Pivot Point

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How do you maximize the impact you have with your scarce resources, such as time and money?

One answer is to analyze whatever you do and find the “PivotPoint” – the activity which maximizes the efficiency and effectiveness of the enterprise. Finding PivotPoints and focusing our energy and those of our clients on them, has given them the leverage needed for many successes.

Today, many politicians and educational experts are focusing on Pre-Kindergarten education as a PivotPoint in the development of our young people’s education. I know the value of that, having conducted the first national evaluation of the needs of handicapped children for Head Start Services many years ago, and then using a government grant to demonstrate the effectiveness in 10 model agencies. Today’s mainstreaming of these children is the outgrowth.

In the State of the Union Address, President Obama was also looking for PivotPoints for college age students to find jobs in their chosen careers. He knows that research by Associated Press, McKinsey and others show that over half of the college students aren’t finding jobs commensurate with the training they received in schools.  But focusing on what more schools can do (and they can do more) misses the PivotPoint where maximum leverage is possible.

For centuries, “apprentice programs” offered a model. Young people get experience at the company in both learning and applying new skills and learn how to work effectively in the organizations. These program work because the focus of education is the worksite where people serve as Mentors. For trades, this model works well. For white collar jobs, this model might not work as well. But it suggests an ideal solution: offering students career-related experiences in the actual workplace, with supervisors who serve as Mentors.

Mentoring interns is the perfect PivotPoint. Companies can pay for this experience themselves, as they did with apprentices, as long as they design programs that benefit everyone – the young person, the company and the Mentor. As an intern, a young person learns about technical career skills and how to work effectively in a work environment. Thus, helping companies increase the number of quality mentoring internships becomes a desirable goal for the United States, especially when extra money for school education is scarce.

MentorOurKids, the non-profit we started, is a PivotPoint organization. It’s goal is to empower and enable organizations to provide career-rich mentoring experiences for young people by helping the company design programs that more than pay for themselves. No outside government aid is ever needed. Proper design allows the company to evaluate the productivity of the mentored interns by recognizing the benefits. In addition to the increased productivity, expanded and improved brand reputation, and improved management skills by Mentors, one of the greatest benefits is cost-effectiveness of recruitment. As one financial institution noted, its spreads a net to work with several new interns each year in order to find those special ones with both the skills and acumen to grow as well as ability to fit into the organization’s culture!

The mentoring internship identifies whether a person can do the job and will fit into the culture.  Compare that to hiring a worker at a much higher salary and waiting 60-90 days (or more) before discovering that there really is no cultural fit. Given that half of all hires don’t work out – offering mentoring internships is definitely a valuable Recruitment PivotPoint!

Contact us to learn more about how Mentor Our Kids can help your organization experience a ROI on its internship program and even if you’re looking to recruit new employees can be a critical PivotPoint. istambase.xyz avis apotek online