Business: Marketing and Hiring Go Hand in Hand

Most businesses don't realize this, but, the marketing of your business can have a lot to do with the employees you eventually employ.
Highly motivated employees want to work with companies that have focus and drive. These driven companies know their customers and have marketing in place that focuses on those customers and on the goals of the company. These companies will have good word of mouth about their brand and people on the street will have heard the buzz about that brand and what it stands for.
Highly motivated people NEED and WANT to work for companies like that.
Those mythical "great" employees out in the world don't magically show up in your resume pile. If you don't see many great employees in your resume pile, it may not be just a compensation issue, it may be that your company isn't seen as the type of place a "great" employee works.
Gen X and Y are driven by more than money. They want to be part of the buzz... in a good way. They want to serve their communities, and most want to do good, not evil. With the unemployment rate so low, the "great" employees of the world now have the luxury of choosing who they work for.
It's a simple choice for a potential employee: Work for someone who knows where they are going and whose generating buzz or work for ???.
The big question is, are you a business where the great employees want to work at?

Home & Garden: It was a Dark and Windy Night...

Dark, windy, rainy, cold and miserable. If your a house, it's a lot worse than that! Fall has hit like a ton of bricks and its time to winterize your home. Have you started yet?

There are lots of little chores you can do to make your house survive the winter months better and heat more efficiently. Have you changed your furnace filters lately? Cleaned the gutters so they don't backup and cause roof damage? Caulked any holes in the siding to prevent heat loss? Wrapped your pipes and outside faucets? Many of these little tasks can have big returns over the course of the winter.

Doityourself.com has a great 2-part article titled Preparing Your Home for Winter that covers many of the tasks around the house you can do to make winter a little easier. Want to get your trees ready for winter? Check out our Pruning 101 class running on October 20Th.
photo by Love like Blue (flickr)

Art: Check out the Studio Tour!

Are you looking for something, fun, cultural, and unconstrained by rigid timeframes and locations this weekend? Try the Whatcom Artist Studio Tour! The tour, on its second and final weekend, entails visiting artist in their working habitats, talking with them about their work, and possibly finding the perfect holiday gift or item to put on your mantle. The studios are all over town, so you could be lazy and visit the one across the street from where you live or you could turn it into a fun scavenger hunt for studio all over the area. Don't worry though--each studio has maps, and is clearly marked by bright yellow signage.

An extra bonus is that several art instructors from Community Education are featured, from the drums of Ramon Murillo to the jewelry of Jamie Bichler to the oil paintings of Lorna Libert. The tour also features the found-art jewelry of Kathy Bastow who is, oddly enough, one of our accounting instructors.

So if you're looking for a reason to walk around in the sunshine, and enjoy supporting local artesans, the Whatcom Artist Studio Tour is your weekend activity!

For more information on the event, click here.

For information on Whatcom Community Education art classes, click here.

My Body is Screaming but I Can't Hear It!

This year for my thirty-somethingth birthday I got what I’ve always wanted: a beard.

No, I didn’t say beer. I said beard, as in b-e-a-r-d. I’ve been waiting for such a gift ever since my 28th birthday when I got my first mustache.

If by now you haven’t guessed, yes, I am female, and I am most certainly being sarcastic.

After my initial shock (and immediate trip to the waxing salon), I realized that it wasn’t the process of aging that bothered me, it was the surprise of it all that ruffled my feathers. I mean, a girl needs a little notice for these events. If I’m going to eventually need a pair of nose-hair clippers I want to know about it now, not on the morning of. Is that too much to ask?

The stress is enough to give me a headache. Come to think of it, I’ve been getting a lot of those lately.

I just don’t know when I lost control of my body and it’s changes. Perhaps I was never in charge.

I’m sure many out there can relate. Everyday I feel more and more like I’m simply a host living in a vessel that insists on moving full throttle down a path I’m unable to see down, no matter how much I try to stop it. It’s becoming a very uncomfortable fight, and with each battle the disconnect between myself and my body becomes more and more evident.

I wish there was a way to be at peace with the things my body does. I wish it would tell me what its changes mean, why it hurts sometimes, why it can’t feel young forever.

Perhaps my body is talking to me and I just don’t know how to hear it…

To register for our classes “Your Body is Talking…Are You Listening?” and/or "Anti-Aging Secrets for Skin & Body" please visit our website at:

http://www.whatcomcommunityed.com/

For fun, click here:

http://usabeard.blogspot.com/

Computer: Everyone Likes a Shortcut!

There's still a few of us that remember life before we had a computer mouse. Everything we did had a key combination that was pushed to make it happen. Now, with programs getting more and more complicated, these keyboard shortcuts can save tons of time when using the computer.

I recently found the mother of all keyboard shortcuts sites. KeyXL has searchable lists of keyboard shortcuts for tons of popular programs on Windows, Macintosh and even Linux and web applications. Looking through the list, they even had list of shortcut keys for the new Adobe Suite programs; useful for those signed up for our new Photoshop classes!

Every program Community Education has a computer class for had a list of shortcut keys available. How cool is that?