On the Hunt for Help: Upper Valley Employers Fight for Workers
The signs are everywhere, and are hard to miss. Now hiring. Help wanted. Jobs available. Apply online. All positions needed. They appear outside manufacturing plants, stuck in the ground at fast-food establishments and big-box retailers or posted just inside the door. They can be spotted on rural roads with no surrounding buildings, or along a town’s main thoroughfare. Applications for employment are prominently displayed as customers...
As Joblessness Falls, Skilled Workers Might Be Harder to Find
Are America’s employers at risk of running out of skilled people to hire? The U.S. economy has become a seemingly perpetual job-generating machine, having steadily added workers for nearly eight years. Even with the unemployment rate now at 3.7 percent — its lowest point since 1969 — hiring hasn’t stalled. So far this year, job agrowth has averaged a robust 208,000 a month, up from a pace of 182,000 for all of 2017. The trend has...
Leadership Upper Valley: Employers Tap Into Program to Equip Workers, Bolster Community
Employers and their workers have lots of choices when it comes to investing in professional development. Workshops, conferences, degree programs, mentoring — there’s a range of opportunities locally, regionally and beyond to help employees build their job and leadership skills, and companies are increasingly seeing the value in investing in their employees. But there’s more to professional development than the hard skills necessary to...
The Business of Agriculture: Female Farmers Lead the Way in New Hampshire
A young child wearing a pink dress, fairy wings attached to her back, watering seeds in the family greenhouse. That is Forrest Barker’s favorite photograph of herself. Now 23, she may not have the fairy wings, but Barker’s passion for the farmland on which she grew up has only swelled. She took that zeal to Cornell University to study agricultural sciences, and returned after graduation to the multiple-generation farm off Route 33 in...
A New Future for Mount Ascutney
Brownsville — With the Ascutney Outdoor Center under construction, a new tubing hill and lift set to open this winter and plans underway for the installation of a T-bar to service about nine ski trails, West Windsor is poised to step out from the shadows of the bleak and uncertain future it faced eight years ago when the Ascutney Mountain Resort ski area closed. Standing outside the center on a warm spring morning, Steve Crihfield,...
A Region for All Seasons: In the Upper Valley, Recreation Is a Serious Business
Summer on Mount Sunapee is in full swing as the town of Sunapee prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary in August. On the slopes, visitors can enjoy an expanding array of warm weather activities like three-dimensional archery, mountaintop yoga and guided hiking. The Adventure Park features rope courses and rock climbing, and the newly opened Evolution Bike Park offers 5 miles of lift-served mountain biking trails with names like...
Video: Life on the Farm in Grafton County
Click the image below to play Valley News video by Carly Geraci and Maggie Cassidy. Read more about the Grafton County Farm from our story in the spring edition of Enterprise.
How to Stop the Flow of Junk Mail and Save Trees — and Your Sanity
Many people love to hate junk mail — and they have lots of different ways of quantifying their disgust: New York University says 5.6 million tons of junk mail end up in American landfills every year. Ecocycle.org says we may spend as much as eight months of our life sorting junk mail. TreeHugger.com claims junk mail’s annual carbon contribution is equal to that of seven U.S. states combined. Of course, these stats all come from people...
From the Editor: A Place to Make Their Stand
We have a fair amount of fun here in the newsroom riffing on the age differences among the staff. One of us — a grizzled business magazine editor, say — will make a witty reference to Sheriff Buford T. Justice or maybe Glenn Frey, only to be met with an indulgent but nevertheless uncomprehending stare from a 20-something fellow editor. Later, a 20-something staff writer demonstrates how he monitors multiple social media “timelines” on...
Making Friends, Making Careers
Two 20-somethings walk into a pub, and notice everyone there is over 60. A setup for a joke? No, just a snapshot of Andrea and Matt Denhart’s first night out in the Upper Valley. “What did we do?” wondered Andrea, now 27. Ohio natives, the couple moved to the area two years ago from New York City for Matt’s job. “It’s a beautiful area,” Andrea remembers thinking. “There’s got to be something out there.” Well, of course there was, and...
