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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (December 8, 2011) –  Zapoint, the leader in career management solutions, and UMass Boston’s Commonwealth Compact are taking their partnership to a new level in 2012.

Launched in 2008, Commonwealth Compact is a Massachusetts statewide diversity initiative housed at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Companies, colleges and universities, health-care providers and nonprofits are among those invited to sign the Compact and measure their diversity.  To date, 230 member organizations have signed on.  In April 2010, Zapoint and Commonwealth Compact launched the Talent Network, a database of diverse talent, employment openings, board and commission opportunities, networking, event information, and more.

“It’s all been leading up to this,” said Chris Twyman, CEO and founder of Zapoint. “We’ve been proud to provide the technology that drives Commonwealth Compact’s revolutionary approach to diversity since day one. We’re now excited to be offering, along with Commonwealth Compact, our analytical and career management technology for in-house use by their member organizations.”

The Commonwealth Compact signers, including such familiar names as Staples, Comcast, Walmart, and Harvard University, employ approximately 280,000 people, or just over 10 percent of the state’s workforce. This new tool will extract employee data from the HR system of record from each participating company. Skills and competency data will then be added to the basic HR information.

“Participating companies will have access to a full-functioning dashboard for analyzing internal talent based on both diversity needs and skills gaps,” said Georgianna Meléndez, co-director of  the Commonwealth Compact. “This will support better hiring decisions across the board, helping the member companies to find the best candidates according to all of their key criteria, including diversity.”

The solution will initially be offered to a select group of key signatory organizations within the Commonwealth Compact, with the goal of making it available to all member organizations by the end of 2012.

“We’re thrilled to be able to offer such crucial capability along with our technology partner, Zapoint,” Meléndez continued. “This offering will transform our existing Talent Network into a one-of-a-kind, comprehensive Talent Ecosystem.”

About Zapoint
Zapoint career management solutions empower people to take ownership of their future by giving them the tools to analyze and plan their career path in order to make these plans a reality. Incorporating Zapoint solutions into the workplace empowers people to create a clear development path within an enterprise-wide social network. This constructs a sustainable, accountable and transparent approach to the internal talent culture by identifying, rewarding and inspiring employees to expand and hone their professional talents. Zapoint solutions can deploy stand-alone, or can integrate with any HRMS and Talent Management system. For more information visit http://www.zapoint.com.

About the Commonwealth Compact

Commonwealth Compact is committed to make Greater Boston a desired destination for people of color, immigrants, and women in the belief that their contributions will be vital to the region’s social and economic future. For more information visit http://www.commonwealthcompact.umb.edu/

As more than 2/3’s of the workforce reports being unengaged in their current positions, Zapoint introduces a quick and effective remedy to this damaging trend  

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (November 29, 2011) – A recent Gallup survey shows that some 71% of American workers are not engaged in their current positions, with 19% of the workforce “actively disengaged.” These figures represent near-record levels of employee disengagement, and pose a tremendous challenge to employers who need to keep both morale and productivity up during difficult economic times.

Meanwhile, the latest Mercer workforce survey shows that employees are looking for recognition, meaningful work, and a sense of progress. That third item is often overlooked – to the organization’s detriment.

“The numbers on engagement are shocking, but not surprising,” commented Chris Twyman, CEO and founder of Zapoint, the leader in career management solutions. “And the solution is very straightforward.”

To address this gap, Zapoint is helping organizations deploy employee-directed career management solutions leveraging data employees have already created via social networking environments (and elsewhere.) The revolutionary web-based solution includes interactive career planning and communication tools for employees while providing management with unprecedented visibility into the collective skills and knowledge of the workforce.

“We call this approach profile acceleration,” explained Twyman. “Give employees the tools to chart their own course, and you’ve gone a long way towards solving the engagement problem.”

“It’s a brilliant strategy for jump-starting employee engagement,” noted David Lipscomb, CEO and founder of CIS Valued Partners LLC, a distinctive full service solutions provider that emphasizes employee engagement as a key contributor to overall organizational health and performance. “Start with information employees have already been motivated enough to create outside the organization and then give them access to it inside the organization – along with the tools they need to map out the next steps of their careers.”

“Other ‘solutions’ to the employee engagement problem can take months or years to deploy,” added Twyman. “We can have a company up and running with its own employees’ data in a matter of days.”

About Zapoint
Zapoint career management solutions empower people to take ownership of their future by giving them the tools to analyze and plan their career path in order to make these plans a reality. Incorporating Zapoint solutions into the workplace empowers people to create a clear development path within an enterprise-wide social network. This constructs a sustainable, accountable and transparent approach to the internal talent culture by identifying, rewarding and inspiring employees to expand and hone their professional talents. Zapoint solutions can deploy stand-alone, or can integrate with any HRMS and Talent Management system. For more information visit http://www.zapoint.com.

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Employment trends suggest massive economic restructuring,
demanding new approaches to career planning and skill development   

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (November 18, 2011) – The clerical positions that have been a mainstay of the US economic picture for more than half a century may be on the endangered species list, according to one top economist.

“The economy is in a state of transition, in which the middle-class jobs that emerged after World War II have begun to decline,” writes Arnold Kling in The American. “These trends serve to limit the availability of well-defined jobs. If a job can be characterized by a precise set of instructions, then that job is a candidate to be automated or outsourced to modestly educated workers in developing countries.”

Kling, who served for seven years as an economist on the staff of the Federal Reserve Board, states that technology is driving job obsolescence at an unprecedented rate. He argues that workers who want to succeed in the challenging times ahead need to master the art of educating themselves and need to focus on developing the right mix of technical and communication skills.

“Forewarned is forearmed,” commented Chris Twyman, CEO and founder of Zapoint, the leader in career management solutions. “To see this transition underway provides the opportunity to make serious choices about what skills to develop and what potential career paths hold the most promise.”

Kling provides three scenarios for potentially mitigating the disappearance of middle-class jobs on a special edition of the Transparency Revolution audio edition on Tuesday, November 22 at 9 PM EST / 6 PM PST. (Archive will be available for download after that date.) Details are available at the Transparency Revolution website.

About Zapoint
Zapoint career management solutions empower people to take ownership of their future by giving them the tools to analyze and plan their career path in order to make these plans a reality. Incorporating Zapoint solutions into the workplace empowers people to create a clear development path within an enterprise-wide social network. This constructs a sustainable, accountable and transparent approach to the internal talent culture by identifying, rewarding and inspiring employees to expand and hone their professional talents. Zapoint solutions can deploy stand-alone, or can integrate with any HRMS and Talent Management system. For more information visit http://www.zapoint.com.

About Arnold Kling

Arnold Kling earned his Ph.D in economics from MIT in 1980. He was an economist on the staff of the Federal Reserve Board from 1980-1986. From 1986-1994 he held a number of positions at Freddie Mac. In 1994, he started one of the first commercial web sites, Homefair.com, which was sold in 1999. Since then, he has been teaching high school statistics as a volunteer and has written several books, including Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care (Cato Institute); From Poverty to Prosperity (forthcoming); and The Knowledge-Power Discrepancy (forthcoming; title tentative). He is a member of the Financial Markets Working Group of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

WORKDAY RISING – LAS VEGAS –At Workday Rising 2011, Zapoint, Inc. has announced a partnership with Workday. Through the partnership, Zapoint, will use Workday’s Integration Cloud Platform to  deliver an integration between Zapoint’s Career Management solution and Workday Human Capital Management (HCM). The integration will enable Workday customers to use Zapoint’s visual and interactive tools for career management and analysis.

“We’re delighted to join the Workday ecosystem and use the Workday Integration Cloud Platform and excited about the possibilities raised by delivering complementary tools for career analysis and management within that ecosystem,” said Chris Twyman, Founder and CEO of Zapoint. “This is a great fit for both companies – at Zapoint, we see an organization’s people as the true drivers of talent management and organizational development. That’s in keeping with Workday’s motto that people are the bottom line.”

“Workday is pleased that Zapoint is using the Workday Integration Cloud Platform to deliver a pre-built integration between Zapoint’s Career Management technologies and Workday HCM,” said Jeff Pulver, vice president, business development at Workday.

Zapoint demonstrated their integrated solution at Workday Rising, October 24-27 at the Aria resort in Las Vegas.