Ernest Blogging and Vlogging

Jobs Jobs Jobs are the focus of  The Whitehouse Jobs Summit.  The Summit will focus on three main areas:

• Green Jobs
• Infrastructure
• Small Business financing

Green Jobs focuses on reducing our carbon footprint, jobs in renewable energy (wind, solar, biofuels, etc), but also can include logistics jobs and “green” products made from recycled material etc…  The renewable energy industry will one day be huge, but when?  The “green economy” is growing but will take years to develop.  The global supply of crude oil is reduced every day, so eventually renewable energy will need to play bigger part. 

Infrastructure spending creates many jobs, that’s one reason China’s GDP is growing around 8% per year.  In the U.S.  how many more roads can we build?  How many bridges can we build?  Where will these roads and bridges take us?  I see repair projects going and some are necessary and indeed improve traffic flow.  Others projects just seem like busy work: satisfactory roads or intersections just being ‘repaired’ to create some work.   I do want good roads, I just wish there was more transparency and information made available on infrastructure spending.   I hate to admit this, but some of those people that want construction jobs will need to go where the infrastructure jobs are, those people may need to move to other countries. The flipside is that it is usually the person with initiative and good work ethic that leaves, that could cause a talent drain for the U.S.

Small business financing is a key to job creation.  Some new businesses need large sums of capital to start others need much less.  Starting a cable network (I’ve been there with The Employment & Career Channel) like Oprah will do requires $50-150 Million, starting a wind farm millions of dollars too, but a pastry shop (like a friend from high school recently did, as learned via Facebook), or an IT consulting firm (as a college and fraternity friend did recently) could require just hundreds or thousands dollars. 

Business financing from government, banks and venture capital will yield the best result for job creation.  The right legal, tax and financial incentives need to in place too.  I hope that the most progress at the Jobs Summit is made in this area.

This Jobs Summit can yield results and all-in-all the summit will indeed help.  The summit is one of many things that needs to happen;  jobs  jobs  jobs will be an ongoing theme for years.  People need to start businesses. 

I’ll leave you with this thought and question.  There are millions of new people joining the middle class all over the world, how can large and small U.S. businesses tap into the needs and wants of those people?

Here’s a pre summit video from CNBC with some of the key attendees at the Summit:

Video

White House Holds Jobs Summit The White House is bringing together business and labor leaders for its jobs summit today in an effort to brainstorm new strategies to spur job creation. Rose Wang, CEO of the Binary Group, and David Ickert, CFO of Air Tractor, discuss the summit with …