JOBS – How to Compete

Posted on June 23, 2013 // Leave a Comment

Traditional: University, Major, Major, Major, Degree, Job, Career?

Your Future: Who You Are, Career, Major, Degree, University, Job

In our last post titled JOBS, we looked at some important data about the relationship between an education and unemployment and income. It provides important evidence about why it is so important to learn.

Buzz Today Source: The Wall Street Journal. Procter & Gamble Inc. got nearly a million applications last year for 2,000 new positions plus vacant jobs. And the Texas Roadhouse Inc. gets as many as 400 resumes for a job opening within 24 hours after listing it online.

What the Department of Labor data in the JOBS post shows, is that it is not only about getting your degree, it is really about learning more in general. That is why I call this blog Learn Prosper. The data shows that for both unemployment and income, more post secondary education is always better. The data shows that an associates degree is more valuable than some education but no degree and that each degree there after – bachelors, masters, Ph.D./professional decreases your likelihood of being unemployed and increases the probability of higher income. The can be no other conclusion than the fact that learning is good for your job and income prospects no matter what the Non-Degree crowd is saying.

In the face of the BUZZ Today information we see here, combined with the data we saw about Starbucks in the last post titled JOBS, it is very clear that merely submitting resumes is not a successful way to compete. When you look at it from the hiring company(s) point of view, you can see why submitting a resume does not work in today’s job market. No one can read 7.6 million or even a million or even 400 resumes for every job.

What companies are doing is using computer software, what are called bots (short for robots) to scan candidate credentials. The approach is to eliminate resumes from consideration to narrow the candidates down to a manageable number. Here are a couple of pointers about this. When the job posting says “bachelor degree required and 3 – 5 years of experience in the field” they mean it. Recent data indicates that as many as 60% of the jobs in the future will require some form of post secondary education.

If you do not have the education and the experience listed, the bot throws your submission out right at the beginning. From there, the bot is looking for matches of key words. The match is between the words in the job posting description and the words in your application and resume. One word of advice. In this case more is not better. What the bot is looking for is matches, not volume. It’s all about the bots.

The harsh reality is that bots are really stupid. They are not designed to interpret and infer. They match key words. If you do not have the key words they are looking for, they do not advance your case to the hiring manager. This is why it is so important to follow the path of Your Future above. Working with O*NET data to understand careers that match who you are is the place to start. From there, the major you chose to study and the degree you earn will put you in area of job opportunities that match who you are. Details on how to best do that are in Your Future is Calling.

From there, it is well worth your effort to really be disciplined about the key words in the job posting to make sure that your submission has the greatest chance of the bot finding the match. Unfortunately the bots are not looking for your potential five years from now. They are looking for what you can do today. It is all about the key word matches.

The other big “gotcha” in the job market is that common phrase: “3-5 years of experience”. More on that in the next post.

Filed Under: Adult learning, Career, Money // Tagged: , , , ,

JOBS

Posted on June 22, 2013 // Leave a Comment

Having a well paying job may not be the only goal of an education, but it has to be one of the main purposes for getting an education. But there is a lot to learn about the job market and how it ties to your education decisions.

Buzz Today Source: The Wall Street Journal The Starbucks Corp attracted 7.6 million applicants over the past 12 months for about 65,000 retail and management positions.

The evidence is clear that the level of your education is closely correlated with unemployment (inversely) and income. We have seen the data before in an earlier www.learnprosper.com post.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

More Education Means More Money Chart, see table below

But in addition to this important general information about the relationship between education and jobs, we want to look at some very specific labor market facts. My goal is to give you data that will help motivate you to actually complete your learning. With an education you radically increase your chances of reaching the job opportunity at the end. This is true whether you stay on the Traditional path or move to the recommended Your Future path.

As discouraging as the BUZZ Today data is about the current job market, the department of labor data on education is very good evidence that you should be doing everything you can to complete your education. It will help you to be able to compete for the jobs.

Some additional data should help encourage you. The very useful book, What Color is Your Parachute provides information even in the face of the tight job market reflected in BUZZ Today. What the book tells us is that in 2012 about 140 million Americans did have jobs. What is most encouraging is just how dynamic the overall job market is. Again from What Color is Your Parachute: In March 2012 4,356,000 people found work and there were 3,737,000 vacancies waiting to be filled. That is a total of 8,093,000 opportunities (p.13). The message is that you don’t have to join the crowded space of millions of others trying to get a job at Starbucks. The challenge you face in the jobs competition is not whether there are jobs to be filled – there are literally millions to be filled every month. The challenge is to decide on the career that fits who you are, get the education you need to compete, then learn how to play the game when hiring companies are faced with the numbers we see in BUZZ Today. More on this in Your Future is Calling and future posts on Learn Prosper.

Filed Under: Adult learning, Career, Income, Money, Who you are // Tagged: , , , , ,

$150,000 in Student Debt and No Job

Posted on May 31, 2013 // Leave a Comment

www.learnprosper.com is designed to give readers like you the information you can use for to prosper in your future. The key words are your and future. Unfortunately many of the headlines about higher education today are crafted to grab your attention and appeal to your emotions.

Buzz TodaySource: Daily Finance: Stories of Student Debt. William: “In just a few months I’m going to turn 62 years old”, says Williams who took out $44,000 in private loans to study psychology. He still has nearly $130,000 to pay off. Paul: Paul sunk more than $120,000 into undergraduate and graduate studies in visual arts, but he has yet to find a job in his field. He owes $150,000 today.Mark: “I wish I hadn’t gone to school,” says Mark, who graduated in 2005 with degrees in psychology and music and $875 monthly payments on $80,000 worth of student loans.

As a nation, student debt totals over $1 trillion dollars. The average student debt of college graduates is around $25,000. This means that there are millions of college graduates with debt that is manageable. What this also means, is that William, Paul and Mark are the exception, not the rule.

Nonetheless, it is valuable to examine the $150,000 and no job case to see what you can learn. The three men in BUZZ Today show us some important lessons.

The ROI that you can expect by earning a degree depends on two things. The first is the amount you pay for your education or the I in the ROI calculation. This you can reduce through a number of important ways that I explain in detail in Your Future is Calling.

The second factor in the ROI calculation is the R, or the Return you can expect to earn in a job. Here BUZZ Today provides some clues. Let’s turn to William, Paul and Mark. Go to O*NET and look up the pay and number of jobs for the identified areas of study: psychology, music and visual arts. The O*NET data speaks for itself.

Headlines about high student debt and no jobs grabs our attention. But it ‘s the lessons to be learned that are most important to you. It’s important to your future that you make key investment and return decisions before you enroll in any degree program. Your choices need to match who you are.

In a recent radio interview I was asked what advice I would give to a young person with $150,000 in student debt and no job. My answer was: “I have no advice to give them. I do not know of any good options once you have arrived at that outcome.” To impact this sad result you have to make better decisions before you begin your learning.

What we see in BUZZ Today, is that merely getting a degree – any degree at any cost, can actually be a very bad decision. The learning that impacts your future begins here.

Filed Under: College degrees, Debt, Income, Money, Paying for your degree, Student loans, Uncategorized // Tagged: , , , ,

Is College Worth It? YES – for most

Posted on May 26, 2013 // Leave a Comment

Lot’s of people are jumping onto the question of the value of college education.  In a just released book titled “Is College Worth It?: A Former United States Secretary of Education and Liberal Arts Graduate Expose the Broken Promise of Higher Education” the former secretary of education asserts that the promise of education has been broken.

          Data from the US Department of Labor shows that the conclusions the authors draw in the BUZZ Today quote simply are not true.   Source:   Department of Labor careeronestop
The graph shown here shows that for every level of education, higher levels  of education result in both lower unemployment and higher income for most graduates.  Note that the median is the point where one half of the group is above the value and one half is below.  The conclusion has to be that for most students, higher levels of education result in higher economic benefit to the learner.  Buzz Today Source:   Washington Times – Is College Worth It? book review:   William J. Bennett and David Wilezol’s “Is College Worth It?” asks and authoritatively answers one of life’s biggest questions.  It provides a thoroughgoing deconstruction of the “of course it is” delusion. It turns out that for too many, and maybe even most of our young people, the answer to this central question is, sadly, “no.” “Whether the standard of excellence for higher education is cultivating the mind and the soul or maximizing financial return on investment, most of higher education fails most students,” the authors write.   The Department of Labor data shown here is unambiguous.  For every increase in education level obtained the unemployment goes down and the income goes up.   Under no line of reasoning can one conclude from this data that higher education fails most students. Instead of the sweeping claims that associate degree holders earn more than bachelor degree holders (shown not true in the data above) or that the ROI on an education investment is not worth it financially, the discussion needs to focus on what a student needs to do to make sure that they get the best return on their personal investment. The Practical Guide on how to do that is what Your Future is Calling is about. Instead of making headline grabbing general statements about all and every, we need to be helping individual higher education students make better decisions about their own career choices, college majors and universities that they attend.  This can only be done with specific objective data about the choices each individual faces.

Filed Under: Adult learning, Career, Income, Money // Tagged: , , , , ,
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