Great Career Resources Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Labor
The U.S. Department of Labor recently sponsored a challenge called “Tools for America’s Job Seekers Challenge.” I caught the tail end of this 3-month challenge and managed to sign up to vote for some of the websites that folks submitted.
Last week, I received an e-mail from the “DOL Challenge Team” that contained some useful information about the challenge and future plans. Here’s the bulk of the e-mail:
“Thank you for participating in the Department of Labor’s Tools for America’s Job Seekers Challenge. This was the Department of Labor’s first foray into the use of crowd sourcing and other web 2.0 technologies, and we consider your participation a major factor in the success of the Challenge.
“Over the course of the three month challenge, over 16,000 registered users cast 30,000 votes for the 634 submitted tools. The Department of Labor has examined these tools, users, and votes for fraud, abuse, and other questionable content and has posted the top tools in alphabetical order on www.careeronestop.org/jobseekertools. We also intend to make the www.dolchallenge.ideascale.com available for some time to allow job seekers, the workforce community, and the public to browse and use all submitted tools.
“During the next few weeks, the Department of Labor will upload all submitted job tools to www.careeroenstop.org so job seekers, the workforce community, and the public will be able to link to these tools from a single site.
“The Department of Labor will continue updating this list of online job tools, and hopes to conduct more “Tools for America’s Job Seekers” challenges in the future. Thank you again for participating in the Challenge, and be sure to check out the top tools on www.careeronestop.org.”
I give major kudos to the team behind this inaugural challenge. Both the challenge and this e-mail reminded me of the wonderful career-related resources produced by the Department of Labor.
The one resource provided by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that seems to be used most often by both career information providers as well as seekers is the Occupational Outlook Handbook.
I know I refer students to this resource quite often.
Now I need to check out those other resources as well, like the CareerOneStop.org website.