"Dear Graduating Seniors: Apparently you’re hosed."
— Rick Newman: Where the Jobs Are, and the College Grads Aren’t
6. Employers who insist on knowing your salary history but won’t reveal what the job pays. Employers regularly insist that candidates name their salary history or expectations up front, while simultaneously refusing to divulge the range they plan to pay. There’s no reason for employers not to share that info, other than to make the hire at a lower price. It’s unfair and they usually get away with it, but we’d all be better off if employers simply shared the range they plan to pay and put an end to the drama and coyness.
2. Learn another job. It’s an unfortunate fact that many corporations in the throes of restructuring won’t think twice about piling additional work on the employees who survive the layoff rounds. So knowing how to fill more than one position in your office can be a surefire way of getting a survivors’ edge.
Each year, U.S. News compiles a list of the Best Careers based on the Labor Department’s employment projections. And this year, we continue to base our picks for the Best Jobs of 2012 on professions that should hire abundantly over the next several years. To better help you make a smart career choice, we’ve also started ranking our selections.
Most employers are not familiar with military service, positions, jargon, or acronyms, so it can be even more challenging for veterans to make a strong case. What can job-seeking veterans do to help transition into civilian positions?
Some economists began to refer to the depths of the recession as a “mancession,” since the bulk of the jobs lost were among men in male-dominated industries such as construction and manufacturing. During the recession (defined as December 2007 to June 2009), the economy shed more than 7 million jobs. Men fared worse in the recession, suffering more than 70 percent of the job losses. But strikingly, in the midst of a slow recovery, women have lost 117,000 jobs while men gained 1,140,000—a staggering difference of about a million jobs.
"Find out how people in the position you’re applying for dress at that company. Then dress one—and only one—level better. If, as is the case with many startup software firms, people are wearing jeans and a t-shirt, then come to the interview in business casual pants and a collared shirt. Showing up at a startup firm like this in a suit may cause a negative first impression."
Most English majors don’t go on to become novelists, and history majors don’t always become history teachers. Edwin Koc, who wrote the NACE report cited above, states in it that “the objective of a liberal education…is to prepare you broadly for the professional world so that you are prepared to undertake many jobs rather than to be trained to do a specific task.”
It sounds like an outsized Texas boast, but the numbers support Rick Perry when he claims that Texas has created more than one-third of the jobs in the United States since the economic recovery began in 2009. There’s an important caveat, however, that the Texas governor is unlikely to volunteer: Virtually all of those new jobs are in the government sector, not in private enterprise.
In addition to patent reform, President Obama has advocated infrastructure spending as a way to help put out-of-work laborers back into jobs. Among the industries that would see the biggest boosts from infrastructure projects, like road- and rail-building, would be construction, which has over two million fewer workers now than prior to the recession.
“It’s really just a matter of jumping in and starting to develop something,” says CompTIA’s Thibodeaux. “Once you create your first program, you get the bug … It’s definitely a learning-by-doing kind of thing because it’s changing so quickly all the time that you have to be in the business of doing it to really stay on top of it.”
Avoid self-talk. It’s important to establish yourself early in a new position so people know who you are, what you’re about, and how you should be treated. However, it’s key not to build yourself up too quickly. One common complaint I hear about recent graduates is that they believe they have done it and seen it all, in part since they don’t know a world without rapid communication. Even if you were to help find the cure for cancer, people from other generations will be suspect. Work in references to your education, experience, and knowledge carefully, being certain to not talk about yourself too much.
The recovery, unfortunately, doesn’t apply to everybody. Workers with up-to-date skills and the vigorous energy it takes to adapt constantly are poised for a return to prosperity. But many others are stuck flat-footed in a confusing, Darwinian economy, out of good options and unsure what to do. Some of that is due to the depth of the recent recession and the abrupt transformation of industries such as housing and construction. But people also make a lot of mistakes that limit their own opportunities. Here are seven of the most commonplace ways to fall behind in an uncertain economy.
"No matter what you decide though, the key is to survey the situation calmly and rationally and make decisions based on how things truly are rather than how you wish they were. That’s a lot more satisfying than a constant struggle."
The recession that officially ended in 2009 zapped about eight million jobs, and overall there are still about 14 million unemployed Americans. A surplus of workers in many fields is likely to keep pay flat for awhile. And in some industries, deeper changes like aggressive offshoring or the replacement of workers with new technology could depress wages indefinitely. Government data shows that average weekly earnings have crept up by about 6.6 percent since the end of 2007, when the recession began. But after inflation, the increase is just 1.4 percent. And that’s only for people who have jobs, since the unemployed aren’t counted in data measuring the size of the typical paycheck.
