I’ve decided not to let my eight-year-old son listen to or read the news anymore because politicians say such stupid things it may impact my kid’s future. The latest comes from Pennsylvania’s governor and this one was a doozy.

Pennsylvania’s Governor Tom Corbett wants teachers to stop educating themselves. Turns out teachers in that state get pay raises when they get a master’s degree and the Gov. wants to put an end to that. We all know states have major budget woes, but instead of just saying Pennsylvania doesn’t have the money for the raises, his office is claiming such degrees may be worthless.

WHYY, my local public radio station, reported this morning that “Corbett’s budget secretary, Charles Zogby, argued advanced degrees don’t automatically make someone a better teacher.”

OK, my son was listening to this while eating his french toast. I always have the radio on because I want to catch up on the news, and I figure it helps the kids learn something. But this morning I had to rethink my strategy. You see, my son doesn’t really love school that much. He’s a good student but he doesn’t have as much fun in school as he does playing with friends, or playing video games, or playing with his Legos. So, he goes to school reluctantly and is always asking questions about why school is important.

We spend a lot of time explaining to him how important school and learning is to his future, and it takes just one pompous Governor to ruin everything. (more…)

I’ll admit it, I’m addicted to food TV; and I’m also a closet foodie. I like to cook. I like talking about cooking, and I love to eat. But should I be a chef?

I don’t think I should, but secretly I dream about it. Come on, admit it; it’s your secret passion too. Well, maybe not a secret passion for many of you because it turns out cooking schools are bursting at the seams.

Enrollment in culinary schools is booming; and Mark Erickson, vice president/dean for The Culinary Institute of America (CIA), told me a while back that: “People are re-pondering the importance of food in our lives. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that food is a topic on the national agenda. People are thinking about the health, social and political implications food has and it’s a wonderful time to think about a career in the food profession.”

This, my foodie friends, is a good and bad thing. (more…)

I got an email a while back from a former vice president at a bank who told his boss he needed medical leave for treatment related to his mental illness. “Shortly thereafter,” he said, “I became expendable.”

The executive, who I’ll call Mr. C., faced something many employees with mental illness face — bias in the workplace. And it’s a growing problem. (more…)

I can’t tell you how often soon-to-be college seniors ask me if they should bypass job-hunting in this crummy economy and go to graduate school instead. The feeling is they can put off having to fight tooth and nail in a tough job market with limited jobs, especially for Gen Y.

Well, I posed this question to my new intern Evie Hayman and she researched the issue. She came up with some directions for you grads-to-be, and for parents who may read this and pass it along to their kids. (more…)

If you had the displeasure of watching the contrived Undercover Boss TV series last night, there was one saving grace. You got a chance to see the glass ceiling up close and personal.

Rich McClure, CEO of United Van Lines, went undercover in his own company to see what was going right and wrong in the trenches. In a twist, his wife joined him in the undercover game because he was fearful he would be recognized in one of the offices he was supposed to visit. His wife got an earful from claims manager Linda Picard about how United Van Lines was a “good ol’ boys network” and she said she gave up long ago when it came to advancing in the company.

“It’s very, very, very difficult for women to move up,” said Linda, a 28-year veteran of the company.

At the end of the show, the CEO is supposed to do right by all the workers by giving them more money, better working conditions, or a chance to get a better job in the company. Guess what Linda got? (more…)

No matter how disgusting a creature you think Charlie Sheen is, his accusations against his former employer who fired him are genius. The guy is actually claiming in a lawsuit filed yesterday he was canned because his managers thought he was disabled. And his bozo bosses actually said as much to him and to the media.

It’s an interesting case that opens up the question of whether an employer can terminate or take any negative job action against a worker that has a disability or is perceived as having a disability. I say perceived because we don’t know for sure what Sheen suffers from. It’s all media speculation at this point. But even if he isn’t disabled under the strict definition of disabled, the law also protects against adverse employment action if an employer just thought a worker was disabled and as a result did something crummy to that worker.

Sheen doesn’t say in his suit that he has a disability, but he does say his employer thought he had a mental and physical disability and thus fired him as a result instead of accommodating his disability, which is required under federal and California law. (more…)

What is it about politicians today and their ideas on job creation? Lately it seems both parties have convinced themselves that cajoling CEOs will help reignite job growth in this country.

First President Obama held a CEO summit to find out why businesses aren’t hiring. Now the Republicans — who have spent so much time on budget cutting that they forgot one of their main promises, creating jobs — are feeling the political heat and turning their attentions to the job market. And guess what, they want to meet with business leaders as well. They’ve scheduled a big teleconference with the business community for next week.

Well, Obama’s power powwow in December didn’t do much to light the fire under CEOs, and I suspect the Republicans won’t get much job blood from the not-hiring stone that has become Corporate America. Companies are making big profits, and your productivity is skyrocketing, so they figure why rock the profit boat.

It got me thinking about a politician who actually did create jobs after an economic catastrophe, and while I don’t know for sure, meeting with CEOs probably wasn’t at the heart of his strategy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt created jobs programs and gave new rights to workers and labor unions.

It seems the opposite is going on right now. (more…)

OK, you made me do it Corporate America. I had decided not to post a blog about International Women’s Day, which is today. But now I feel compelled to do so.

I didn’t want to blog because commemorations like this are often empty and useless, and end up as nothing more than a way for corporations to promote their so-called good deeds. For example, Google is helping the effort by including a graphic for the occasion on its search page and the company put together a map so people can find the various events going on globally in conjunction with International Women’s Day.

It’s great that Google wants to piggy back on a cause for women empowerment, but what about concentrating on your own board room? Google has only two female board members and only one women who is part of the executive management team.

Look, I know Google isn’t alone in this pathetic showing of women leaders. (more…)

Charlie Sheen finally got fired by Warner Bros. so I’m hoping it’s the last we’ll hear from the women-abusing egomaniac. But, I’m not holding my breath. Famous rich guys like Sheen always make a comeback because employers are willing to give people like him a second chance even though they get terminated in such a public way.

But the same doesn’t go for the rest of us. Getting fired can taint your career for years.

Even if you’re the perfect person for a job, hiring managers are not going to look kindly at a past that includes getting axed because of something you did, or just leaving your former employer with a bad taste in his or her mouth. According to a survey by OfficeTeam, a staffing company, hiring managers “remove more than one in five (21 percent) candidates from consideration after speaking to their professional contacts.”

And even if your former boss feels compelled to keep tight-lipped about your past transgressions for fear of being sued, the digital age may doom you anyway. You never know what information is out there about you, and often workers doom themselves. I’ve seen more than one tweet about someone getting fired. Why do people put this information out there about themselves? (more…)

“They don’t put you in a class with people your age Mommy?” my daughter asked me when I returned from a local University on Saturday. I was there to take a practice test for a graduate school exam and it was worse than any nightmare I envisioned.

Everyone was twenty-minus in the classroom; the seats were horribly uncomfortable; the bubbles on the test grid were way smaller than I remembered; and the test questions made my head hurt. They were like those horrific questions you got in math class that some masochistic test editor came up with to toy with the world. “You have four pilots and four copilots, and four planes take off in a certain order, but we’re not going to tell you the order or which pilot goes with which copilot, but you’re still going to have to figure out the pairing and when they take off….”

Ugh!

It’s been years since I’ve taken a test of any kind, other than medical tests, and it was quite a rude awakening. Yes, CareerDiva is pondering going back to school. (more…)