You’re a high school senior about to enter college. You’re interested in a couple of majors, but you’re not quite sure about the job market for each major. You may wonder, are there really many nursing jobs available? What about marketing positions? Or journalism openings?
Or maybe you’re a college junior about to enter your senior year. You’ve chosen a major, but you wonder if it will be hard to find a job when you graduate. You ask, are there many job openings in my field of study?
Here’s practical method to get a clearer picture of your job market. Search for job openings in your major at a job search website.
I’ll do a sample search on monster.com to get you started.
I’ve always assumed that there were more accounting jobs than marketing jobs. I chose to become an accounting major instead of marketing because of this assumption. (Yeah, I know it’s crazy that someone can be interested in both accounting and marketing).
So, here I’m searching for accounting entry level jobs. I use the keywords “entry level” because they weed out jobs that require years of experience. I don’t know if those keywords work when searching for non-business jobs. For non-business jobs, you may have to look at each job individually to see you meet its requirements.
I enter “Dallas, TX” because that’s where I want to work. I hit search.
There are 47 entry level jobs in accounting.
Let’s search for marketing job openings.
There’s 19 marketing entry level positions.
Once you’ve done your search, you can look at the individual job postings and get a feel for the job market. You’ll be able to get clearer answers to these questions:
- What kind of companies are hiring?
- What types of jobs do I qualify for?
- What specific skills are companies looking for?
- Is there a minimum GPA for certain jobs?
- How much money can I expect to earn?
Feel free to ask questions, give other career tips, or share your experience with job searching. You can leave a comment below or email me at deebarizo at yahoo dot com. Thanks for reading and may your next job search go well!
Technorati Tags: career, job search, job
2 responses so far ↓
perpetualstudent // Jul 31, 2006 at 6:56 pm
Good thoughts and good advice. In my case things worked out, but I wished that I had paid attention to also what types of positions are availiable in my field. I chose to concentrate on Signal Processing. Most of the available positions are working for defense contractors (SONAR and RADAR,) something I am not comfortable with. If I had chosen Communications (cell phones, wireless cards, routers, etc,) I would have had more non-defense jobs available. My job is very different than my grad studies, but I am happy with the change.
dee // Jul 31, 2006 at 9:42 pm
Thanks for the encouragement. Glad your job situation worked out.
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