By: Sara Meier, M.S.Ed, CAE

As a former kid and a former teacher, I, like the rest of our country, connect September with “Back to School.” Magazine covers, store fronts and sitcoms all feature back to school themes in this month of new beginnings.

This September boasts an especially poignant time in my life as my oldest son starts kindergarten (sniff, sniff). I’m not sure who is more excited, him or me. I have such great memories of laying out my newly purchased outfit for the first day of school (even if it was wool and too hot to wear in early September) and rushing to the store with the supply list my teacher had given out to buy notebooks, markers, glue and pencils. My son is just excited to be a kindergartner; he knows that this means he’s in the big league now. No more play groups, preschool or naps, he associates school with learning how to read, doing math and packing lunch!

I asked my son recently what he wanted to be when he grew up. He quickly rattled off police officer, fireman, architect, doctor, nurse and veterinarian, I shudder at the thought of paying for college. I love that he has high aspirations and has no idea yet how long he will need to be in school to achieve some of these professions. And while I love this naïveté in my 5 year old, in my professional life as Executive Director of the International Association for Continuing Education and Training (IACET), I am keenly aware of the fact that our country has too many Americans without the necessary skills and educational levels that many professions need now and in the near future.

Our country is built on the foundation that a good education will get you a good job. The attainment of a high school diploma used to be enough for most people to sustain a life in the middle class in our country. A recent study by Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce called Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements through 2018 reveals there will be a 3 million degree shortfall in our country by 2018. The economy will need twenty two million more Associate’s, Bachelor’s and Graduate degrees and 4.7 million postsecondary certificates. 

So if our country’s citizens will need more than just a high school education but our educational system does not currently finance postsecondary education for all, what does that mean for the millions of Americans who need additional education and training to hold a job? The authors of the Georgetown study believe that fed­eral and state governments will need to engage postsecondary institutions as partners and that together they must develop reforms that result in both cost-efficient and quality postsecondary education and training programs. The key word in their recommendation to me is quality. The other key word in this formula is access. By providing access to quality educational programs, professional associations like many our company manages, can be a huge asset to the predicament our country is facing. Professional associations can help by outlining clearer pathways to employment, offering affordable alternatives to the traditional brick and mortar institutions and ensuring that what they offer has value in the marketplace.

In an effort to raise awareness around this initiative, it seemed fitting for IACET, an association that focuses on identifying high quality continuing education and training, to host its own back to school event. The IACET Symposium on Thursday, September 23^rd will feature thought leaders from the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), NAM’s Manufacturing Institute, the Department of Education and the authors of the Georgetown University study. I am hopeful that by bringing together researchers, practitioners and administrators of continuing education and training, we will walk away with some of the necessary tools to provide better quality and better access to education for those that need it most.

As the first day of school approaches, I will be thinking about what I need to prepare my son for his first day of school, but I will also be thinking about what it means for the hundreds of thousands of American adults who need to head back to school and how our association community can help them do their homework. 

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This topic seemed like a great idea when we doled out assignments a few months ago – but now it is August, and I am scrolling through the home page of my Kindle, and am somewhat conflicted.  Do I let you know what books I have REALLY enjoyed this summer, or do I try to impress you with some that are business-related, even if they didn’t cause me to stay up past my bedtime to finish up “just one more chapter.”

 How about a little of each?

 I have a lifetime love of novels, starting with my Nancy Drew and Louisa May Alcott addiction as a child, so it has traditionally been a hard sell for me to willingly read a lot of non-fiction.  However, I really enjoyed The Survivor’s Club.  The concept intrigued me – the author, Ben Sherwood, travels worldwide to gain insight from people who have survived a slew of near fatal phenomena ranging from a mountain lion attack to a Holocaust concentration camp, and interviews an array of experts to understand the psychology, genetics and jumble of other little things that determines whether we live or die.

 As someone who is on the road quite a bit for work, I have definitely internalized a great deal from this book.  I have made an effort to be more observant of safety procedures, pathways to exits and the people around me – a bonus both as a business traveler as well as a parent.  From a nonprofit management perspective, some of the takeaways on who weathers a crisis situation best can be very interesting, and sometimes counterintuitive.  The best part of the book is, at the conclusion, you take a “Survivors Inventory” that tells you what personality characteristics you have that may help or hinder you in an emergency situation.  I have talked about it so much that my husband has “picked it up” (aka hacking into my Amazon account and reading it on his iPad), and I bet he will never take his shoes off on a plane again – and neither will you, once you read it.

 I am a fast reader, so I love looonnggg books – ones that I can really get into and savor over a period of days.  Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian fit the bill – in print version, it clocks in at 720 pages.  I hesitate to tell people what it is about, because as soon as I say the word “vampire” I will instantly get eye-rolls in the vein of moody teen vamps that live in the Pacific Northwest.  The vampire in Kostova’s books isn’t a dreamy heartthrob in the least – he is a truly terrifying villain.  The main appeal of the book for me was the really engrossing way she presented some amazing Byzantine and Ottoman history.  As someone who considers myself somewhat  deficient in both geography and world history, I love novels like this that manage to tell the story of history – religion, power plays and migration – in such a compelling manner.  I recommend the book both for the engaging storyline, as well as showing me countries and people I wouldn’t usually encounter, in life or on the page.

 And finally, I absolutely love Real Simple magazine, so I immediately bought Just Let Me Lie Down: Necessary Terms for the Half-Insane Working Mom by the magazine’s editor, Kristin  von Ogtrop.  At Coulter, we have a number of clients that focus on work-life balance, including the Alliance for Women in Media and the American Society of Women Accountants, who has a Balance Award program that celebrates corporate progress in this area.

 The book is organized in alphabetical order, but mostly riffs on topics that any working mom can identify.  It is a light read, but comforting to know that other women – even a woman who edits a magazine focused on being organized, efficient and creating a streamlined life – freak out about the insanity that is Halloween, “corporate seepage” (when you use work-speak at home – like telling your son we have a “hard stop” on playing Uno at 8:00 p.m.) and balancing the “integrate-separate” ratio between work and home.

 I am off to Maine in a few weeks, and look forward to finishing The Wisdom of Crowds (a Coulter Companies book club selection), Solar (by Ian Mcewan) and at least one of those “The Girl Who…” books as I feel like the only person I know who hasn’t gotten hooked on them!

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By: Thomas Coulter Gibson

The raging debate of whether Kindle or iPad, hardback or paperback, obscures what’s really important … that regardless of “platform”, our summer reading choices reflect our mood and passions.  While I can’t say that I’ve yet had the opportunity this summer to enjoy a “toes in the sand, great book at hand, umbrella drink at the ready” moment, I’ve mentally prepared on my frequent trips to New York City during fiercely protected “Acela time” by reading (or re-reading) books that I can strongly recommend.  Three in particular are absolutely worth your time …

1. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
   Put simply, the best piece of financial journalism I’ve ever read.  It’s assiduously-reported, deeply compelling reading that explains to this thick-headed undergraduate English major the root causes of the cascading financial crisis.  Lewis “de-mystifies” an economic sector that has been unnecessarily (and inappropriately, I think) mystical; an otherworld that leverages OPM (other people’s money) to generate outsized returns for a select few.  It helps to underscore not just the imperfections, but the outright fraud in a financial system where ridiculously disproportionate rewards cause people and institutions to abandon their moral compass.  The Big Short exposes too many self-proclaimed “Masters of the Universe” to be little more than ethereally bright, societally-stunted horses asses.    
2. The Great Bridge: The Epic Tale of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough
   Written in 1972 before McCullough was embraced as our nation’s greatest narrative historian, The Great Bridge is the story of what was at that time (and perhaps even through today) American’s most remarkable engineering achievement.  More than that, it’s the story of the singular focus and determination of the extraordinary people most centrally behind that vision, John Augustus Roebling, his son Colonel Washington Roebling and wife Emily Roebling.  As Montgomery Schuyler wrote about the Brooklyn Bridge in Harpers Weekly in 1883, “It just so happens that the work that is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is not a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.”  Reading this book reinforces my faith in the heights that people and societies can scale and the imperative we all work to build such bridges, literal and metaphorical, with our lives. 
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
   On July 11, we celebrated as a nation the 50^th anniversary of the publication of this seminal novel of social injustice as seen through a child’s eyes.  I read this book at least annually and it never fails to move me in ways deep and lasting.  The book was further popularized by the movie of the same name, my favorite on every level.  More important than a “must read”, To Kill a Mockingbird is a “must re-read.”    

Oh and just so you don’t think I’m completely boring, I’ve also caught up on past issues of Vanity Fair, People and Us magazine.  I mean, what good are toes in the sand if we can’t laugh together at the goofiness of our celebrity-obsessed culture?  Soooo … what are you reading this summer?

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