College grads: Time is on your side in job search

IF Mick Jagger addressed the Class of 2009 at one of this month’s many college commencements, he’d probably urge the grads to repeat his famous lyric, “Time is on my side.”

It may seem hard for real-world-bound collegians to find comfort in the words of a guy who sings for a living, especially in this recession. But Jagger earned a scholarship to the London School of Economics as a teenager, and though he dropped out, he was smart enough to eventually amass a $300-million fortune.

Time was on the Rolling Stones’ side then.

Time is on the side of this year’s college grads, too.

Yes, their job prospects right now are narrow. Their quest for employment is like running the tire drill at a football practice – get those knees up, don’t touch any of the tires, and make sure your time on the stopwatch beats that of the job-hunter behind you.

“Our message to students is to be competitive,” said Kent Waggoner, director of the career center at Indiana State University. Resumes must be “pristine,” he added. Grads must network – the 21st-century equivalent of “know-who” – by staying in contact with acquaintances who are connected with potential employers to find those unadvertised “hidden market” opportunities. They must show creativity by leaving an indelibly positive impression on a human-resources rep who is inundated with resumes.

Every new hire will get scrutinized.

“The economy is still tough,” said Kevin Hewerdine, director of career services and employer relations at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. “Companies are very leery about adding jobs.”

It’s not pretty, but it’s not forever.

Back in 1982, a Reagan-era recession drove unemployment to 10.8 percent nationwide. Inflation hit double digits. The prime interest rate topped out at 21.5 percent that June. On the morning after ISU gave 2,600 diplomas to its Class of ’82, a story in the Tribune-Star described the bleak job market awaiting them: “Recession gripping the United States has infected almost every other part of the world. The victims are thousands of businesses gone bust, millions of workers tossed out of their jobs, and billions of other ordinary people feeling the symptoms of a thinner pocketbook and an uncertain future.”

Sound familiar?

A little more than a year later, the disaster was over. Interest, jobless and inflation rates stabilized. The most devastated industries – manufacturers, airlines and automakers – made the strongest recoveries. Reagan’s rock-bottom approval rating did a 180, and America re-elected him in a landslide.

And most of the Class of ’82 found work.

The men and women graduating this month enter a better situation than their predecessors of 27 years ago.

“It actually is, from a longer-term perspective, a better market than the (recession of the) ’80s,” said Edwin Koc, director of strategic research at the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

That sounds hard to believe, with some of the nation’s largest employers (like GM and Chrysler) clinging to life, and 5.1 million jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007.

But during the 1981-82 recession, college grads entered a job market in which the average worker was 34 years old, Koc explained from the NACE offices in Bethlehem, Pa. The average age of an American worker today is 41. The work force is rapidly aging. The number of baby boomers retiring will climb, Koc said, even though many of them have been forced to continue working because their investments and home values were decimated by the recession.

The nation needs the Classes of ’09 and ’10 to be ready.

“It’s going to be a tough market for college grads this year, and maybe a tough market for next year’s class,” Koc said, “but after that, it’s looking pretty good.”

Some glimmers of hope, as President Obama put it this spring, are already on the collegians’ horizon.

At Rose-Hulman, even the renowned engineering college isn’t immune from the recession. Between 85 and 90 percent of Rose’s 366 graduates will already have a job secured by commencement day on May 30, Hewerdine estimated. That’s an enviable plateau for most colleges, but it’s a drop from Rose’s 95-percent rate on graduation day 2008. The average number of job offers per grad is now one or two, instead of three or four last year, because of the contraction of the manufacturing and automotive industries.

Still, by later this year, the school expects all to be placed in jobs, Hewerdine said.

There are some hiring hotspots, too, for young engineers in the oil and gas industry, computer sciences, electrical engineering, and in federal agencies.

Nationwide, grads may find good luck with federal job offers, Koc said. Accounting remains lucrative. And in the Midwest, transportation logistics firms – commercial trucking and rail cargo carriers – are hiring, he added.

As for ISU and the outlook for its 1,660 spring grads, Waggoner detected an interesting trend at a recent Indianapolis career fair. An information technology firm specializing in Web design and network building, had grown to 80 employees from 30 since September. Fewer firms attended the fair, but the 40 that did were “very, very aggressive. I’ll use the phrase ‘contracts in their briefcases.’ They were ready to talk to students,” Waggoner said.

The market for elementary teachers is once again promising, Waggoner said. That field had been hard to crack because those teachers stayed with their jobs. Now, though, they’ve begun to retire. The next wave of recruits is in demand.

Their time will come.



Mark Bennett writes for The Tribune Star in Terre Haute, Ind.

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