Albany

The Grantsmanship Center is holding a three day seminar on how to generate unrestricted funds using earned income. Excerpts from their announcement:

Would you like to generate unrestricted funds,
while strengthening your nonprofit organization’s core mission
and developing more credibility with funders?

Come find out how! Sign up now for The Grantsmanship Center’s Earned Income Strategies workshop, offered in Schenectady, NY, May 5-7, 2008, and hosted by The Hamilton Hill Arts Center.

Tuition for this comprehensive 3-day training is $575.
To make sure that every participant receives individual attention, enrollment is limited to 30 participants, so register early to reserve your spot.
To register for this workshop: http://www.tgci.com/eisregister.asp
For more information, visit http://tgci.com/eis.shtml
or call The Grantsmanship Center’s Registrar at (213) 482-9860.

Boston

The Grantsmanship Center’s signature Grantsmanship Training Program is coming to Boston, Massachusetts, March 17-21, 2008. The program will be hosted by Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD).

The Grantsmanship Training Program is a comprehensive, hands-on workshop that covers the complete grant development process, from researching funding sources to writing and reviewing grant proposals. More than 110,000 nonprofit and government personnel have attended this fast-paced, five-day workshop, which is followed with a full year of membership support services.

And while we’re at it…the National Institutes of Health will hold their yearly SBIR-STTR conference July 22nd and 23rd in Atlanta Ga. They are charging $150.00 tuition this year.

This week’s New Yorker magazine, (and next week’s too, since it is a double issue), has a wonderful article in their occasional “Annals of Invention” series about the artist and inventor Steve Hollinger called Thinking in the Rain–An Artist Takes on the Umbrella. If you ever wanted to find out about the provenance of Tubers and Zots, more than you ever knew about clerical haberdashery, manufacturing in China, and umbrella design (tricky), it is all in this article…unfortunately, not online, but in the print issue.

But there is a sentence fragment buried in there that just begs for a fuller explanation. Top of page 95 second column.

His mother, Myrna, a sculptor who works primarily in the medium of dried fish, said about him recently…

I’ve been reading Daniel J. Levitin’s book This Is Your Brain on Music. In particular, I was interested to learn of the ten-thousand hours theory of mastery…that it takes that long to become “world class” at something.

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert–in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people don’t seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet fond a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Of course, my question is, how long does it take to become “pretty good”?

And, after searching Google, I see I’m pretty late to this party; there are further discussions in the context of game development, and personal productivity.

More Grantsmanship! The full notice posted below:

The Grantsmanship Center’s signature Grantsmanship Training Program is coming to Boston, Massachusetts, March 17-21, 2008. The program will be hosted by Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD).

The Grantsmanship Training Program is a comprehensive, hands-on workshop that covers the complete grant development process, from researching funding sources to writing and reviewing grant proposals. More than 100,000 nonprofit and government personnel have attended this fast-paced, five-day workshop, which is followed with a full year of membership support services.

During this workshop, participants learn The Grantsmanship Center’s proposal-writing format, the most widely used in the world. In addition to practicing advanced techniques for pursuing government, foundation, and corporate grants, participants work in small teams to develop and then review real grant proposals.

Participants exit the class equipped with new skills, new professional connections, and follow-up support services for one year, including professional proposal review, access to The Grantsmanship Center’s exclusive online funding databases, and an array of other benefits. Many also leave with proposals that are ready to polish and submit.

Tuition for the Grantsmanship Training Program is $875 ($825 for each additional registrant from the same organization).

To ensure personalized attention, class size is limited to 30 participants. To register online, to learn about scholarship opportunities for qualifying organizations, or for more information, visit http://www.tgci.com/gtptraining.shtml. Or call The Grantsmanship Center’s Registrar at (800) 421-9512.

If you’re wondering why the Grantsmanship Training Program is five days (when other grantwriting classes are shorter)…

· The Grantsmanship Training Program is not a quick overview of “grantwriting.”

· The Grantsmanship Training Program is an intensive, small-group, total-immersion workshop that covers funding research, program planning and proposal writing.

· By integrating program planning into our curriculum when we first created grantsmanship training, The Grantsmanship Center anticipated the increased demand by grantmakers for more accountability, smarter programming, and a stronger, more demonstrable return on granted funds.

· Grantsmanship Training Program participants prepare and critique real grant proposals under expert guidance during the class.

· You can’t get this quality of in-depth training, personal attention and hands-on experience in a two-, three- or even a four-day workshop!

The Brazen Careerist has an interesting perspective about work-life balance and career advancement for the 21st century. Much of what she writes might be considered appalling from a hiring manager’s perspective, but a lot of information is right on. Here’s her take on how to get a job you’re not qualified for.

This issue comes up all the time with software jobs. Almost by definition, anyone working in software development or similar technology is “unqualified” for their current job, because they would never make the cut if the current job was formally searched. Likewise, companies would like to hire people who are on the cutting edge of the latest technology; it is not uncommon to see jobs for, say AJAX or Voice over IP with five years experience…even though AJAX or VoIP have barely been mainstream for two years. What the hiring manager may not know is that a good candidate for AJAX might be someone who knows Javascript, CSS, XML and backend databases, and a good potential VoIP person would be someone who is all over local area networking, DNS, DHCP, and telephony. If they don’t know it, it incumbant on the job-seeker to convince the hiring manager.

Update: Video Here
The Vermont Software Developer’s Alliance is a trade organization of 60 companies that create software applications, shrinkwrapped programs and software tools. As part of a consortium with Seven Days, Burlington CEDO and our state and local colleges we created a creative/tech career fair for job-seekers who were looking for positions in the green technology, scientific, software development and creative arts.

It is really a kick when you can Make Stuff Happen, and it was evident right from the start that the event would be a success. But then on Saturday I was overwhelmed… I started talking to people at 9:30 and didn’t stop until 4:30 with a brief lunch break. I was at the vtSDA table the whole time wearing my vtSDA hat.

I think it is great from the other comments that people did think that there were a lot of qualified attendees. I was encouraged by the number of companies participating, but wasn’t sure about the people I was talking to. I found a mix:

1. C++/C#/Java programmers, often seniors or recent graduates

2. “Web Developers” – lots of people calling themselves this, a few who could cite more substantial accomplishments (work with database back-ends) and others who clearly were fishing around. A couple cited experience with ASP.NET

3. “Project Managers” – former programmers who may have failed to make the next leap to current development technologies. (?)

4. Some “Career Changers” – I explained to several folks that all of our vtSDA companies weren’t just looking for hard-core techies but will need account managers, financial folks etc.

5. I had several folks were were IT/Network Managers, and interestingly, I wasn’t sure who to send them to except to suggest larger companies, and the colleges.

6. Lots of comments that started with “I had no idea…”

• I had no idea there were so many cool companies in Vermont
• I had no idea that I could actually get a technical job here, I thought I’d have to go to Boston, or Silicon Valley. (the two places most mentioned…)
• I had no idea what I need to know to have a career in software development
• I had no idea that company XYZ had done animation for Lord of the Rings

I think there are some challenges and opportunities for us on the “low end” and entry-level. I talked to several folks about Vermont HiTec. Several wanted to know how to get started or how to improve their situation or how to transition. Some were discouraged to find out that a B.A. was considered a minimum qualification for many of our companies. Most were short on specifics…. nobody mentioned that they knew much about software engineering, source-code control, ECLIPSE, RUBY. “Web Programmers” didn’t mention XML or CSS. Lots who identified themselves as programmers mentioned VB6….and were interested in taking the free Visual Studio CDs. (This I find a little worrisome.) Nobody complained that the CDs were from VS 2005 (!) If I was hiring a “Microsoft” programmer, I’d sure like to hear that they had been using Orcas (the VS2008 beta versions) for the past six months.

There were enough take-aways here for another discussion about career planning. In the meantime, here is a link to the Stuck in Vermont vBlog which has a video showing Dealer.com‘s new offices. Can’t get any more innovative than their digs.