JOBS

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.

Learn What You Need for the Future You Desire

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

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

It is highly likely that you have experienced the sequence as shown in the first line Traditional shown above. If this is true, you have a set of experiences that define the challenges you now face. Some of those challenges are how to pay off the debt from your education and degree, how to find a job given the degree you have, what major to focus on. If you have already dropped out you may be deciding on what university to now transfer to. All are significant challenges.

Buzz Today Source: CNN Money title: “I will graduate with $100,000 in loans.” When Mears was ready for college, her parents had just lost their home to foreclosure. Mears fell in love with Union College when she started in 2011. She is majoring in political science. She’s also taking time to figure out a five-year plan, including what she’d like to do after graduation.

My goal is to help you transition to the sequence on the second line titled: Your Future. This is a totally different sequence of decisions that change what you need to know to get to the future you desire. Individual blogs will look at various parts of this decision.

The information is this BUZZ Today is exactly the Traditional path that most learners are on. It is University first (Union College), Major (Political Science), Degree (to be conferred), career (figure out what she’d like to do after graduation).

The Your Future path brings some of these critical decisions up earlier in the decision. Your Future is Calling provides.

A Practical Guide to the Education You Need to Have the Future You Desire.

Future posts will provide more detail on solutions to address the link between Learn and Prosper. Stay tuned.

All and Every

The current discussion about the value of learning is entangled in a very public debate about college and degrees.  To begin with, colleges and degrees are way too narrow topics when it comes to your future.  What we are talking about here is you: not everyone – all – only.

Buzz TodaySource:  Aspen Ideas Festival   “Is College for Everyone?”   Source:   Brookings Institute   “Should Everyone Go to College?”  Source: Jobs.aol.com   “Has the MBA Become a Worthless Degree?”  Source:  Washington Times Book Review:  “Is College Worth It?”  The first thing that has to change is the belief that we are failing as a society if everyone doesn’t go to college.  Source:    CNN Money    defying history and stereotypes by proving that a bachelor’s degree is not, as widely believed, the only ticket to a middle-class income.

Unfortunately, the sweeping headlines do not help you make the decisions that are right for you. You are not all or everyone. You are who you are.  What you need is specific information to make the choices that create the future that fits who you are.  Careers matter.

Even when it comes to careers choices there are lots of skeptics. There are some who believe that it is not possible to accurately predict what jobs will exist five years from now. It is true that those forecasts will not be perfect, but there are some good data sources that give a lot of valuable information even if it is not perfect.

The best of those sources in my opinion is the US Department of Labor WEB site called O*NET.  The design of the WEB site is especially valuable for finding key information about careers and jobs.  Your job is to explore that data to find what best fits who you are.  The road map for using the data is clearly spelled out in my book Your Future is Calling.

Selecting A College or University Part II

Earning a degree is now more important than ever.  Experts predict that the majority of new jobs that will be created over the next decade will require a post secondary degree of some kind.  Today, less than 40% of Americans hold such a degree.  The mismatch between current supply and future demand is obvious.

   Buzz TodaySource:  Your Future is Calling.  When you have earned credits in your prior education you actually have those credits.  But there is a problem when you want to use those credits in a degree program.  It is not where you got those credits that is important in American higher education.  It is where you are trying to use those credits, that is most important in American higher education. It is very important that you understand this.  Even though you earned the credits and you paid the tuition, and those credits are on your official transcript they might be worthless. Not the U.S. Department of Education nor even God himself / herself can guarantee that those credits will be accepted in a different degree program.  It is only the university you are entering that has the authority to grant those credits as being valid toward the degree you are seeking. 

Today an education is more important than ever and represents a huge investment in time and money.  You would think that the information required to select the right school is readily available.  Wrong!  Given the complex world we live in there is more information than ever.  But good clear information is scarce.

So, how can this be?  The answer is that our world is far more complex.  Today the choice of a college involves not only the selection of a place to call your alma mater, it involves your life choices.  This is especially true for adults returning to education.

A high school graduate entering a freshman class has several years of general education to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their life.  An eighteen year old filling out their second semester class roster has little risk of getting their course selection wrong.  Their choices at that stage have little impact on the life they will lead a decade later.

For an adult with a prior education who has a spouse, has kids and works every day at a job – filling out their class roster has more risk in their choices.  These choices include the college or university they plan to attend.  How the courses are delivered (online or in class), what majors are available and how much of their strained income tuition consumes are all related to the school selected.  Unlike the typical recent high school graduate, this adult is particularly sensitive to time to graduation and cost of enrollment.

So how are you to decide which college or university is right for you?  The answer is that you need detailed and reliable information about the majors available, credit transfer policy, grant availability, scholarships and accreditation of every college you are considering attending.  One place all of that information is available is in:  Your Future is Calling.