A friend and colleague, Bill Bentley, writes about the use of professional certifications in the recruiting industry.
I had a long talk with a senior IT professional in Chicago last week expressing his deep frustration that despite his long and distinguished professional career, he could not get interviews without certain certifications despite being able to teach the topics himself.
Many of you looking for jobs are facing the same problem whether you know it or not. Certifications are being used to screen out candidates because of the huge numbers of applicants. An $8/hr person or worse, a computer program, is being used to scan resumes into the little pile that the hiring manager will look at and the big pile that gets thrown away.
Certifications which are being used A LOT for this purpose are Six Sigma, Lean, PMP and increasingly in the IT field, ITIL. In some cases the companies truly want these skills but in many cases they are nothing more than `wish list’ skills and objective facts that can be easily used by the resume screener for sorting.
If the jobs that you look at have these topics listed in the job descriptions you can be quite sure that without them, your resume is much more likely to end up in the big pile than the little pile. …
 So do you really need that certification just to get the job? Often an organization is trying to upgrade its bench strength by requiring certification, but how do you know it’s not just a charade and a meaningless recruiting filter. Maybe you want to be sure your prospective employer is serious, and that might take some digging and fortitude to be able to walk away from a company that’s just pretending.
  
Combining the questions of green and sustainability with the application of lean thinking to supply chain and logistics I offer these current publications for your consideration.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, presents two cases 1) the impact of global warming, population growth, rise of a global middle class through globalization, and 2) America’s loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11, combine to ever greater instability. The rise of new powerful economic nations is completely changing the way the world works. Whether you buy in to the doom and gloom you might give some thought to how solving these problems present the greatest economic opportunity of our time.
Streamlined: 14 Principles of building & Managing the Lean Supply Chain by Mandyam M. Srinivasan stresses systems thinking. It integrates two management philosophies: the theory of constraints and lean thinking, and illustrating how they complement and reinforce each other to create the smooth flow of goods and services through the supply chain. Thought provoking.
End-to-End Lean Management by Robert Trent describes a broad array of waste that affects all supply chains and shows how to make lean performance improvement a reality across your entire supply chain. Trent he explains and details key lean objectives, including standardization, flow, optimization, and waste elimination. An easy read.
 Dr. Shewhart was a prominent scientist with the Western Electric Engineering Department back in the 1920s. In 1924, Dr. Shewhart devised a framework for the first application of the statistical method to the problem of quality control. Shewhart wrote a note to R.L. Jones, responding to his request for some type of inspection report that “might be modified from time to time, in order to give a glance at the greatest amount of accurate information”. He attached a sample chart “designed to indicate whether or not the observed variations in the percent of defective apparatus of a given type are significant; that is, to indicate whether or not the product is satisfactory.”
Shewhart’s example was the world’s first schematic control chart. In one short letter, he had set forth the essential principles and considerations of quality control. As he pursued this work, Shewart gave birth to the modern scientific study of statistical process control.
In 1931, Shewhart’s book ‘Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product’ contained his findings on statistical sampling techniques. A Western Electric colleague, W. Edwards Deming, spread the word on Shewhart’s work when he joined the US War Department, and later when he taught the fundamentals of quality in Japan.
Taylor, Frederick Winslow (1856-1915), American industrial engineer, who originated scientific management in business. He was born in Germantown (now part of Philadelphia), Pennsylvania. In 1878, he began working at the Midvale Steel Company. He became foreman of the steel plant and applied himself to studies in the measurement of industrial productivity. Taylor developed detailed systems intended to gain maximum efficiency from both workers and machines in the factory. These systems relied on time and motion studies, which help determine the best methods for performing a task in the least amount of time. In 1898 he became joint discoverer of the Taylor-White process, a method of tempering steel. Taylor served as consulting engineer for several companies. His management methods were published in The Principles of Scientific Management.
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