By Katie Kieffer
Image credit: “Where the real business takes place” by SVTHERLAND on Flickr via Creative Commons.
It’s game night everyone! You won’t win a fake prize like a pile of plastic tokens or a stack of paper money. In this game, you win the real deal: Jobs. So, bring your friends and get ready to go from mopey paupers to upbeat workers.
I invented the game “Job Trap” when I realized that Mouse Trap was a waste of time and that I’d have more fun accomplishing something in life than fighting my friends for cheese-shaped tokens. I thought about the biggest economic problem in the U.S. today, the high unemployment rate, and decided to create a game to fix this problem. Here’s how you play:
Object of the game
Win as many jobs as possible. If you win more jobs than you need, you become an employer. As an employer, you have the ability to hire people to work for you. If you’ve always wanted a good job and a professional staff, then here’s your chance to win both.
Game pieces
The only thing you need in this game is your mind. Bring your creativity, your ingenuity and your common sense.
Rules of the game
To win the game, you need to “untrap” the most jobs. At the beginning of the game, each player is challenged with the same two traps. Each player has one hour to figure out how to release the most jobs from these traps.
Image credit: “businessmen” by huntz on Flickr via Creative Commons.
At the end of the hour, a panel of judges including myself will review each player’s solutions and determine approximately how many jobs their unique solutions have the potential to create. The player whose solutions are deemed by the judges to create the most jobs wins.
The two job traps
- College. The cost of college tuition is rising significantly faster than inflation and wages are not keeping up with inflation, reports The Wall Street Journal. The average salary for college graduates dipped 1.7 percent from 2009 to 2010, reports The New York Times.
- Win by creating well-paying jobs for college graduates that outpace the costs of inflation and college tuition. Hint: Look into repairing the economic damage caused by Clinton-era loose home-ownership policies.
- Over 1.2 million patent applications stall at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. American inventors and entrepreneurs have patents awaiting approval that could create jobs, but our government bureaucracy is stalling the process. Engineers in China are reading the U.S. patent applications that are available online and then copying American ingenuity and selling it around the world, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
- Win by creating jobs through innovation and entrepreneurship. Hint: Look into speeding up the patent approval process and shielding U.S. patent applications from the eyes of foreign copycats.
Good luck and play to win the game!
Image credit: “Vimmi With The Dunk” by SVTHERLAND on Flickr via Creative Commons.
This game sounds like a great idea!
I especially hope that someone can come up with an idea to speed
up the patent approval process…that pretty much stinks.