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 ...
Tell that to the newly minted petroleum engineering graduates who are pulling down $100k per year.
Not if your degree is in EE/CS, which most Americans don’t pursue....
LOL. My husband majored in Philosophy too. When we married he eventually tired of working in the mill and went to law school, which vastly improved his earning potential.
There’s a saying in law school, “What was your first choice?”
"Our crew" is a bunch of old mainframe programmer/analysts, highest level (title-wise) in a large regional bancorp (14,000 employees).
Most of the long-term mainframers poo-pooed the need to learn other platforms, languages, concepts, principles, etc., until the company got deeper into negotiations with Infosys to outsource our core systems to India with a Java replacement.
Only people over or close to 65 can afford to plan on retiring with "only" mainframe skills, and people that retire are coming back to work as contractors within weeks (if they can).
“I want to enter as an entry-level data analyst. I expect a salary in the $40-50,000 range commiserate with my skills. I want the opportunity for advancement if I work hard and prove my worth.”
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It sounds as though you’re a senior already. Many of the recent graduates I’ve seen “get their foot in the door” in recent years did so by well placed (summer & holidays) internships. They had the opportunities to prove their worth and were picked up, as “known quantities”, upon graduation.
If you’re past the internship stage, then you might try getting on as a “temporary” in your line of work (even if it’s entry level work)—anything to be in a position to prove your worth.
By the way, welcome to the world of work and hustling. Nobody is getting anything handed to them in today’s economy (except perhaps for a handful of minority affirmative action folks). Wish you the best. Just don’t give up.
Employers are also concerned about how a graduate financed their education, they won’t be very impressed with somebody with good grades, who just financed their education from student loans and the Bank of Mom and Dad.
>In today’s “labor market”, a college diploma doesn’t mean much. Everybody has one.
No kidding. I’ve been looking for programming jobs (I have a Bachelor’s in Computer Science) and during a couple of interviews I’ve been asked questions like “what is the general structure of an if-statement.” IMO, this is pretty insulting to anyone who has put in the work to get a 4-year degree in the field.
I’m told that’s because there are applying people who don’t know — which is surprising in itself with the posted requirements of the job.
If I were “in charge” of the hiring of the candidate, I’d make sure there was a “training reimbursement clause” (and another guaranteeing the legitimacy of the diploma). Then, in the case of fraud/misrepresentation such that an employee who didn’t know such a thing (as the if-statement) the company would fire and sue the candidate (fraud) and sue the issuing-school as well (further fraud).
Yes, more work for lawyers; but in the end degrees would QUICKLY come to have some value. (Consider how schools would react to being sued for incompetence on part of their graduates.)
>Employers are looking for people who are willing to work. IMHO.
This is true; but there seems to be a sort of lemming effect in my field. The sort of thing that allows PHP to be used in commercial projects*** because a) everyone else does it, and b) it’s “quicker”* and “easier”**.
So, I’m not sure it boils down to just being willing to work. (Unless that willingness to work includes the sacrifice of a commitment to providing an excellent product.)
* It’s ‘quicker’ because it allows a coder to go in and start making immediately visible changes.
** It’s ‘easier’ because cause it does a lot of “magic” type-casting and the like; a bad thing, I think, because it discourages thinking about the actual problem at hand.
*** This leads to why it’s a bad idea in a commercial product: there are a lot of hidden ‘gotchas’ which turn the production from problem-solving to correcting for the language. For example, let’s say you want to do something with the cent portion of a payment; the string ‘08’ is converted into the number 0; because the magic-typecast errors out (it thinks that an integer starting w/ zero is in octal; meaning digits of 0..7) and returns a 0 (indicating an error). The whole language is like that.
>There’s a good 15% of the electorate who would not vote for a Democrat for anything. Now it’s time for Republicans to figure out how to get those guys to vote FOR a Republican.
The problem with this is that the Republican party is unconcerned with holding to it’s stated party-planks.
When was the last time that the Republican party effected a major cut-down on government-size? (I’m talking multiple agencies shut down.)
When was the last time they effected a balanced budget?
When was the last time they actually pushed FOR a repeal/repudiation of Roe v. Wade? (They had control of the legislative and executive for most of Bush2.)
When was the last time they actually stood against gun-control? (They get false-praise for the 90s AWB; they had to do NOTHING for the sunset-clause to kick in.)
When was the last time they stood for REAL Constitutionalism? (If they did there would be problems with: the Fed-reserve, the GCA/NFA, the War on Drugs, etc)
In short, the Republican party seems dead-set in be[com]ing utterly irrelevant.
The diploma is just a start. It’s really all about who you know.
Let’s face it. Most employers have a stack of applications. They hire people they know, and almost all have connections with people in their own network looking for work. The only reason they would resort to an unknown entity would be desperation.
Employers tend to hire people they’ve already worked with from their families, church, charities, political organizations or through internships.
My son hasn’t even graduated yet, and he was offered two full time jobs. The pay is OK. He’ll be able to afford his own place and will be able to support himself. He’s in children’s ministry. One job offer came from his home church, where he has volunteered for years. The other through an internship.
My first professional jobs came through connections with a family member and with a classmate who ended up in administration. My husband was hired out of his internship. My other son was hired because of a connection with a friend. My adopted Asian high school daughter was hired on the spot the moment she walked into an Asian restaurant. My grandmother loved to surprise her elderly neighbor with freshly baked bread. This neighbor’s son eventually hired my grandmother.
This is nothing new. True, our society has become more credentialed. But it’s still all about who you know.
Nice.
I’ve got a CS degree myself but am having a bit less success in my job-search... though that may be because I’m looking more for a particular sort of programming job (using Ada) which jobs seems to want only ‘experienced’ people w/ security clearances. {I know I’d pass a clearance, but I’ve had very little in the way of formal-training w/ Ada; most of it is self-taught after a ‘programing languages’ course.} Maybe the problem is, so to speak, that ladder has no bottom rungs.
I have a degree in EE and was asked what is Ohm's Law? I got up and left, I was totally rude but I was pissed off. I just stormed out of the place without saying a word. For all I know the dufus thought I was a fraud and knew nothing about EE. But clearly my resume said BSEE on it so it is all retarded in the end....
For Freepers who can't understand this it would be like interviewing a Physician an asking him/her "So do you know what blood is?"
>I forgot to add that I am interested in ALL Data Analysis, not just investment/banking analysis. I love stats.
Stats are kinda-interesting, even though I had to take the course 3 times to pass. (Had motivation issues.)
What I found odd was that I could explain what the teacher was talking about to those who just-didn’t-get-it in such a manner that they got it... even though I was/am certain my level of understanding was tenuous at best.
,,,,and it’s no wonder ,, have you ever heard of some of the wierd degrees these young fools are being awarded .
Oddly enough, this point was not accented, and it is important. There is a large oversupply of college graduates today.
When I got my bachelor's degree in 1966, receiving a degree was somewhat prestigious since only 6.5 percent of the U.S. population held one. Today, it's 30.4 percent, which is quite a jump. (To understand why, look up the Supreme Court 1971 decision Griggs v. Duke Power and consider its implications from the viewpoint of employers.)
In 1966 I walked right from graduation into the job of my choice and that was not unusual. Quite a difference an oversupply of college graduates can make.
>You’re being satirical, right? You couldn’t possibly be serious, could you???
Probably not; I’ve got a BS in Computer Science and am looking for a job, the couple of phone interviews I’ve done have posed questions like “what is the general form of an if-statement?”... this is the equivalent of asking a registered-nurse what a “heart-rate”/”pulse” is in an interview.
I've worked in factories at jobs involving hard labor ~ and it was no fun. Other than having employment and the income that came with it I was glad to see those jobs disappear ~ and they didn't go to Mexico or China.
BTW, China has this same problem with modern manufacturing capability ~ it employs a lot fewer people than meets the need for jobs. But, fur shur, they are not giving up any of the new methods .
You probably won't see anything like that for the rest of history.
Saved all the firm job offers just to prove to the kids I was a contender some day.
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