The next wave of college graduates will be stepping into the world of work over the coming weeks. Some already have jobs, some are job hunting, and some have pushed aside the thought of a career until after finals week. No matter where you stand on the job front, you can all benefit by updating your vocabulary with a few words that can help you push through difficult times on the job hunt, on the job, or in all aspects of life. These words to live by are:
Over the last few years, Americans have become more familiar with change. Our president’s campaign was based on change; our economy took a change for the worst and is making small steps to recovery; many members of our friends and families changed or lost careers; technology continues to change how we communicate, learn, listen to music, fight disease, etc. All of these factors have created a new economy that will only continue to get further away from what we know today (65 percent of kids in grade school are predicted to have jobs that don’t exist yet.1)
Piper Perry, my intern last semester, had worked since she started cleaning Super 8 hotels at 16. A lackluster student in high school, she went to Montana State University at Bozeman to please her mother. But , like a lot of students, she spent more time partying than studying, and she dropped out.
If you have looked for work without luck or if you are stuck in a job and need a career change, an internship can provide you with a preview into a whole new field and give you an idea of whether your skills and abilities match that career, even if you’ve already graduated from college or have yet to go to college. Whether you took the opportunity to have an internship in school or not, getting an internship at this point in your life can get you in the door of your dream job, build work experience and skills to add to your resume, and give you something fulfilling to do that can break the monotony of a job search.
During tough times, people go back to school. By many estimates, the depression America is experiencing right now hasn’t been this bad since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time in office. His ingenuity in the Works Progress Act and many other programs which put people to work when jobs were scarce is the hallmark of his presidency. Obama, who clearly understands that the number one thing we can do to improve our economy is educate young people in America, also needs to look at how people over twenty-five can increase their earning power, save for retirement and, hopefully, find ways to give back to society in both money and time.
Today’s college grads find themselves competing for entry-level jobs against laid-off workers with master’s degrees in business adminstration and years of experience. After seeing the movie Larry Crowne this weekend, we are also reminded that there are millions of displaced workers—people who don’t have college degrees who find themselves on a no-growth path and are ultimately let go to face more schooling and/or retraining. Here are a few things recent graduates can do to maintain equilibrium duing the economic downturn.