Posted on 04/22/2012 12:31:28 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The college class of 2012 is in for a rude welcome to the world of work.
A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don't fully use their skills and knowledge.
Young adults with bachelor's degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that's confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans....
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
My son is a Linux DB programmer, and has grown to really like home based jobs.
Will he ever become a senior VP? He doesn't care. He is making $60k+ and increasing his skills, while finishing his Masters degree.
Your resume blows his away. So do like he did, and contract away until a medium sized company wants you bad enough to outbid others.
He is working toward his Masters of Divinity in Missouri. All of the jobs in his area all want MS experience, and he would rather not go to the Redmond side of the force.
Your situation differs but between NC and VA there has to be a position for you.
If you use the Eclipse IDE, then use it to learn Apex, the Java-like web database programming language built into SalesForce. You can download a dev copy of SFDC for free and Eclipse is free, too.
There is a shortage of SFDC developers and, like central_va says, you’ll be in 6 figs in no time.
Black_Shark, let me give you a piece of advice on the open thread.
As the disclaimer on an open-source piece of scientific software used to say, "Careful! Anything free comes with no guarantee."
1) I expect a salary in the $40-50,000 range commiserate with my skills.
This comes across as demanding. It's an employer's market. There are people (as you say) with 2-3 years experience willing to take that much. Unless you have a hook (you're dating the CEO's daughter) saying what YOU want isn't a good move. It makes you look grasping and likely to jump ship as soon as a marginally better salary comes along.
2) I want the opportunity for advancement if I work hard and prove my worth.
In a field which is full of companies nearly going belly-up (think of the shenanigans to keep the banks from foundering), your individual contribution is of no value. You are a *COST*. Get on board and SHOW what you can do, and they may like you: or your entire division may get axed to cover the rear of someone trying to enter the C-level suite.
3) I want to be on the management/executive track by the time I’m 30.
Have you stopped to consider how many unemployed MBAs there are right now?
And again, you may think that you are advertising yourself as "serious" but there are other, less flattering, messages which might be read into that statement.
4) Life is hard but this is friggin ridiculous. Why did I go to college and work my BUTT off learning statistics and mathematics when I could have bypassed it all and still be qualified for the same jobs?
Where did you go to school? What is your GPA? In what discipline?
It may or not be impressive, but if the big picture is that your field is under the gun, the odds are against you.
Consider your learning as intellectual kindling, find out what area is hot (and likely to remain so), and see how you can springboard from your area to that.
Central_va's advice is not just gold: it's platinum.
Programmers are a dime a dozen; but programmers who understand the business rules and reasons behind the programming, who can contribute in a meaningful way to design, are priceless. Your econ is a good start to that, if you want to go to the financial industry.
On the con side, if you really want to go to management, programmers are considered "outside the loop" for *real* business operations.
Full Disclosure: depending on the situation, management is not all it's cracked up to be. It is mostly political; the pressure never lets up; you are being gunned at by other managers eager to absorb your department AND by those beneath you; and you usually have to work late (9 or 10 pm) most every night just to keep up. It can play hell with a marriage.
Which is yet another reason I did NOT opt for management track immediately.
Cheers!
We Are All Out of Work Coal Miners Now
Are you TAXED ENOUGH ALREADY,
Or still have your last dime?
Do you need to keep on giving
Until you are poor, weak and blind?
Do you feel good as the parasites
Destroy what you have built?
Does it warm your heart to witness
That the poor refuse to work?
Ah, the joy of working to go in debt
To DC’s Company Store,
And with each election the politicians say,
“We must tax you until YOU are also poor.”
10% - or less - of the 18-year old population has any business going anywhere near a college, unless it’s to sell sandwiches in the dorms late at night.
IT’S NOT THE DEGREE, STUPID - IT’S HOW HARD IT IS TO QUALIFY.
If you give a bachelor’s degree to my 3-year old Labrador Retriever, will she make more than a high school graduate?
The whole thing is so absurd, makes me wanna holler.
Mine did, too. She is in Japan, beginning her second year of teaching English. She just wanted a job.
You’ll get your biggest salary bump when you quit your first job and move on to the next. Take the 30K or whatever is offered but keep gaining experience, meeting people and looking for better opportunities. Banks can hire and lay off like waves in the ocean, I used to work in the IT side of a major one. They also give out the title of AVP and VP all the time, and it doesn’t really mean much in the big institutions unless you’re planning on being a lifer. Like someone else posted programming skills like CSharp and Java are in demand but you might be more suited to Database Development/Analysis with database servers like SQL Server or Oracle.
I have no idea. You tell me.
I have no idea. You tell me.
It’s not too late to switch to a degree in Philosophy.
It worked for me.
What? You mean you can’t come out with a degree in Wymyns Studies and get a high paying job? Time for another entitlement for all these poor kids!!
I appreciate your advice however I am not “demanding” these conditions to employers. That is the last thing I would do in an interview. Instead, I listen to the employers and have a mental checklist. If the employer offers me a job paying $35K, then I expect opportunities for quick advancement in order to compensate for the lower starting salary. If I get offered $35K for a deadend job, I say “no but thank you” and move on to the next interview.
I know the unemployment rate for MBA’s and I’ve also seen their curriculum and I’m not surprised. That is why, if I chose the grad school route, I would get a Master’s in Applied Economics with Master’s Minor in Statistics along with as much math as I could cram in my head during that 2 year span. Math is king in this world.
In regards to the school, I went to North Carolina State University which has one of the top Statistics departments in the nation along with being the top math school in the state. As I said, a BS in Economics here requires Calc, Linear Algebra, Diff Eq, Econometrics, among other math requirements. I have more math than an engineering major is required to have but it’s applied to a different discipline. They do thermo/physics, I do economics. My overall GPA is 3.385 thanks to freshman/sophomore years and major GPA is 3.619 thanks to a C in intro to micro back when I was a poli-sci major. Otherwise it would be a ~3.9.
This economy sucks but there is a certain threshold to which a job is no longer viable. It’s not like I’m expecting that much. I expect a salary near the average for college graduates ($50K), opportunities within the company, and the ability to further improve my skillset. Unfortunately, this does not look likely in this economy and with the amount of cheap labor that is being supplied abroad so I don’t know what the future holds.
Philosophy may be the hardest major. I took an intro to philosophy course and it blew my mind and my friend showed me his Logic textbook... my head hurts thinking about it.
Give me Math anyday!
You can where the Democrat party wields power. Obama will hire them and make us pay for it.
That may be my only option. I am currently debating between doing that or going to grad school ($30-35K for 2 years with room, board, tuition, etc). If nothing else gets offered, than my choice will come down to those two options and I don;t know what I’ll do.
I thought it was pretty easy, loads of BS’ing and drinking. Wouldn’t recommend it as a career though.
Murach's book "Java Programming 4th Edition" is what our crew is using. Murach's lessons are geared toward NetBeans, but are usable on Eclipse with a little more hassle. Most of us installed both IDEs. Some of us already have multiple versions of WAMP or LAMP installed.
Eclipse and NetBeans are both free downloads for both Windows and Mac, as is the JDK 1.7 (Java Development Kit), and Apache Derby 10.8 or later for a web server. MySql is used for the database parts of the book, and is also a free download.
The book lists for $52.50, but is about $40 on Amazon.
I guess my point is that it is depressing giving up 4 years of my life only to discover that I am no more valuable coming out than I was coming in.
Very frustrating.
Eclipse is free, almost all IDE's are free. NetBeans is a good one too. Here is the eclipse Download: Link here.
Get a degree in finance. That will help
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