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What You Need to Know About Careers and Education

Learn Prosper is real. Two out of three jobs available today require some form of learning credential. There are millions of job opportunities every month. The overwhelming majority of those opportunities require that you have education credentials to even be considered. The BUZZ Today has the data. The analysis is in the body of this post.

Buzz TodaySource: US Bureau of Labor Statistics There were 4.0 million job openings in December 2013 and there were 4.4 million hires in December 2013. This makes a total of 8.4 million opportunities to find a new job or career in one 30 day period at the end of 2013.

The argument is over education in the future. There is a lot of debate about whether the forecasts for future jobs are real or not. The Lumina Foundation has a big goal: “To increase the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60% by the year 2025”. Another forecast of the demand for degree credentials comes from the highly regarded Georgetown University Center for Education and the Workforce which forecasts that the decade growth ending in 2018 will create 47 million new job openings. Of those new jobs, the forecast is for nearly two-thirds of them to require some post-secondary education.

Recently, some have argued that the value of an education is overstated and that forecasts of future labor demand are flawed.  Much of this argument is entangled with the fact that higher education has become too expensive. This fact is true. Higher education in America has become too expensive. But this is a different issue than whether labor markets demand an education.

The BUZZ Today data shows that there are millions of positions available in the labor markets today – 8.4 million opportunities last December alone to be precise. The jobs are there. What you need to know is what it takes to qualify. Here additional information is valuable.

The massive job posting service Monster.com has studied the mix of current job postings on their web site. What they found is that 60% of those postings required a bachelor degree or above. This is data on the job market today, not some contested forecast about future labor market conditions.

There is one additional fact that you need to know about this issue of career opportunities and education. Companies are receiving massive numbers of resumes for every position. To handle this very real challenge, most large companies use resume screening software to qualify job applicants. If your resume does not match the key words and qualifications of the job posting you will not get an interview. The bottom line is that for the vast majority of the millions of job opportunities you must have a degree credential to even be considered for the position. Without the credentials, it is extremely unlikely that you will be invited to interview.

The main conclusion is that an education vastly increases your chances for a new career. For personal guidance on how to most efficiently obtain that education, go to Your Future is Calling. The book is full of helpful guidance on linking “who you are” to careers and the education path you need to get to the future you desire.

What Employers Are Looking for in Degrees and Credentials

Some are arguing that it is possible to get a good job without a college degree.  It’s true.  It is possible.  But the fact is, having the right credentials vastly increases your chances to have the future you desire.  This blog post gives you  facts about why this is the case and what you need to do about it.  Buzz TodaySource:  CollegeMeasures.org     Higher education is one of the most important investments that people make. And most students make this investment because they want a better chance to land a good career and higher earnings. Because college credentials are usually associated with higher earnings, taking on reasonable debt or paying high tuition are not necessarily bad choices. But as they enter the labor market, some graduates earn far more than others. Graduates with the same major but from different schools can take home substantially different amounts of money. And earnings vary widely among graduates from the same school who have chosen different majors.

In BUZZ Today we see what researchers show us about careers, majors and schools.  The CollegeMeasures.org site is full of valuable salary information from thousands of jobs and tens of thousands of college graduates in five different states.  The data is well worth the effort to understand it.

But CollegeMeasures.org looks at actual market data for degrees and careers.  What we want to do here is look at the issues from the employer’s perspective.

For better or worse, this is a JOB market.  Markets are the connection of buyers and sellers.  Employers are hard nosed decision makers and you are a seller and employers are buyers.  To get a sense of the employer perspective as a buyer think about the situations where you are the buyer and someone else is the seller.  An example might be when you are buying a house or a car. What you want as a buyer is a quality product that fits your needs, a competitive price and some assurance that what you are buying has some staying power.  Employers want the same things you do as a buyer.

So what do employers want when they hire you?  They want to have some assurance that you can actually do what they are hiring you to do.  That is what your major is all about.  It is extremely unlikely that they will hire a biology major for a $125,000 a year petroleum engineering position.  Because our world of work is becoming ever more specialized and complex, what you are qualified to do becomes more important every year.  The difference in pay reflects the growing need for skills and knowledge.  The market salaries on CollegeMeasures document the demand for such skills and knowledge in the job market.

A degree communicates more than merely skills.  To an employer, someone with a degree is a person who has demonstrated behaviors that employers value.  Earning a degree is a long term commitment and someone with that degree has proven to be up to the challenge of such a long term commitment. Employers value that.

So, for better or worse, the resume software that will screen your resume with your job application will be screening for the credentials valued by the employer.  A large number of those job postings will have something like:  “Bachelor’s degree required and 3-5 years experience”.   It may not be fair but it is a reality.  In a world where each job opening can get thousands of applications resume screening software is a reality of today’s job market.  Without the credentials job applicants never even get the interview needed to prove themselves.

In the end, degrees and credentials are the price of entry to  many attractive job opportunities.  Winning the lottery is a possibility but having the credentials employers are looking for produces a much higher probability of success.

Loans for School – How to Keep Your Student Debt Low

The President is right, money you spend on your education is the best investment you will ever make. It is also true that excessive student debt can make paying back the cost of that education a painful burden. But there are alternatives. The best way to get your education and keep your student debt low is to not take on the school loans in the first place. Sounds too easy you say? It’s easier than you think – if you know the facts.

In Buzz Today you can see the way the press is dealing with the challenges of getting an education today. It is a fact that tuition costs can outstrip your paycheck…if you don’t do something different. The old approach of simply enrolling in any college, showing up and taking out piles of student loans will bury you in debt. Buzz Today Source: NPR Obama says higher education is the best investment young people can make in their future, but with tuition costs outstripping paychecks, many families face an unpleasant choice between a heavy debt load or skipping college altogether.

What you need to do is ignore the battle between colleges and the politicians over the rapidly rising cost of college tuition. There isn’t anything you can do about that. Just for the record, I agree with those who say that the rising college tuition is excessive and out of control.

What you can do is take actions that serve your needs even as these political battles rage around us. Here are some tips I talk about in Your Future is Calling. They will help you keep the cost of that important education down, eliminating your need to take on crushing student debt in the first place.

1. The reduction in tuition paid on average is actually about 45% below the tuition price published on the college WEG site. For information on the actual tuition paid at all but a handful of American universities go to the government site COLLEGENavigator. On this site you can see what students enrolled at you favorite college actually paid. You should not pay more. You will if you do not have these facts.

2. The first two years of college curriculum cover what educators call the “General Education”(gen ed) core. Regional accrediting bodies in American require these courses. Notice what these requirements are called – general education. What this means is that how individual colleges fulfill these requirements are general, that is, about the same in every college. This means that you can take these requirements about anywhere, including at a low cost community college, and then transfer those credits to the college of your all important area of concentration. Not every college will accept credits from just any school, but many do. The facts you need to know are which colleges will accept what transfer credits from what source. You need to ask. Don’t just enroll.

3. Many college students incur excess debt through what I call Major, Major, Major. This happens when you enroll in college, take high cost gen ed, randomly select a major, decide its not for you, then select a second major and even a third major. Every time you do this you take longer to graduate and in so doing, increase your student debt. To avoid this, you need the facts about what career fits “who you are”. The career choices are detailed on O*NET

The President is right that an education is the most important thing you can do for yourself and your loved ones. But the Buzz Today insert states a false choice. There are alternatives to high debt or no degree. You just have to have the facts to make the right choices before you incur student debt.