Career Development

Welcome to LaGuardia eCareer: A Virtual Career Center at LaGuardia Community College of the City University of New York.

"We professors love to talk about quiet students: the men who slouch in the back row, hidden beneath their baseball caps; the women who smile congenially but never, ever raise their hands; the classes that leave us frustratedly channeling the hapless economics teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off as we plead in vain for student participation ("Anyone? Anyone?")."

"Team projects always follow similar patterns: first learning who you'll be working with, the icebreaker session, the brainstorming and planning, and finally implementation. Of course, most of the time you're procrastinating or debating with your team members, but eventually you construct a final product. The goal of working in a team is learning and evolving, while achieving something with other people."

"Community colleges get their few moments in the White House limelight next week when President Barack Obama and the vice president's wife, Jill Biden, convene a community-college summit. It's another step toward giving the institutions, the Rodney Dangerfields of higher education, a bit more of the respect they deserve."

NYC Workforce Weekly October 10th, 2010 - PDF

"At 29, Wes Swank has several friends entering full-time M.B.A. programs. Mr. Swank, a managing director at the hedge fund Hayman Advisors LP in Dallas, isn't joining them. He earned his M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business at age 24, matriculating just a few months after completing his undergraduate studies."

Check out my article entitled, Introducing LaGuardia eCareer! in the September 2010 issue of LIVE WIRE. A LaGuardia Community College CUNY publication.

"When Audrey Kane joined TGI Friday's U.S. division in 2005, the middle manager learned she might gain a vice presidency someday. She became a regional VP of the restaurant chain in August 2009 - a year sooner than she expected. Ms. Kane believes her participation in an outside training program hastened her promotion because she improved her internal negotiation and networking skills. "

"Psychology majors might want to put themselves on the couch. Only 26% of psychology majors are "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their career paths, the lowest in a sampling of popular majors included in a Wall Street Journal study. The psychology majors the survey captured had a satisfaction rate 14 percentage points lower than the next lowest majors, economics and environmental engineering."

"Among the explanations for the stubbornly high U.S. unemployment rate, factors such as housing troubles and extended unemployment benefits have played a leading role. Increasingly, though, economists and job seekers are identifying another problem: Employers are being pickier, or not trying as hard as they usually do to fill the openings they have."

"Community colleges are the "unsung heroes" of the American education system, President Obama said during a White House summit on community colleges on Tuesday-the first time such institutions have received such recognition at the presidential level, those involved in the event say-and they should play a critical role in achieving the administration's goal of leading the world in college graduation rates by 2020. "

"As the White House stages a first-of-its-kind community college summit Tuesday, the Obama administration is proposing that stronger partnerships between two-year public colleges and big-name U.S. employers such as McDonald's and The Gap will help better match workers with jobs during the economic recovery and beyond."

"Big, complex problems require the work of multidisciplinary teams. Consider prostate cancer. Decades of research and billions of dollars have led to the understanding that neither doctors, chemists, biolo­gists, nor engineers can arrive at a cure on their own. That multifaceted approach is gaining acceptance among the vari­ous individuals and organizations concerned with solving great problems. When giving research money to colleges, founda­tions and government agencies often require that investigators come from multiple academic disciplines as a condition of financial support."

"Prepping for job interviews is the subject of plenty of coaching and advice. But when job interviews turn to juggle-related topics, some questions can catch interviewees completely unprepared."

"U.S. companies largely favor graduates of big state universities over Ivy League and other elite liberal-arts schools when hiring to fill entry-level jobs, a Wall Street Journal study found."

"For all the recent research and writing on happiness, studies that synthesize findings from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities have been notably missing, says Sissela Bok."

Employment in New York State PDF

"Weeks after Rosalyn Ray was laid off from her job as a medical health clerk last year, she decided to hire someone to revamp her résumé. "

"Beloit, Wis. - Born when Ross Perot was warning about a giant sucking sound and Bill Clinton was apologizing for pain in his marriage, members of this fall's entering college class of 2014 have emerged as a post-email generation for whom the digital world is routine and technology is just too slow. Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit's Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. The Mindset List website at www.beloit.edu/mindset, the Mediasite webcast and its Facebook page receive more than 400,000 hits annually. The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since "digital" has always been in the cultural DNA, they've never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. Dirty Harry (who's that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat. Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them. A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of sch

Employment in New York August 2010 - PDF