A Whole New Game to Solve Underemployment

Those of us who work or employ others are swimming through larger and larger waves of change. But, many are losing faith they will play valuable roles in the future or progress economically.

This past year, I came to the conclusion that much of the turmoil rolling through our country is but a symptom of too many people getting kicked to the curb by change. For example, a 3.8% unemployment rate sounds good. But, in a wide range of surveys, 30 to 48% of working Americans characterize themselves as “underemployed” and the segment is growing. Everywhere that we look, we find the impact of change. For example, trucking jobs will decline from 4.8 million to 800,000 in less than 8 years.

Technology offers us new forms of freedom and for every step forward, there are new opportunities to actually improve our quality of life and work. Unfortunately, our culture is not effectively wired in helping people define and find the work that matters, that brings meaning into their lives and makes the world a better place in which to live.

We are about to do our part and we need your help. Inspired Work has had a really good run. When we deliver The Inspired Work Program this weekend, it will be 28 years since we launched our services. Over 43,000 participants have used our programs to transform their lives. But, did we change the world? No, we didn’t and much of that has to do with how the entire human development industry works. Quite simply, we fiercely protect our intellectual capital and sell it to the highest bidders. Affluent professionals and large employers have benefited from our services for years. But, the underemployed sit at home on their computers trying to hack solutions to their career challenges.

Without an intervention, even those of us who have wonderful relationships with our work will be impacted by the numbers of individuals who cannot catch up to change. If I am not being pointed enough, why has homelessness in Los Angeles surged by 75% in just 5 years? The growth in homelessness is primarily from underemployed workers who miss one or two paychecks and find themselves on the streets.

Make no mistake. Their problem is our problem.

We had an urgent question to answer.

“How can we take care of everyone?”

Today, we launch a journey to develop a digital platform that provides for individual workers, employers, and entrepreneurs. We will deliver these solutions without any charges for core services. The curriculum that has been used by many of the nation’s predominant employers will be available to all employers and single users without charge. The Inspired Work Program, which has been the centerpiece in all of our offerings, will be carefully storyboarded, videos will be produced by leading Hollywood talent, and rendered in ways that allow people to transform their relationship towards work at home.

The spirit in which we are making these changes isn’t just to bring innovation to Inspired Work. We are intent on providing a laboratory where anyone who works will be able to bring innovation into their careers. We will continue to help all employers become better places to work.

Cutting-edge organizations set up laboratories to hatch new inventions and are often referred to as skunkworks. workskunk will become the destination for people who want to reinvent themselves and for organizations to become better places to work.

To move forward, we want and need your help. Today, on Labor Day, we launch a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. The spirit of the campaign is to add enough to our investment to launch workskunk as quickly as possible. Funds will be used to design a technology platform, develop video and interactive content, launch an embedded news station and hire a few key employees.

If you are enthused about this message, please take a look at our campaign. You will hear from graduates of our programs, colleagues and clients describe in detail, why it is a good idea to support workskunk.

Please contribute anywhere from $10 to 10,000.

Please get the word out to your friends, family, and colleagues. Every contribution will be greeted with inclusion into the new community and will offer opportunities to get the most out of our new platform.

Here is the link to our campaign: http://bit.ly/workskunk

Become a Skunk!