President Obama has been very aggressive about appointing “CZAR’s” for the role of leading major initiatives for his administration. Many pundits have been openly critical of the number of CZAR’s Obama has appointed in his short time in office. As of June 15, Obama has appointed 16 CZAR’s, compared to one for Reagan, one for George H.W. Bush, three for Clinton, and four for George W. Bush. Many of the CZAR positions are linked to an office which already has an Executive Secretary, leading to concern of over-spending on duplicative executive positions. In case you are wondering, here are some of the CZAR’s he has appointed…

Drug, Energy and Environment, Homeland Security, Health, Urban Affairs, Economic, Regulatory, Technology, Government Performance, Border, WMD Policy, Intelligence, Automotive, Pay, Great Lakes, and Cyber.

If you are a training professional, here is the bigger question. What's missing? Answer: An Education and Training CZAR!

So why don't we have an Education and Training CZAR? Just in case you don’t know, the U.S. Government has an Education and Training Administration (ETA) and it has been without a Secretary for more than a year. With all the talk about the importance of job training and bringing our economy back to life, wouldn’t you think this would be an important office to fill?

Quoting the ETA’s Mission Statement, “the mission of the Employment and Training Administration is to contribute to the more efficient functioning of the U.S. labor market by providing high quality job training, employment, labor market information, and income maintenance services…”   

So what have they done for our industry lately? It’s not clear to me. And my guess is if our profession and industry is important to our future economy, we should have us a CZAR too. Thinking about it, maybe I should have made a contribution to the campaign so I could be in the running.

Note: If you want to follow what’s going on in the Office of Employment & Training Administration, go to http://www.doleta.gov/etainfo/.

And if you have any questions, please feel to send me a note at dharward@trainingindustry.com.  Or feel free to post your comments below.