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Jobs for Students - Where Are They?
jtpalinmajere asks: "The past few years students like myself have found themselves in an ominously precarious situation. This is to say that the availability for jobs in the computer industry that are suited well for fresh meat graduates are dwindling at an alarming rate. Personally, I graduate this coming Spring and have been job searching for the past semester with little if any success at finding a prospective future employer. The placement office at my university hasn't been too helpful for many students in the CS department. The only companies that I have come in contact with that might consider fresh graduates are Microsoft and government agencies such as the FBI. If I can actually compete with the 76% foreign immigrant population of Microsoft then I might see that as a fairly good start, though the odds don't seem to roll in my favor. As far as the government is concerned, I'm simply not old enough for any job that gets paid more than minimum wage and has actual job security. Most of my job searching has been conducted through services like Dice and Monster. 99% of the jobs listed in these services require 2 - X many years of previous experience using Y software with a current Z security clearance level. I've even found one company that wants 10 years experience specifically with .NET -- go figure! I'm not looking for the dream job that everyone hopes to one day attain. I'm looking for a job that will simply get me into the industry with a meager salary large enough to sustain life. How many other students find themselves in my position? What are some opinions, particularly from our non-students, for soon to be graduates like myself?"
Did you do any internships while in college or coop? One of the most helpful job resources I found are my "ex-coworkers" and "friends of friends". If they like you and know you can perform good, people will keep an extra eye out for leads and/or possible openings.
Network...
Don't burn bridges...
Wear clean underwear...
?...
Profit
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
That depends. Can you say "Do you want fries with that?"
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The only companies that I have come in contact with that might consider fresh graduates are Microsoft and government agencies such as the FBI. If I can actually compete with the 76% foreign immigrant population of Microsoft then I might see that as a fairly good start, though the odds don't seem to roll in my favor.
I think you will find that the vast majority of non-US citizens at Microsoft, or any other organization that hire H1Bs for that matter, aren't fresh graduates, but were already experienced software developers before the H1B is granted. It would be very difficult under the terms of H1B to hire fresh graduates, as one of the conditions is that the holder must have skills that are not in ready supply in the US.
Therefore, these people are entirely irrelevant; you wouldn't be competing with them for an entry level job anyway.
50% of jobs out there arn't advertised.
Go to the employers directly, send in your resume. It shows initiative if you call a company and ask to speek to HR or the hirer, depending on the size of the company.
I work for a small company (im not out of uni yet) and have heard that small companies are good for jobs, but don't advertise much. I hear this stuff through the "channel". Network some Wetware and hunt down a job.
As far as the government is concerned, I'm simply not old enough for any job that gets paid more than minimum wage and has actual job security.
That's about right. My grandpa needed to be 18 and just graduated from high school to get a good job that could support a family. My father needed to have a 4 year degree for the same thing. I needed a degree and a few years of experience before I found a decent job.
At this rate our grandchildren are going to have to be retired before they can get a decent job.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
Get a temp job that starts to pay the bills. Let the firm know that you would prefer tech-area jobs. Temp work is the great back door through which the inept Human Resource director is circumvented.
If you like the place, and they like you, you will eventually get an offer for a 'real' job. Meanwhile, you will get to see all the different types of jobs there are: specifically, which places you really don't want to work.
While you're slumming in the mail room, you should contribute to some open source projects at home. Temp jobs almost never make you sign oppressive IP contracts. It will keep your skills up, and you will earn a reputation with your peers. Non-paid work is _always_ impressive on your resume. If a shop says "Hey, why are you doing OSS stuff?" you can say it was to keep your skills sharp while you found a 'real' job.
But don't write off the 'real' world. There's a far bigger, and hidden, market for people who know how to program. I started in environmental consulting, and one of our best consultants was a database guru. I recently automated table generation in a large report. Saved us a week of formatting time. Programmer is not in my job description. These types of jobs generally have a specific problem domain, which gives you a leg up when you want to move to a 'real' tech shop.
My father is a blogger.
For more than 20 years, as a hobby, I've been helping friends re-write their resumes. I've noticed that one factor that affects the hiring of excellent students is that their resumes usually don't communicate clearly.
People are told that resumes should be only one page. That's not true. When you write any advertisement, you should write as much as you have to say. When you finish telling the entire story, stop writing. This advice is from the famous ad man David Ogilvy, who wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man , an excellent book that is, as you would guess, easy to read. Any library should have it.
Here are PDF examples of the before and after: Original student resume, with beginning corrections. Draft of improved resume, with formatting quirkiness caused by Microsoft Word. (My friend the student did the re-writing, using my suggestions as a guide. The improved version is current as of yesterday.)
It took maybe 10 hours to develop the information. I spent the time because I am a friend. It is easy to understand that a prospective employer would not spend 10 hours getting to know every person who sends a resume.
Notice that the original resume looks like the resume of thousands of recent journalism graduates. The improved resume is an advertisement that gives a complete picture of the person being advertised. The original expects the reader to do the work. The improved version gives as much as possible and asks as little as possible from the reader.
Like the friend in the example, many students have a lot of relevant experiences.
The book Executive Jobs Unlimited is old, but includes a lot of information that is relevant to anyone's effort to write a job-getting advertisement. Most libraries have this book.
A lot of the problems in getting a job are caused by the inexperience and ignorance of the employers. Employers are often no better than applicants at communicating. They often ask for qualities expressed by buzzwords. Often what an employer really wants is very different from what is communicated. Imagine the confusion when both the applicant and the prospective employer communicate poorly.
The most difficult kind of writing is writing an advertisement. The most difficult kind of advertisement to write is an advertisement for a person. The most difficult person about whom to write is yourself. Get help if you can. Write biographies of yourself, so that you will have information to use in the job-getting advertisement. Most people have difficulty believing they are as good as they really are, I've found.
If you are interested, it is okay to mirror the resumes, but the mirror must include a link to this original Slashdot comment.
When you submit a resume to HR, talk about your 25 years of experience with .NET and 50 years of Java.
Care to back that up? Lying on an H1B application results in a 10-year ban from travelling to the US, so it's not something that anyone would do lightly. And it's not just a HR department checking up on you, it's the INS. And if a company decides to stretch the truth a little in a pitch about the experience of its employees, that's not necessarily the employee's fault.
Or was that just another whiny "the dang foreigners are takin' all our jobs and women" remark? Remember, the only difference between you and a green card holder is that your parents caught an earlier flight or boat.
I don't like to criticise, but I'd hesitate to recommend your rewritten resume as an example. Since CV writing is quite a personal thing, I'll just list my reservations below with the most serious first, and let anyone else look at both and decide for themselves whether they agree.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.