Our Despairing, Alienated, Mass Murdering Young Men
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One thing we know about our latest mass murderer in Texas is that high school - our education institutions - weren't meeting his needs: he quit it.
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How do we turn our despairing, angry, alienated young men into people with direction, with hope?
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I tried to help people find career direction, at one point, in my life and so I know it can be done. We need, perhaps, at the 9th grade level, an at least, 6 month course, maybe a full year course, entitled: Finding Career Direction.
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When I did it - I borrowed ideas from many sources.
1. I talked about Life Balance with the client.
2. I tried to help the client clarify their values.
3. I tried to help the client understand their personality type, their dominant and inferior functions and careers that might be a good fit with their personality type.
4. I talked about the client's interests and about careers that might use them.
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The Intake Sheet I Used based on instruments I was familiar with:
The Life Balance Sheet
In order to get a snapshot of your life balance at the present time, rate each of the following areas on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 would be high and 1 would be low. Delete any areas that are not important to you. Add any areas that are not listed, but that are important to you. In rating each area ask yourself – “How satisfied am I…” This is a subjective assessment. It is not about how your family or colleagues or neighbors see you; it is not about success; it is about your personal satisfaction right now. Scores will change weekly, daily – even hourly as circumstances change. Do not look for ultimate truth; just check in with how you feel at this moment about how satisfied you are with each of the following areas in your life.
Personal Growth
Money
Health
Friendships
Family
Work/Career
Physical Environments
Significant Other/Romance
Fun and Recreation
Spiritual Life
Use of Time
VALUES RATING SHEET
Rate the Values in the list below by assigning each value a number from 1 to 10 where 10 is of the highest importance to you and 1 indicates the least importance. Add any other values of importance to you not listed on this page on the bottom of the page and rate them, too.
Self-Actualization
Achievement
Advancement
Making Life More Beautiful
Altruism
Leadership
Autonomy
Creativity
Economic Rewards
Living The Life Style I Want
Personal Development
Physical Activity
Prestige
Adventure
Social Interaction
Economic Security
Variety
Structure
Quality Time With Family
Fun and Recreation
Physical Environment
Love
Health
Spirituality
Self-awareness
Listening
Responding to Needs of Others
Managing Your Emotions
Problem Solving
Social Responsibility
Stress Management
Assertiveness
Balance
Fulfillment
Process
Add any other values you may have along with their rating to this list.
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I gave my clients the Myers-Briggs Interest Inventory and gave them every bit of information I had on their personality type for as Carl Jung said - Personality Type is the Archetype of Orientation.
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I gave my clients interests inventories so they could match their interests with careers in which they could use them.
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It is no accident these mass murderers treat other people like an It - these are people who have never known an I-Thou relationship.
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These despairing, angry young men have had a lifetime of Imposition - like our educational institutions today that Impose things on our youth without ever asking the question - What Do They Need To Unfold Their Potentiality - the Nature that they were born with.
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Our Families, Our Schools are not good enough environments.
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A political radio host recently asked his audience - how do you control your nature?. Wrong question. Have you ever seen a "bad" baby with a "bad" nature. The question should be - how do you survive a culture that does not meet your needs.
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Our Families, Our Schools Need To Be About Unfolding, Not Imposition
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Erich Fromm on The Relationship Between Violence and Being
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I do not believe in the concept of the Isolated Mind - the problem is this mentally ill person. I do believe we cannot be separated from our environment - you cannot look at the despair in our culture - the violence, the drug taking, the depression - and not look at how our institutions are not meeting human needs.
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We should not excuse the terrible crime that was committed in Texas, but if we do not learn from it - we guarantee it will be repeated.
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Martin Buber: "Everyone should carefully observe what way his heart draws him to, and then choose this way with all his strength."
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We need to help our children to do that. Freud said the mentally healthy person can work and love. An I-Thou relationship teaches a person to love. We can offer our 9th graders on the threshold of making course choices that will determine their future career direction - personality type inventories, interest inventories, values inventories, discussions about life balance, information about careers in a 6 month or 1 year course - Finding Career Direction. Our despairing, angry young men need help in finding direction. Our schools should be doing that.
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Some of the things I read in Searching for myself.
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I was writing The Search For Being when my Government Gang Stalking began around 2006. My personality type - INFJ - is among the rarest. Each personality type has its own psychology. When people don't understand you - they tend to project things on you. That's what happened when the Immature Fireman who was my new neighbor got me targeted. I remain targeted to this day.
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I asked a neighbor back then, why he was Gang Stalking me. He replied - you think you are better than us. That's how he interpreted my introversion. I tried another time to talk to him - neighbors were violating my property boundries (this was a big factor in starting my gang stalking). I told him in my introverted intuitive way - steeped in psychology - "boundries are important to me." Later I would read things like "The Communication Wheel Workbook" by Henry L. Thompson. Its thesis - different personality types speak different languages. It made me realize using my psychology speak/"boundries" completely didn't communicate with the Sensing Thinking type I was talking to. It just added to his thinking I was weird, better than he was.
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The chapter I didn't add to the Search For Being
Chapter 24
My Conception of God
When I graduated elementary school I won the religion award. I was good at memorizing catechism questions. My Roman Catholic religion was important to me. But when my mentally retarded brother was born, things didn’t make sense. I had learned we were made to obey God’s law so we could be happy with him one day in heaven. But my brother would never be able to do that. It was in junior high school that I began to doubt my faith. In high school I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but began to look forward to attending a Roman Catholic college in which I could take theology courses as part of the core curriculum to see if there were an intellectual basis to my waning faith, something to help me to believe again. I went to college, took the courses, but didn’t find what I was looking for. After college my search was on. I would wander the stacks in the library looking for something to believe in. I found Eastern religions. They made more sense to me than my Roman Catholic faith. But it was when I found the psychology section that I found something I could believe in. Psychology for many years became my religion. It showed me how to live my life.
Then in 2006 I was gang stalked. Gang stalking is when a great many people join together to stalk a target. It begins with a conflict with another person. In my case, at first this person got just a few people to use gang stalking tactics to try to make me leave where I was living. In gang stalking lies are spread about a target and a kind of psychological warfare is begun to try to undermine the mental health of the target and to leave him or her so unsettled so as to flee from the situation. But, in my case, I didn’t flee. Just as the ringleader of the gang stalking had his reasons for doing what he did, some from his past, some from the present, I had mine, too. I grew up in a home where I saw, year after year, my father abuse my mother. I had always wanted her to fight back. But she never did. I think back then in my childhood I decided I would never be like her. So I fought the gang stalkers with every bit of creativity I could muster. But as the psychological warfare dragged on, I needed renewal for a sagging spirit. I started to watch the Word Network. And I discovered what to me was a most amazing thing. I made connections in what the preachers I was watching were saying and what I had learned in studying psychology and psychoanalysis. When they talked of the Holy Spirit. I thought unformulated experience. I related what they said to what had become the foundation of my belief system, the different constructions of the various authors in my book, The Search for Being. I had become an atheist. But as I listened I found what I had been looking for earlier in my life, a God I could believe in.
I couldn’t believe in a cosmic papa who reigned in heaven and demanded we obey his law and give him praise to go to heaven after we died. Kant’s ideas that space and time might be in our mind, not in reality, had deprived me of the belief heaven was a place. My study of psychology had resulted in my believing in the narrative self, that we were just the stories we told and subsequently believed about ourselves. I believed in the idea of multiple selves, that we had a multiple subpersonalities. I believed Freud when he said the self was a bodily self. I believed the Buddhist who taught me all was constant change. For me there was no self, just the stories we told about ourself. There were really just physical processes. And as I thought I began to see the concept of God as a correlate of the concept of the Self. I began to see them both as existing on what one of my favorite thinkers, David Bohm, would call the explicate level. I related that to what the Bible called seeing “through a glass darkly”. All our words were feeble attempts to describe an underlying reality. The word “self” was a concept. Now I saw the word “God” was that, too.
When I thought of the Big Bang theory and envisioned the Singularity becoming many, becoming the stuff of an expanding universe, pantheism began to make sense. While I couldn’t believe in the cosmic papa sitting on his throne in heaven and demanding obedience to his will or sending his creation to hell if it disobeyed, I could believe in David Bohm’s wholeness, the Singularity, the one that became the Many. I could conceive of the Wholeness as eternal. But rather than seeing that wholeness as a transcendent other, I saw how the concept of the Holy Ghost so often spoken about by Christian pastors, the concept of unformulated experience enunciated by psychoanalyst Donnel Stern, might be the link to the God within, an immanent God, our participation in that wholeness. I saw us as being a part of the Singularity from which all things came. That for me was the equivalent to the concept of soul. Yet, I could not agree with those who believed they were God. I saw all creation, from the ant to human beings, as participating in being, the being of the Singularity, but no part as being equivalent to the whole, the wholeness of which Bohm spoke, which encompassed all that was. Thus there was a place for humility in my worldview, a demand to listen in Buber’s I-Thou sense to all else that unfolded from the Singularity.
As I listened to the preachers on the Word Network I saw these preachers as fellow introverted intuitives. Dominant introverted intuitives, as I learned in my study of personality type, often become preachers, psychologists etc. I saw the prophets in the Bible as fellow introverted intuitives, too, who used their intuitive gifts to bring forth truths about our world. I felt at home again. The circle was complete. I felt like I finally understood what the religion of my childhood was saying. I had returned home again, but with the insights of an adult. Jesus had said he was speaking in parables to help the people to understand. This implied to me that the intuitive truths he knew, they might not understand. Yes, he was a “son of God,” but they too could participate in wholeness/god through the Holy Ghost. When asked which of the commandments was the most important, Jesus said, “is this: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. With those words I think Jesus gave us the key to inner peace, to peace on Earth, the greatest ethical system one could have. Our logical minds tell us A is different than B, the world is made up of separate, individual things. Human beings have evolved/survived because we could fight for our self-interest. A goal of psychoanalysis, psychology is a strong ego. But Jesus exhortation said, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it.” I interpret that as whosoever shall lose his ego, lose his focus on self, self-interest, and identify with the Whole, shall gain it, eternal life. The self is an illusion, a “tale told by an idiot”, only the Whole exists, to understand our participation in the Whole is to gain eternal life. Then we can love our neighbor as ourself. I could not praise a demanding God who required my praise or would send me to hell., but I naturally am filled with praise and awe for each new day, for the beauty of the sky, a tree, a stream. I readily appreciate the miraculous universe that I didn’t create that I am lucky enough to participate in. For me, that is the attitude, the attitude of praise that Jesus spoke of. That attitude of gratitude is the key to peace and happiness, I think.
There might be gang stalkers, there might be the Hitlers, but as I heard pastor Paula White say on the Word Network – “the fight was fixed”, God would win out in the end, even the Earth might pass away, I thought, but the Whole Bohm spoke of would survive. I participated in some small way in that whole. It was that in me, I thought, that was eternal. All the rest was as the Buddhist had said was constant change. I felt a sense of consolation in that.
When I was very young, I remembered sometimes awakening in the night and thinking about what it would be like to die. I felt a deep and trembling anxiety at the thought of my own extinction, at not existing anymore, at the thought of my death. But now I saw things differently. Like the Buddhist I saw the Self as an illusion, a word, a narrative self, a “tale told by an idiot”, the result of seeing “through the glass darkly”. I saw the concept of God like that, too. A word. While Jesus spoke in parables to be understood by the common man as the zen masters (who showed me we could not say, but only point) know, and as Alfred Korzybski taught – the map is not the territory. All our words are pale reflections of the underlying reality which quantum mechanics, which relativity point out is whole, with no separate existing things.
I believe if we want to understand what evil is we have to look at the concept of narcissism. Our evolutionary past has taught us how to survive. We each are motivated mostly by self-interest. If that were not so, we would not have survived. Certainly, altruism, particularly, at the level of our own family, is present, too, and contributed to the survival of the species. But now as I listened to the Word Network, as I experience gang stalking, I realized something else. I began to wonder if evil only exists on the explicate level, if it is a phenomena of otherness. I saw the bible story of Eve eating the forbidden apple can be as the individual usuping the domain of God, the many thinking they do not just participate in some small way in the whole, but, in their narcissism, that they are the whole, they are God. Eating of the tree of knowledge, thinking we are omniscient, exerting our will over that of the Whole, the whole within – that which we must obey because it is the stuff of what we are, the only thing that is, that which inspires rightly awe, at its unknowability, immensity, creative intelligence – that, to me, was the birth of evil, the temptation of the serpent. In our narcissism, each one of us, in pursuing our own self-interest at the expense of otherness bite the apple again. That to me was the original sin. That is the source, I concluded, of the evil of a Hitler, of a gang stalker. Love thy neighbor as thy self, Jesus said. What he did not say is because you are part of me, the Singularity, part of the oneness that is. Above all praise God, feel the sense of awe, the sense of gratitude at the wholeness, which is there for you, which you did not create. I think of the unbelievable beauty those that have seen it talk of in seeing outer space. That is what God means to me now.
So I have come full circle. The little girl who sat in her church amidst stained glass windows and felt a sense of awe, an oceanic feeling amidst the smell of incense from the altar, the organ music. I have found her again. That believer I was then has finally found something she can believe in. The Whole. I am a small part of that. To a certain extent I identify it with nature, a nature I participate in, a nature within me, I can discern by listening to what Donnell Stern called feelings of tendency within me that I can try to articulate with words, or drawing, or art. There is nothing I love more than feeling that sense of Godliness in nature, or in a deep conversation with another person best expressed by Martin Buber’s words, I-Thou, or watching an actor manifesting Spirit in a role or a conductor embodying Spirit in his work or a book or work of art in which I can feel the spirit that created it. For me those encounters with Spirit are God.
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Did Anyone in His Life Try To Get To Know The Mass Shooter?
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An Education That Is Imposititon Instead of Unfolding (of gifts) is Alienating.
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Interview Questions I Asked To Get To Know My Clients When I Did Career Advisement
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Interview Questions
- Tell me about your current work situation –
how long have you been there
what do you like about your current job
what do you hate about it?
- Tell me about your educational backround?
- What subjects did you like best in high school or college?
- What subjects did you dislike or hate?
- If you could design your own school what would it be like? What would you like to study? To learn more about?
- If you could be anything you wanted to be with no educational requirements what would you like to be?
- When you were a child or an adolescent what did you want to be when you grew up? Did you have any daydream occupations? Things you thought it would be interesting to do?
- What do you like to do in your spare time? What are your hobbies?
- What is a perfect day like for you? Did you ever have one of those days when everything goes right? What would a great day be like for you?
10. If I told you I was going to arrange for you to spend an hour with any occupational group you would find interesting… which occupational group would you enjoy spending time with?
11. What kind of things do you hate? What kind of things are hard for you?
12. What are your greatest strengths?
13. What are your greatest weaknesses?
14. What is it that not even your friends know about you?
15. What things in your life that you’ve done are you most proud of?
16. What skills would you like to have that you don’t have now?
17. Can you describe for me the kind of environment you’d like to work in? Would you rather work outdoors or indoors? What would the ideal environment be?
18. What motivates you to do your best?
19. What location would you like to work in?
20. What are the things in life that make you happiest? What are you passionate about?
21. If you could trade places with anyone in the world you wanted to for a day – who would you choose?
22. How do you feel about going back to school?
23. Jungian analysts talk about our personas, the social masks we wear, the roles we play and what they call the real self. How is your persona, your work self different from your real self?
24. If you were to die tomorrow, tell me what your regrets would be?
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The Kind of Thing We Could Use With a 9th Grader before he/she/they start selecting a direction in high school
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FINDING CAREER DIRECTION
Which skills would you like to use in your work? Print out the list of skills below and circle the ones you would like to use in your work. If there is time during the first interview you will read the skills you want to use in your work to your career coach. If there isn’t time in Session 1, keep the list to review with your coach in Session 4.
acting having responsibility performing
administering heading persuading
advising helping photographing
analyzing hypothesizing piloting
anticipating identifying planning
arranging illustrating playing
assessing imagining predicting
budgeting implementing preparing
building improving prescribing
calculating informing presenting
charting initiating printing
checking innovating problem solving
classifying initiating processing
coaching inspecting producing
collecting inspiring programming
communicating installing projecting
compiling instituting promoting
composing instructing proof-reading
computing integrating protecting
conceptualizing interpreting providing
consolidating interviewing publicizing
constructing intuiting purchasing
coordinating inventing questioning
counseling inventorying raising
deciding investigating reading
defining leading realizing
detecting lecturing reasoning
developing lifting recommending
devising listening reconciling
diagnosing logging recording
directing maintaining recruiting
discovering making rehabilitating
displaying managing relating
dissecting manipulating repairing
dramatizing mediating reporting
drawing meeting researching
driving memorizing resolving
editing mentoring responding
empathizing modeling restoring
enforcing monitoring risking
estimating motivating scheduling
evaluating navigating selling
experimenting negotiating serving
explaining observing setting-up
filing obtaining sewing
fixing operating showing
formulating ordering singing
founding organizing sketching
gathering originating solving
generating overseeing sorting
guiding painting speaking
summarizing
supervising
supplying
symbolizing
synthesizing
systematizing
talking
teaching
team-building
telling
tending
testing and proving
training
transcribing
translating
traveling
treating
trouble-shooting
typing
understanding
unifying
uniting
verbalizing
writing
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I got ideas for what I used in Career Advisement from many different sources, for instance, books on Coaching.
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Back then I used these websites:
Bonnie Calcagno
Find Career Direction
www.findcareerdirection.com
Web Sites To Help You in Making Career Decisions
WHERE DO I WANT TO GET MY EDUCATION?
Virtual College Tour – www.campustours.com
Community College Web – www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cc
Graduate School Programs – www.gradschools.com
Application Process – www.myfootpath.com
Test prep, admission guides, search for programs you are interested in – www.petersons.com
Search for colleges, business schools, law schools, medical schools, graduate schools, graduate programs – www.princetonreview.com
Vocational Education – certificates, bachlor’s, master’s, doctorate – business, trade, technical – www.rwm.org/rwm
Find degree programs, study in state you are looking for – www.usuniversities.com
Regionally accredited U.S. universities and colleges – www.utexas.edu/world/univ
Two, four year schools, vocational/technical, business, nursing, upper-level undergraduate - apply online – www.collegenet.com
Common Application – www.commonapp.org
ENTRANCE EXAM INFO
ACT – entrance exam – www.actstudent.org/index.html
College Board – exam descriptions – www.collegeboard.com
Educational Testing Service – info on testing – www.ets.org
Schools Who May Admit You With Low Test Scores – www.fairtest.org/uni/optional.htm
Kaplan: Test Prep and Admissions – test preparation – www.kaptest.com
INFO ON COLLEGE RANKINGS
College and University Rankings – www.library.uiuc.edu/edx/rankings.htm
Rankings by region – www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/eduhome.htm
SCHOLARSHIPS, LOANS
Adventures in Education – http://adventuresineducation.org
America’s CareerInfoNet: Scholarship Search Search – www.acinet.org/acinet/scholarshipsearch/
College Answer – walks you through every phase of process – www.collegeanswer.com
College Is Possible – www.collegeispossible.org
College Savings Plans Network – state saving plans – www.college
savings.org
eStudentLoan.com – private and government loan programs – www.estudentloan.com
FAFSA on the Web – federal student aid – www.fafsa.ed.gov
FastWeb – scholarship search – www.fastweb.com
Federal Student Aid – from U.S. Dept. Education – www.studentaid.ed.gov
FinAid! – funding college education – www.finaid.org
Hispanic Scholarship Fund – www.hsf.net
Mapping Your Future – selecting and paying for college – http://mapping-your-future.org
MyRichUncle – private lending – https://ww.myrichuncle.com
Nellie Mae – apply and prequalify for loans – www.nelliemae.com
Sallie Mae – leading provider of student loans – www.salliemae.com
ScholarshipHelp.org – www.scholarshiphelp.org
SuperCollege – submit question to experts – www.supercollege.com
United Negro College Fund – www.uncf.org
Back to College – adults finish degree started long ago – www.back2college.com
The Center For All Collegiate Information – organizes all college-related sites – www.collegiate.net
HEATH Resource Center – infor for STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES – www.heath.gwu.edu
Students.gov – U.S. government site for info – www.students.gov
U.S. Department of Education – overview of federal student aid, planning for college and technical training, graduate resources, studying abroad – download Student Guide to Financial aid – www.ed.gov/index.jhtml
CAREER PLANNING
Career Development eManual – www.cdm.uwaterloo.ca
Career Planning Process – looking for possible careers, not sure what to do next – www.bgsu.edu/offices/sa/career/students/planning_process.html
Planning a Career – choosing or changing a career – www.mapping-your-future.org/planning/
What Can I Do With a Major In – www.uncwil.edu/stuaff/career/Majors/Index.htm
About Career Planning – http://careerplanning.about.com/od/selfassessment/
AdvisorTeam – www.advisorteam.com/temperament_sorter/register.asp - Keirsey Temperament Sorter II
IDENTIFYING YOUR SKILLS
Job Readiness Tests – www.businessworks.bc.ca/tests.htm - what training may need
O*NET Skills Search – find occuspations that match your skills – http://online.onetcenter.org/skills/
America’s Career InfoNet – www.acinet.org/acinet
Career Guide to Industries – career info by industries – www.bls.gov/oco/cg
Career Voyages – high growth, high demand occupations – skills and education needed – www.careervoyages.gov
Licensed Occupations – www.careerinfonet.org/acinet/licensedoccupations/lois_state.asp
Occupational Outlook Handbook – www.bls.gov/oco
O*NET Online – http://online.onetcenter.org
Association of Computer-Based Systems for Career Information – state based career information www.acsci.org
AARP: Careers www.aarp.org/money/careers
American Society of Association Executives www.asacenter.org - associations
CareerJournal.com www.careerjournal.com - salary info, job hunting advice etc.
Careers in Business www.careers-in-business.com
Getcareerskills.com – www.acteonline.org/career/skills - TECHNICAL CAREERS and info
JIST Publishing – www.just.com
Job Accomodation Network www.jan.wwu.edu -increase employability of people with disabilities
JobProfiles.org – www.jobprofiles.org
MyCareerBlast.com www.mycareerblast.com - choosing college major, minor, uncover summer jobs and internships, grad school decisions
Pam Pohly’s Net Guide www.pohly.com/index.html - careers in healthcare
Job Corps http://jobcorps.doleta.gove - no cost education and vocational training programs
Registered Apprencticeship www.doleta.gov/atels_bat/ - learn a trade through apprenticeships
SALARY INFO
JobStar: Salary Info Index http://jobstar.org/tools/salary/
Salary Expert www.salaryexpert.com - regional salary reports
CLEARINGHOUSES
Careers.org www.careers.org - 4000 career related internet resources
The Riley Guide: Employment Opportunities and Job Resources on the Internet www.rileyguide.com
Statistics
FedStats www.fedstats.gov
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis www.bea.gov
U.S. Dept. of Labor www.dol.gov
U.S. Dept. Labor Statistics www.bls.gov
U.S. Dept Empl and Training www.doleta.gov
Business Mag
http://money.cnn.com/
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