energy intensity
Back when Jerry Brown was Governor the first time in the 1970’s California adopted its first energy efficiency code. Today the result of that great experiment in energy efficiency is that California’s energy intensity is fully one-half the national average. Because of the size of the California market, appliance makers built better products just like automakers reduced emissions and the benefits spread beyond California’s borders.
Disruptive Technology is both the problem and solution for energy efficiency.
The California Energy Efficiency Code worked well for several decades until the disruptive technology of flat screen HD TV’s arrived on the scene. In a span of as little as five years, the rapid growth in the market penetration for HDTVs overwhelmed the energy efficiency savings to date. Those HDTVs used a lot more energy and they ate up the efficiency savings from all the laundry and kitchen appliance improvements for the last twenty years! Poof! Gone in the flash of a gazillion megapixels. So California amended its energy efficiency code to apply to HDTVs and the balance is being restored as new energy efficient HDTVs replace the first generation ones. We’ll buy them too because they are bigger, brighter, and cheaper—and we want them!
So what’s the lesson?
1. Embed Energy Efficiency Technology. If we want energy efficiency—and we do, we need to embed it in the technology we expect to use and make it part of the products we buy not something we must think about, decide up or do separately from living our lives.
2. Make it EASY! So why don’t we make use of home area networks? We know the answer– because it is not yet fast, easy, cheap or convenient. We don’t want more gadgets, we want better apps on the gadgets we already have and use. This is the lesson we learned when less than 20% of us bothered to learn how to program our old VCRs, or set our programmable thermostats, and why Microsoft finally set up Windows automatic updates—because doing this stuff is a big hassle.
3. Give Me Control and Don’t Try to change my Lifestyle. Most start-ups in this space are focused on building software, gadgets, dashboards and devices. Most will likely reach the same conclusion as Google’s PowerMeter and MSFT HOLM not because these are not good products, but because we don’t want them. We want simplified integrated solutions that give us control over our lifestyles. We don’t want big brother (utilities, government or big companies) tracking us, measuring us, alerting us or shaming us into saving energy. We don’t want more gadgets or devices. We don’t want our personal information stored in some ‘hackable’ cloud server. What is missing is that fine balance between embedded technology that helps me optimize my use based upon decisions I make that gives ME control over my lifestyle and the ability to change my mind.
Who’s on First Customers or Utilities?
Many of the start-ups and vendors in the energy efficiency and demand response space are focused on utilities not end-use customers. The energy and utility markets are still too fragmented to afford the scale needed for retail customer aggregation at this stage. Vendors see utilities as their customers buying EE and DR deliverables vendors get from aggregating commercial and industrial customers. So far this has worked OK for vendors focused like EnerNOC, Comverge and CPower, but theirs is a transitional game and continued growth means they must constantly expand into new markets.
The utilities are procrastinating until standards are adopted like the proposed Smart Energy Profile 2.0 HAN national standard, but that might take another five years. California’s big three investor owned utilities say they have pilot programs but the number of devices in active use is small. The risk for utilities is they are wasting their lead time while they still control the gateway to customers when they could be offering fast, easy, embedded technology solutions that would improve customer engagement, overcome angst about smart meter deployment changes in rates, and set the stage for a more distributed energy future for themselves and their customers. This will likely prove as big mistake.
The door is opening for more disruptive technology change ahead as smart meter saturation gives way to more and better ways to use the meter data insight to create new products and ‘wise up’ old ones. I predict a race ahead between the utility-centric vendors and the customer-centered vendors.
Utilities will wake up to the need to catch up after having wasted this lead-time and will scramble to offer their customers better solutions that enable use of smart meter data, energy efficiency and demand response services, and distributed generation options. Few are likely to succeed because they are not working NOW to engage customers, and organize them into a loyal social network that sees the utility has “on their side” in understanding and making effective use of smart grid enabled disruptive technologies.
Advantage will likely belong to new vendors who use social networking and customer aggregation to create the scale needed to make new disruptive technology driven solutions scalable and profitable. This is a marketing play not a device sale play. It is a segmentation play not a one size fits all solution. It is who do you trust not what do you have to sell me. For smart grid to succeed requires scale and the ability to cross artificial market boundaries. The consolidation process is already underway in each stage of the energy value chain.
Bigger players are emerging offering end to end solutions. New entrants using new applications of disruptive technology will surprise us as customers and will swamp the boat of procrastinating utilities and complacent gadget makers. All you have to do is imagine the disruptive technology power of an “Energy Groupon’ working with vendors to seduce us into playing the energy efficiency and demand response game for fun and profit. What profit? The kind utilities never offer us—winner of the biggest saver in the neighborhood award. A chance to enter the Hawaii vacation sweepstakes from among the neighborhood winners in my town. The competition between schools for a big prize for the most energy savings by households of students.
- Help us win and we will help you save energy. Let me track my progress on my Comcast home energy channel or change my settings on my iPhone app.
- Make it competitive and fun to save energy. Show me the competitive scores on EE by neighborhoods in my neighborhoods score compared to its savings potential for the current quarter’s Sweepstakes.
- Empower me to save energy with embedded technology. That embedded technology turned HDTV from scoundrels into energy efficiency champions while giving me bigger screen, brighter picture AND energy savings in one generation of technology, but it took the amendment to energy efficiency code to achieve it. If other states did nothing more than adopt the California Energy Efficiency Code or the new national standards based code, we could dramatically improve energy efficiency and intensity.
Creating the consumer demand for better products using less energy from disruptive new technologies that also lower costs—that is the big pay-off for all of us.
Related articles
National Demand Response Action Plan Message to Customers: You Win! (insightadvisor.wordpress.com)
Cost-saving claims add up to barefaced cheek (guardian.co.uk)
Smart Energy Data Frienemies (insightadvisor.wordpress.com)
Landlord insurance holders ‘need to be more energy efficient’ (premierlinedirect.co.uk)
Home Energy Auditor in Maryland Participates in Pepco’s Home Performance with Energy Star(R) Program (prweb.com)
EPA: New Energy Star Initiative Recognizes Cutting-Edge Products with Highest Energy Efficiency (bespacific.com)
Support For Energy Efficient Bulbs Dims Among GOP (npr.org)
Why Fighting Energy-Efficient Lightbulbs Is So Stupid (ecocentric.blogs.time.com)
About the author:
Gary L. Hunt has been a trusted advisor on energy and technology issues for more than thirty years. He served as CEO of a wholesale power producer in New England, ran utility systems in Austin, Texas and Oakland, California, and, for the past ten years, been a strategic consultant focused on energy markets, fundamentals, prices and risk. The views expressed here are his personal observations and insight and do not necessarily represent those of his employer, clients, colleagues or wife.
You can read his blog Insight Advisor at: http://insightadvisor.wordpress.com/
March 22, 2011
Priority High Tech Jobs from Redfish Technology
This week’s top high tech career opportunities are in CRM, Wireless Networking, Software as a Service, Online Marketing and Advertising, Software, Telecoms, Mobile Technology. The roles include Sales Directors, Account Executives, Sales Engineers, Product Marketing Manager, Technical Writer, Software Developers (Ruby, PHO, Web UI/UX, Java, etc), and more!
(more…)
March 15, 2011
Priority High Tech Jobs from Redfish Technology
This week’s top high tech career opportunities are in Software as a Service, Online Marketing and Advertising, Social Networking, Software, Telecoms, Mobile Technology. The roles include developers (Ruby, PHO, Web UI/UX, Java, etc), Product Marketing Manager, Sales Directors, Account Executives, Sales Engineers, and more!
(more…)
October 25, 2010
The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market: Implications for Employment and Earnings
David Autor, MIT Department of Economics and National Bureau of Economic Research
The Hamilton Project
Introduction:
“Between December 2007, when the U.S. housing and financial crises became the subject of daily news headlines, and March of 2010, the latest period for which data are available, the number of employed workers in the United States fell by 8.2 million, to 129.8 million from 138.0 million. In the same interval, the civilian unemployment rate nearly doubled, to 9.7 percent from 5.0 percent, while the employment-to-population ratio dropped to 58.6 percent from 62.7 percent—the lowest level seen in more than 25 years. Job losses of this magnitude cause enormous harm to workers, families, and communities. (more…)
October 22, 2010
How America Can Create Jobs
By Andy Grove, of Intel & Lecturer in Management Stanford Graduate School of Business
This is an interesting article discussing the need to recreate the scaling process in the U.S., i.e. nurture the start-up, fund it, but then rather than expatriate the manufacturing abroad, keep the jobs domestic. In this way not only is there more U.S. employment but we can also harness and nurture the scaling and innovation that comes with being an integral part of an effective ecosystem in which technology know-how can accumulate, experience can build on experience, and closer relationships can be forged between suppliers and customers. The author cites examples of the job machine (scaling and innovation process) breaking down in computers, and in alternative energy. Photovoltaics, a U.S. invention, are now primarily manufactured in China. “U.S. employment in the making of photovoltaic films and panels is perhaps 10,000—just a few % of estimated worldwide employment.” Not only have we foregone a large number of jobs, we risk breaking “the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today’s “commodity” manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry.” (more…)
October 6, 2010
Green Job Trends
Three Million Jobs and Counting!
You have got to love it! And you’ve got to read the new Clean Tech Job Trends 2010 report just released by Clean Edge and The SJF Institute. This month in our look at Green Job Trends, we focus on the new CleanEdge report. Here are some of the highlights from our perspective:
Top Jobs Sectors
The top five sectors for clean-tech job activity in the U.S. are solar power; biofuels and biomaterials; smart grid and energy efficiency; wind energy; and, new to the list this year, advanced transportation/vehicles.
Top Locations
The Top 15 metropolitan areas for clean-tech job seekers in the U.S. were little surprise based on where we do most of our work in green job placements.
- San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA
- Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside, CA
- Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH (more…)
May 26, 2010
“Green building” homes to be more energy efficient, even energy independent, is something that has really increased in popularity these days, as more and more people are becoming aware of the effects our energy consumption has on the planet, of rising energy expense costs, and even where we get our energy and fuels from. There are a few angles of approach to get at energy efficiency, and truth be told, taking all of these is the best, most efficient way to achieve this goal. What are some of these approaches?
The many ways to be green building a home towards energy efficiency, or indeed, energy independence, can be seen as coming mainly from four major areas – the Sun, the Earth, the Water and the Wind. This almost brings to mind the philosophical elements of the alchemists, Earth, Air, Fire and Water – not too far off, actually, in the alchemy of energy conservation. Of course, dealing with the sun, we have solar power, whether active or passive. Earth would be geo-thermal power, and the other two are even more obvious. Let’s look at geo-thermal…
For green building a home to use geo-thermal energy, a great way to utilize this also takes water into account. Sending simple pipelines of water a few meters underground below the house to be circulated into the home and back underground and back in again, is a superb way to heat and cool your home and its water at the same go. Former US President Bush’s home in Texas utilizes this very same technology, and has for years – many homes up north in Canada do as well. This is a great example of “green building”. Homes that have this type of technology installed can basically run off-grid, as far as air and water heating and cooling.
Solar power, as I mentioned before, can be active as well as passive. The active form uses solar panels, which these days are far more efficient than they were decades ago, and much less expensive as well, and the passive form is usually structured into the green building of the home itself – its overall shape, which way it faces, the window exposure, the use of convection enveloping designs in the structure of the home itself using a “double-hulled” design, and so on. Green building homes with these designs in mind make for a far less impact on our environment, and also aid in the needed erasure of our huge “carbon footprint” we’ve stamped onto the Earth.
Wind and water are other angles of approach, whether you use windmills or waterwheels to generate electricity, or perhaps even both in tandem. These systems often use a battery of a few cells, such as those used in cars, or a single cell such as those used in forklifts, in order to store the energy created for continuous use. Using all of these angles of approach, we can see how green building homes with them all in use can create a totally energy efficient, even energy independent home to live in.
If you’re interested in learning more about green building and other things related to alternative energy, then you’ve got to check out the EcoPlusHome project.
Bryan Kenny and his family are an average North American family with one exception…they’re living in the EcoPlusHome.
The EcoPlusHome is a prefabricated home powered by alternative energies like solar thermal, geothermal and photovoltaic. Bryan and his family will show the world that it is possible to live self sustained for a 12 month period by showcasing their journey living in the EcoPlusHome on their blog.
Bryan and his family welcome you to join their journey to self sufficiency on their blog http://ecoplushome.com/blog.
Author: Bryan Kenny
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Low-volume PCB maker
Older Posts »
|
|
