Get Skilled

Back in June we realized that having a set of skills, especially uncommon ones, are helpful in surviving a recession. Duh.

Well your opportunity has arrived, my underskilled friends. On Saturday, October 10th the Brooklyn Skillshare offers a fun-packed day of getting schooled in getting skilled.

Do you want to learn how to fix your own bike, make your own butter and kombucha, prepare raw food, or tap dance? All of the above?? I thought so!

All they ask in return is a suggested donation of $10, and the schedule can be found here.

Be Cool To Your School?

Not if you're Trina Thompson, a woman who is suing her college for its failure to find her a job after graduation.

Thompson received her degree in information technology this past May from Monroe College in the Bronx, finishing with a 2.7 GPA and a "good attendance record." She now charges the school's Office of Career Advancement with putting "insufficient effort" into assisting her in her job search.

According to her complaint, "the office of career advancement information technology counselor did not make sure their Monroe e-recruiting clients call their graduates that recently finished college for an interview to get a job placement. They have not tried hard enough to help me."

She also complains that, "they favor more toward students that got a 4.0."

Sounds like maybe Ms. Thompson shoulda gone to law school.

Got Skills?

While the over-educated masses sit around on their butts desperate for work and cursing their expensive, seemingly useless degrees, a certain population of U.S. workers can't even keep up with their job offers.

The New York Times reports that companies and contracters looking to hire experienced skilled labor are having trouble filling the positions -- it took one manager 18 months to find the 80 welders he needed for one particular project.

Those who are looking to retrain for a new skill in order to dive back into that job market should consider the following, according to the Times: welding; critical care nursing; electrical lining; special education; geotechnical engineering; repiratory therapy; and civil engineering. Nurses, as always, are also in demand, but slightly less so than in recent years, partly because many are coming out of retirement back into the work force since the recession hit.

But, however wise it may be to get some training now, this immediate opening in the job market is not for recent vocational school graduates Most of the jobs going unfilled right now require skills that take years to attain, and in some cases employers even demand ten years of experience before considering a resume. Plus, according to one Oregon-based research firm, often times those who have the vocational training necessary for these jobs do not have the educational background that employers seek in filling demanding and high-paying skilled labor jobs- so getting an academic education first is not a waste of time, but instead a means to reach the upper level and higher paying of skilled labor jobs.

Street Art for the Recession

Perhaps it is the same air of renewed commitment and creativity among artists that I blogged about last week that we have to thank for a whole new batch of fascinating and uniquely recession-era street art cropping up in New York.


Back in April, Brian Lehrer interviewed the founders of Wooster Collective, a group of street artists based in Manhattan, about street art given the listener reports of some fresh graffiti and stencils showing up all over the city New York with a distinct economic theme.

The WNYC website linked to a couple of great examples of these pieces, below:

1) a sarcastic bubble-letter sticker encouraging you to "enjoy subprime lending;"
2) a stencil of former treasury secretary Henry Paulsen, fed. chairman Ben Bernanke, and former SEC chairman Christopher Cox, below the caption "Axis of Evil."
3) spraypaint by the Holland Tunnel asking, "where's my f*cking bailout?

Marc and Sarah Schiller, the Wooster Collective founders, describe street art as a "mirror to society," and say that it allows the city itself to act as a canvas for any artist with something to say. But, what is most exciting to me about this is really true for anyone with something to say. For this medium more than most, it seems anyone with "something to say" (and with the guts to risk getting caught) can be an artist.
Street art is a subversive medium, but one with mass access and a huge audience. The combination gives it great potential to communicate ideas which aren't expressed in the mainstream media, and need to squeeze themselves into the spotlight through other means instead.

In addition to standard spray paint graffiti and stencils, the Schillers mentioned a few more elaborate street art "installations" that can be found around New York.
I found one such installation artist with some great pieces online at WebUrbanist. Brad Downey dresses himself as a city maintenance or construction worker so as to be essentially invisible as he goes about setting up his funky installations, like these (right.)

Phone booth installations are popular, according to the Schillings, because so many of the phone booths in New York are unused, defunct, and forgotten.

Artists replace the backlit ads with their own work, adding something interesting to the landscape while aggressively rejecting the world of advertising our consumer culture, as well as commenting on a wasted urban infrastructure.

So perk up your peripheral vision next time you're on the streets, and see what art you find.