Career and money advice for new college graduates

If you’re a millennial, do these things, or else risk remaining unemployed for a long time.

1. Wake up early. Job seeking is a full-time job.
2. Don’t pass on everything. No entry-level job is ideal.
3. Stop relying on mom and dad.

Career advice from Aol Jobs, summarized by FINS Morning Coffee

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With two out of three college graduates averaging more than $24,000 in student loans, Fox Business steps in with this financial advice.

Step 1: Create a Budget

Even if grads don’t have a concrete post-grad plan just yet, creating a budget of projected expenses such as bills, rent and discretionary spending can help them better understand their cash flow situation, suggests John Bucsek, managing director with MetLife Solutions Group. …

Making a budget doesn’t have to be an overwhelming prospect—grads can easily keep up with their expenses using sites like Mint.com or creating a simple spreadsheet….

Step 2: Figure Out Student Loan Terms

Grads typically only have a six-month grace period before having to start repaying student loans, making it essential to secure a job and stay on top of other expenses.

Unemployed or financially-strapped grads should consult with their lender to determine repayment options available to them such as deferment, forbearance, and Income Based Repayment plans should they have issues making payments on time….

Step 3: Get High Interest Debt in Check

Whether grads are an authorized or co-signed user on a parent’s card or have their own account, they should  focus on getting the debt with the highest interest rate paid down first.

Understanding how debt impacts future goals and how credit score plays into every major purchase can help them stay on top of making steady payments and monitoring credit history health, says Bucsek.

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A variation on the expert’s advice

Since the percentage of young adults living with their parents has risen to 22% today, from 11% in 1980, it appears the recommendation to “stop relying on mom and dad” is being ignored by many.  Here’s my variation on the preceding advice.

1. Get up early every day to find a job, or to hone your skills to make yourself more employable.
2. Even if you can’t find a job in your field, work somewhere, even if it’s part-time.  Earn some money.
3. If you’re living at home, use the opportunity to save aggressively and/or pay down student loans.

 Related:  Parents have lower expectations for kids becoming financially independent (Cost of College)

For 2013 graduates, ‘college hiring to remain relatively flat’

Consistent with a jobless recovery, 2013 college graduates see only a modest uptick in new jobs despite last year’s rosy predictions.

The economy might be improving, but few employers are hiring more new college graduates.

In fact, the hiring situation for new graduates looks about the same as last year, which is to say not very good, according to a new report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Broadly, projections for hiring plummeted in 2009 but have ticked upward since then. Yet, there is only supposed to be a 2.1 percent increase in hiring graduates from the class of 2013. That’s the smallest increase in five years.

It’s nowhere near last year’s survey estimate that indicated a 13 percent increase in the hiring of recent graduates.

Demand is higher for jobs related to technology, healthcare, education, and business, and lower for graduates in the humanities and social sciences.

In light of  reports about curtailed school funding increases and an oversupply of teachers, it would be prudent for students to look into the details about exactly what types of jobs are included in the “educational services” category.

Salary increases vary substantially.

The college Class of 2013 commands an overall starting salary of $44,928—up 5.3 percent over the average starting salary their Class of 2012 counterparts realized ($42,666).

Figure 1: Average Salaries by Discipline*

Category	2013 Average Salary	2012 Average Salary	Percent Change
Business	$54,234	$50,633	7.1%
Communications	$43,145	$41,550	3.8%
Computer Science	$59,977	$57,529	4.3%
Education	$40,480	$38,524	5.1%
Engineering	$62,535	$60,151	4.0%
Health Sciences	$49,713	$45,442	9.4%
Humanities & Social Sciences	$37,058	$36,371	1.9%
Math & Sciences	$42,724	$41,430	3.1%
Overall	$44,928	$42,666	5.3%

*Source: April 2013 Salary Survey, National Association of Colleges and Employers

Related:  Don’t pick a college major based on today’s hot jobs (Cost of College)

The rise of serial interns – ‘long hours and low pay’

“Permatern” is the new label for a college graduate who spends years in her 20s working for a minimal stipend or for free.  This pattern seems to have become more common for some liberal arts college graduates seeking jobs in media, the arts, and other fields, particularly in the metro areas of New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C.

Kate, with a degree in political science from an Ivy League school, was recently profiled in The Week.

She had one internship at a political organization and another at a media company and is now an unpaid intern at a lobbying firm. To make ends meet, she works as a hostess three or four nights a week, which means she often clocks 15-hour days.

Lacking a steady paycheck and benefits

… After all, who wants to still be an intern at an age when you should have a 401(k) and a modicum of job security, or at least be earning more than you did at your summer job during high school? …

When I ask Kate how many jobs she’s applied for, she says, “Like a million.”

Permaterns are sometimes counted in the growing numbers of underemployed college graduates.

Desperate as she is, the Department of Labor doesn’t consider her to be unemployed, because she has two jobs. Instead, Kate, who often works more than 60 hours a week, is in a class of workers who don’t show up in government reports. She’s one of the ”permaterns” — those perpetual interns, mostly in their 20s — who have been battered by the recession and are holding out hope that the conventional career wisdom that an internship leads to a job isn’t folklore from a bygone era.

A ‘skills gap’

The serial intern isn’t unique to D.C. You can find young people languishing at film studios in Los Angeles and magazine empires in New York City. The permatern phenomenon points toward wider trends in the economy — namely the cutthroat competition for knowledge-economy jobs, the lack of investment in this generation, and the skills gap between what a generation weaned on a liberal-arts education is trained for and what the in-demand skills and professions are right now (i.e., not another poli-sci or English major). The result? For many in Washington, the American dream starts with a highbrow internship that pays $4.35 an hour — then another, and maybe another.

STEM majors usually avoid serial internships.

Not everyone in the generation meets such a fate. Jessica’s brother, who is 28 and a mechanical aerospace engineer, has been gainfully employed since the day he graduated from college, Jessica says. So here’s another chasm in the 20-something cohort: the one between the liberal-arts kids and the engineering and science majors. “Engineering is an in-demand skill,” Jessica says. “International relations/policy kids are a dime a dozen, so the intern pay difference makes sense in that regard.”

A sense of entitlement

The expectation that one’s career should be fulfilling is another reason why the mid-20s, or even early-30s, intern has become a familiar sight in Washington offices. “People in this generation, despite the recession, are looking for what they really want to do, so they take a hit in the form of an internship to land one of those coveted jobs that pays the bills and is fun,” says Ryan Healy of career-advice site BrazenCareerist.com.

Living at home and logging long hours

… long hours and low pay go hand in hand in the creative class. The recession has been no friend to entry-level positions, where hundreds of applicants vie for unpaid internships at which they are expected to be on call with iPhone in hand, tweeting for and representing their company at all hours.

“We need to hire a 22-22-22,” one new-media manager was overheard saying recently, meaning a 22-year-old willing to work 22-hour days for $22,000 a year….

Required to be available all the time and expected to work ’65+ hours per week’.

A recent posting by Dalkey Archive Press, an avant-garde publisher in Champaign, Ill., for unpaid interns in its London office encapsulated the outlandish demands on young workers. The stern catalog of grounds for “immediate dismissal” included “coming in late or leaving early without prior permission,” “being unavailable at night or on the weekends” and “failing to respond to e-mails in a timely way.” And “The Steve Wilkos Show” on NBCUniversal recently advertised on Craigslist for a freelance booking production assistant who would work “65+ hours per week” (the listing was later removed after drawing outraged comments when it was linked on jimromenesko.com).

Sometimes it works out.

Sometimes the grueling internships lead to steady jobs, often with equally grueling hours.  That is considered a success.  Other times workers give up on their dream career after years of serial internships, and get a practical job to pay the bills.  That is simply considered reality.  I recently heard a story about an aspiring teacher who interned at a Washington D.C. area women’s advocacy group for about a year, and then was finally able to get an administrative job for a lobbying firm.  One of her main goals was staying in DC, so things have worked out all right for now.

Related:  Unpaid internships – the good, the bad, and the ugly (Cost of College)

Gloomy outlook for radiologists

“The times of graduating from medical school and driving a Porsche are done,” according to a radiology resident witnessing the gloomy outlook for his medical specialty.

At St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, a dozen radiologists in training, including Dr. Luke Gerges, 28, are suddenly stranded on an expensive road to nowhere. All received termination notices recently because their hospital is ending their residency program next year as part of a plan to replace its radiologists with a teleradiology company that reads diagnostic images remotely.

“Those days of raking in the dough with radiology are gone,” said Dr. Gerges, who is four years beyond medical school and $300,000 in debt. He said he chose a specialty he loves without caring that big salaries were waning, but never imagined it would be this hard to finish his postgraduate training and get a job.

An unsustainable growth in costs has led to the remote reading of radiology images.

Starting in the 1980s, the advent of technology like M.R.I.’s and CT scans, combined with a fee-for-service system, created ballooning demand for imaging and drove the compensation of radiologists to unsustainable heights, he said. “That led to a sense of entitlement in some people’s minds,” he said. “And that led to this development of offshore remote reading of cases.”

By 2001, with the supply of radiologists limited by a 1997 Congressional cap on all Medicare-supported residencies, nighttime demand was unmanageable for smaller emergency rooms. So-called nighthawk radiology services began pooling the diagnostic imaging loads of several hospitals and transmitting them electronically to American radiologists stationed overseas or working from home.

Though outsourcing to India grabbed headlines, the big growth in teleradiology was domestic. Now the nighthawk companies, staffed by recent radiology graduates, are competing for the daytime work, too.

According to one hospital spokesman, remote reading may actually improve the quality of care as well as cut costs.

Other specialties are also seeing restricted growth.

Few specialties have been immune to the same factors depressing radiology: deep Medicare cuts, cut-rate competition driven by technology, doubts about the health value of many tests and procedures and new measures to tilt public money to primary care.

Meanwhile, nurse practitioners are projected to nearly double in number by 2025.

A warning to petroleum engineering students

In the wake of a one-year jump of 55% in the number of U.S. petroleum engineering freshman students, it was reported that Texas A&M sent a letter to incoming students advising them to be realistic about future job growth.

Dear Admitted Aggie PETE Applicant,

The Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering, Texas A&M University, is pleased that you applied and were admitted to our top ranked petroleum engineering program. If you pursue a degree in petroleum engineering, our program is committed to providing the highest quality education available.

Recent data suggests that some concern about the sustainability of the entry level job market during a time of explosive growth in the number of students studying petroleum engineering in U.S. universities may be prudent.

Our advice is that you become aware of graduation projections and petroleum industry employment outlook for people with petroleum engineering degrees. For example, between fall 2011 and fall 2012, the number of freshmen in petroleum engineering programs in the U.S. increased from 1,388 to 2,153, a 55% jump in one year. Based on the many inquiries and applications TAMU is receiving for the petroleum engineering major, the number of U.S. students in petroleum engineering will probably continue a strong upward trend, as long as the employment market remains stable. These days, a very large number of people are already studying in petroleum engineering programs (see attachment, showing data made available through the Society of Petroleum Engineers, SPE), at a time when: the number of recent graduates, who began their studies several years ago, is already at about historical highs and growing rapidly (see attachment); our program’s board of industry advisors are recommending that we “do not grow” our undergraduate program at this time; and oil and natural gas price projections and expectations of U.S. governmental policy influences are viewed as not particularly encouraging by the U.S. petroleum industry.

We are not trying to discourage you from a career that we think is among the most fascinating, dynamic, challenging careers that exist. However, we also want you to know that the Aggie PETE program is doing the right thing by providing you with information that could end up being important to your future.

Sincerely,
Xxxxxxxxx

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2010 annual median pay for a petroleum engineer was $114,080, while the number of jobs in the ten-year period ending 2020 is expected to grow 17%.

Rig count numbers track oil well activity and serve as an indication of petroleum industry jobs.

I graduated with a degree in geology in 1977, which turned out to be accidentally fortuitous timing.  And it’s no surprise that I left the business around 1986, as did many geologists, petroleum engineers, and other industry workers.

Related:  Don’t pick a college major based on today’s hot jobs (Cost of College)

Nurse practitioners are projected to nearly double in number by 2025

Obamacare may fuel demand for physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and other jobs in the wake of a doctor shortage.

SACRAMENTO — As the state moves to expand healthcare coverage to millions of Californians under President Obama‘s healthcare law, it faces a major obstacle: There aren’t enough doctors to treat a crush of newly insured patients.

Some lawmakers want to fill the gap by redefining who can provide healthcare.

They are working on proposals that would allow physician assistants to treat more patients and nurse practitioners to set up independent practices. Pharmacists and optometrists could act as primary care providers, diagnosing and managing some chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and high-blood pressure.

Replacing doctors with other professionals may end up costing more and could lower the quality of care.

Doctors say giving non-physicians more authority and autonomy could jeopardize patient safety. It could also drive up costs, because those workers, who have less medical education and training, tend to order more tests and prescribe more antibiotics, they said.

“Patient safety should always trump access concerns,” said Dr. Paul Phinney, president of the California Medical Assn.

Doctors want more funding for medical school tuition, but that would not fix the short-term staffing shortage.

“We’re not going to produce thousands of additional doctors in any kind of short-term time frame,” said Assemblyman Roger Dickinson (D-Sacramento). “It makes sense to look at changes that could relieve the pressure that we’re going to undoubtedly encounter for access to care.”

Nurse practitioners and other non-physician providers already provide health care services in growing numbers.

The number of physician assistants in the U.S. more than doubled from 2000 to 2010….

The nurse practitioner population will nearly double by 2025, according to an analysis published in the July Medical Care, the official journal of the medical care section of the American Public Health Assn.

I’ve been very happy with the nurse practitioner who staffs our local drug store care center.  Their location and hours are convenient, and she usually offers to call the next day to check how the patient is doing.

Related:

• Better financial payoff for women who become PAs instead doctors (Cost of College)
• Why nursing graduates can’t find jobs (Cost of College)
• When the Doctor Is Not Needed (New York Times)

Quick Links – Top-paying jobs for community college graduates; no mandate relief in New York; high salary for high school principal; plus more

◊◊◊ Top ten jobs for two-year graduates (Community College Spotlight)

The top job is an air traffic controller,with a median 2010 salary of $108,040.

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◊◊◊  New York mandate relief report fails to recommend action on the most costly state requirements

ALBANY, N.Y. – Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Mandate Relief Council voted down 51 of 65 requests for help from local governments and school districts Tuesday, approving 14 suggestions for review of state mandates for special education and two other school issues….

The Council also recommended further study of a request to drop the state mandate for school districts with fewer than 1,000 pupils to have internal auditors on staff; and a state Education Department rule that mandates students get a “minimum number of minutes per week (seat time), by grade level and subject area.”

Requests to reduce the crippling pension costs were among those that were rejected.

They rejected requests to reduce the mandate to transport private school students; to reform teacher tenure and “last in, first out” work rules; to change the Triborough Amendment to the Taylor Law that keeps automatic teacher pay raises in place after a contract has expired; and to reduce the cost of public employee and teacher pensions. The requests included letting school districts create pension reserve funds, but that was rejected because it was an expansion of district authority, not a state mandate.

Also rejected were local government requests regarding the Wicks public works contracting law, health insurance contributions, restrictions on new unfunded mandates, tax cap exemptions, legal services for the poor and the MTA commuter tax.

Staff of the panel said that the rejected requests were beyond the scope and the authority of the council to decide because they were matters of state law, covered by local union contracts, or otherwise not a qualified candidate for elimination or reform.

I believe a constitutional amendment is needed to reduce pension costs, one of the most costly state mandates.  If that’s the case, the Council could have made that recommendation.  You can see a copy of the full report at the Mandate Relief Council site.

…
◊◊◊  Westchester County high school principal earns $377,080 annuall, including $131,352 in pension payments

New York’s highest-salaried school principal, James Ruck, who has led Harrison High since 2006, will earn $245,728 this year, setting a new standard for a building administrator in the nation’s hottest market for education leaders.

Ruck, 68, the former schools superintendent at Suffolk County’s Sachem Central schools, augments his Harrison pay with an estimated $131,352 a year in pension payments, pushing his annual income to more than $377,000. Ruck, of Northport, intends to step down from Harrison in June

About 1,000 students attend Harrison High School.

…
◊◊◊  ‘Motivation, Not IQ, Matters Most for Learning New Math Skills’ (Time)

But IQ does matter in overall math achievement levels.

… While some element of math achievement may be linked to natural inborn intelligence, when it comes to developing skills during high school, motivation and math study habits are much more important than IQ, according to a new study…

To their surprise, the researches found that IQ does not predict new learning — in other words, intelligence as measured by the IQ test does not indicate how likely students are to pick up new concepts or accumulate new skills. While children with higher IQs did have higher test scores from the beginning of the study, how much newmaterial the kids learned over the years was not related to how smart they were, at least not once demographic factors were taken into account.

“Students with high IQ have high math achievement and students with low IQ have low math achievement,” Murayama says. “But IQ does not predict any growth in math achievement. It determines the starting point.”

For a journalism job, consider majoring in economics or math

Nate Sliver, reigning king of political prognosticators after accurately applying his skills in statistics and mathematics to this month’s presidential election, offers his opinion on the future of journalism.

Why has the data-driven approach to predictions received so much attention recently, and what role have you and your team played in that?
I think people like those types of stories because—Moneyball is a part of it, right? And I think we have so much information now, we have so much data. We need better practices, strategies, techniques, to make better use of it. I think people are hungry for it. I think people do—appropriately—not trust the messenger so much. They don’t necessarily trust the reporter or the pundit to relay all the facts to them when they have so much information at their disposal, for free, basically. So it plays into that curiosity for what we do with all that information.

What does the growing popularity of this approach mean for the future of journalism and punditry in particular?
I think punditry serves no purpose. I don’t care if it has a future. For journalism though, there are two ways to do it. You can go and take your traditional journalist—and many of them are fantastically good reporters, very good writers, certainly The New York Times—and try to train them more in some math and probability and statistics. Or you can hire people who come from that background, where maybe now some papers are going to hire economics majors and math majors, fields that you wouldn’t typically enter if you want to go into journalism. But I would think—I guess I would predict—you’ll see more data-driven analysts or reporters. I think at some places, there are questions about where do these journalists fit in and what do you call them? Because the term reporter is now in context, but what is it, right? The New York Times, by hiring me, took a step to do that. The Washington Post has done that with Ezra Klein, but the Times, some of the best journalists are those who make their interactive graphics. And they really do consider themselves journalists, in terms of, “We’re trying to present complex information in a way that helps elucidate the truth to people.”

Since journalists are expected to apply a critical eye to the stories they write, it would make sense for them to know probability and statistics along with having other analytical abilities.  I’m not sure that all journalism schools focus very much attention on teaching these skills.

Interactive graphics do seem like the big thing in journalism.  Don’t most of us like playing with the data accompanying a story?

From Nate’s lips to God’s ears
My son is an aspiring journalist who is majoring in economics, so I hope Silver is correct in his view that data-driven reporting is on the rise.

Related:

• Roger Ailes tells journalism students: ‘I think you ought to change your major’ (Poynter.org)
• Is the journalism degree becoming obsolete? (ijnet.org)

Most new jobs do not require a college degree

63 percent of this decade’s new jobs will not require a college degree.

Industries and occupations related to health care, personal care and social assistance, and construction are projected to have the fastest job growth between 2010 and 2020.

…
The upward trend in healthcare jobs would seem to be consistent with a United States that is beginning to resemble Europe, with a declining birth rate and an aging population.

As the population continues to age, older groups of Americans are expected to have more rapid growth than younger groups. The 16-to-24 age group is anticipated to experience little population change, with a growth rate of 0.3 percent during 2010–20, while the population ages 25 to 34 is projected to grow 10.5 percent over same timeframe. Meanwhile, the 45-to-54 age group is expected to shrink by 7.6 percent, reflecting the slower birthrate following the baby-boom generation. As the baby boomers continue to age, the 55-and-older population is projected to increase by 29.1 percent, more than any other age group.

Low wages
With only one spouse working, most of these jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree are unlikely to support a middle-class lifestyle for a family.  But for a two-wage earner family, these jobs can provide a reasonably comfortable lifestyle.  Here are the income figures for the five occupations projected to add the greatest number of new jobs.

Table 2. Occupations with the largest numeric growth, projected 2010-20

	Occupation	Number of new jobs added	Percent change	Wages (May 2010 median)	Entry-Level Education	Related Work Experience	On-the-job Training
	Registered Nurses	711,900	26	$64,690	Associate’s degree	None	None
	Retail Salespersons	706,800	17	20,670	Less than high school	None	Short-term on-the-job training
	Home Health Aides	706,300	69	20,560	Less than high school	None	Short-term on-the-job training
	Personal Care Aides	607,000	70	19,640	Less than high school	None	Short-term on-the-job training
	Office Clerks, General	489,500	17	26,610	High school diploma or equivalent	None	Short-term on-the-job training

A married couple working at any combination of these jobs would land above the “contemporary” poverty line – $33,686 for a family of four.  Based on the median wages from this chart, a registered nurse and a personal care aide would bring in a total income of $84,330.  However, it should be noted that the trend is for a nurse with a bachelor’s degree or a diploma to fare better in the job market.  But even combining the two lowest paying jobs from this chart would generate $40,200 total annual income.

Related:  ‘How Many College Graduates Does the U.S. Labor Force Really Need?’ (Cost of College)

‘our nation’s march toward a more technical, STEM type workforce’

The strong emerging professional, scientific, and technical job sector deserves attention from college students contemplating college majors.

New Geography labels this a trend ‘toward a more technical, STEM type workforce’

Although the professional, scientific, and technical industry sector makes up only 6% of the U.S. workforce, it was responsible for 10% of national job growth from 2010 to 2012. In addition, the broad industry (NAICS 54) grew by 6% in the past two years, which illustrates our nation’s march toward a more technical, STEM type workforce. There are over 9.2 million jobs in this industry, which is driven by sub-sectors like computer system design services and management, scientific, and technical consulting services.

That 6% job growth looks even better when compared to the anemic overall increase in jobs across all sectors during the same period.  In that light, the BLS outlook appears reasonable.

Among the jobs increasing at a healthy rate are Software Developers, Computer Systems Analysts, Management Analysts, Services Sales Representatives, Market Research Analysts, Interviewers, Interpreters and Translators, Advertising Sales Agents, Public Relations Specialists, Accountants, Bookkeeping Clerks, Chemical Technicians, Chemists, Surveying and Mapping Technicians, and Architects.  (Growth in the last two occupations is related to the geophysical services sector, perhaps with many in North Dakota?)

A few observations:

• Lawyers are an exception in this category, having not experienced growth in the last two years.  With the glut in unemployed and underemployed attorneys, the outlook is gloomy.
• Advertising sector job growth surprised me, and even the fact that it was included in this category was an eye-opener.  However, considering the growth of the Internet and social media, I conclude that this field is increasingly requiring specialized technological expertise.  I have a relative majoring in advertising, and next time I have a chance I’ll pick her brain about this.
• Translation and interpretation services is the second fastest growing sector.  And here I thought technology was putting most translators out of jobs.
• Most jobs in this sector seem to require at least a bachelor’s degree.  An exception is Surveying and Mapping Technicians.

There’s much more at the link, including information about geographic distribution and job descriptions.  Here’s one that was helpful for me.

Management analysts – Conduct organizational studies and evaluations, design systems and procedures, conduct work simplification and measurement studies, and prepare operations and procedures manuals to assist management in operating more efficiently and effectively.

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More detail about industry sector NAICS 54, Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services - what is is and what it is not:

NAICS Industry Sector Description

The Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services sector comprises establishments that specialize in performing professional, scientific, and technical activities for others. These activities require a high degree of expertise and training. The establishments in this sector specialize according to expertise and provide these services to clients in a variety of industries and, in some cases, to households. Activities performed include: legal advice and representation; accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll services; architectural, engineering, and specialized design services; computer services; consulting services; research services; advertising services; photographic services; translation and interpretation services; veterinary services; and other professional, scientific, and technical services.

This sector excludes establishments primarily engaged in providing a range of day-to-day office administrative services, such as financial planning, billing and recordkeeping, personnel, and physical distribution and logistics. These establishments are classified in Sector 56, Administrative and Support and Waste Management and Remediation Services.