Career Development

April 2010 - Employment in New York

"Think back for a moment, if you will, to your first full-time job. Odds are it was a lowly staff position with a humble title, lots of drudgery and little encouragement or recognition from anybody. In order to take even one step up, you may have had to wait out someone who had been there for ages and showed no sign of budging. But you probably stuck it out, at least for a few years, and paid your dues. After all, who ever said work was supposed to be fun?"

"In late 2007, Taylor Senatore and Jennifer Frank withdrew most of their personal savings-a combined $250,000-to launch California Wine Merchants in New York. The duo, who teamed up after discovering by chance that they shared the same entrepreneurial goal, figured that amount would cover all of their start-up costs and even leave change to spare."

"How should you go about advertising yourself on LinkedIn when you are already employed? It seems like you wouldn't want to be too overt, since people from your present company are likely to see your posting. Is it OK to note that you are open to job queries?"

This is the landing page for eCareer at LaGuardia Community College- CUNY.

Job search engine for health care field.

"Use the Business Directory to obtain the name, address, and contact information for businesses most likely to employ people in your occupation or industry. Employment levels at more than 713,000 firms in New York State were compared with statewide industry staffing patterns for 800 occupations to identify potential employers in your field. "

"NACE's 2010 Student Survey shows a strong link between use of career services and a student's ability to get a job offer. Results show that, the more frequently a senior used career services, the more likely he/she would receive a job offer. Just under 29 percent of those who received job offers had not used the career center-meaning the remaining 71 percent with offers were career center users. "

"Finding a job, flourishing on the job and moving into a better job demand plenty of work-especially during a jobless recovery."

"Early in Ian Graham's new book 'Unbillable Hours,' a John Grisham-like true story of his work as a corporate lawyer and how he helped get a murder conviction overturned, he quickly comes to the realization that working at a big Los Angeles law firm wasn't the best career move. The money is great -- $120,000 as a first-year associate -- but as one of his colleagues points out, working 260,000 billable hours per year comes out to $40 an hour, or what he pays his cleaning lady."

"Alex Barnett spent 14 years as an attorney handling several high-profile class-action lawsuits involving consumer fraud and product defects. But after getting laid off by two firms in the spring of 2008, he began prepping for a different kind of spotlight: He launched a career in stand-up comedy."

"MAYS LANDING, N.J.-Training and education are said to be the best route to a better job, but Cynthia Motte is still waiting to see if that's true. Ms. Motte and millions of other jobless workers across the country are discovering that new skills can take you only so far when jobs are scarce."

"Welcome to the GED COMPASS. The GED Testing Initiative is a public/private partnership that aims to improve the New York City GED testing system, including testing infrastructure, test-taker readiness, and public awareness and support. Through the Literacy Assistance Center, new tools are being developed including a GED Compass web portal to ensure that GED test takers know where to enroll in GED prep programs, prepare for the exam and secure a GED test seat. This website was developed for people interested in learning about how to get a GED in New York City. There are many ways to achieve this goal and this website will help you find the path that is right for you. In New York City finding a place to take the GED was difficult. Finding information about what you need to do to prepare for the test was hard to find. The Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD) partnered with the New York Community Trust to take a close look at the existing system and see how it could be improved. The result was a comprehensive report written by literacy expert, Jacqueline Cook, called Our Chance for Change: A Four Year Initiative for GED Testing in New York. You can see the full report here. "

Those working in metro areas scattered along the East and West coasts - San Jose, New York, Seattle - tended to get paid better last year than their middle-America counterparts, according to the Labor Department's report comparing occupational pay in 77 metro areas, released Wednesday. Employees in the heartland and in certain southern metro areas, such as Lincoln, Neb., and Tallahassee, Fla., earned the least.

Top Ten Networking Tips for Alumni written by Leslie Camacho.

One of the most old-fashioned occupations in finance is back in favor: the life-insurance agent. Some big insurers are adding thousands of agents and planning to sign up more. They're taking advantage of the weak job market to scoop up former real-estate agents, mortgage brokers, bankers and lawyers whose prospects have declined.

"Few events arouse more teenage angst than the springtime arrival of college rejection letters. With next fall's college freshman class expected to approach a record 2.9 million students, hundreds of thousands of applicants will soon be receiving the dreaded letters. Teenagers who face rejection will be joining good company, including Nobel laureates, billionaire philanthropists, university presidents, constitutional scholars, best-selling authors and other leaders of business, media and the arts who once received college or graduate-school rejection "

NYC Workforce Weekly

"Later this year, a marketing manager will sit down for his first day of work at HomeAway, a company that helps people rent their vacation homes online. In the firm's sleek Austin, Texas, headquarters, a glass-wrapped building decorated with travel souvenirs, the marketer will flip on his computer and do his job - a job no one has done before. This, you see, will be a brand-new job, one of the most coveted commodities of economic recovery. "

"Internships-the vast majority of which are unpaid-have become a staple of the college experience. In 1992, only 9% of graduating college students had participated in internships; by 2006 that figure increased nine-fold to 83% (Ortner 1997/1998; NACE 2008), representing at least 2.5 million student workers each year. Internships are often beneficial for both the student and the employer. Students can gain valuable insights into the nature of a certain occupation or industry, specific skill development, exposure to a network of contacts in a field of interest, and experience in the professional world. In turn, employers can engage in low-cost workforce training and vetting for future employment."