But not every company suffers from an epidemic of employee disengagement. A handful of top companies really do get it — engaged workers aren’t just happier and more productive, but also the source of the vast majority of breakthrough ideas. (Click here to tweet this thought.) In addition to being great places to work if you happen to be looking for a job, these best-of-class companies can serve as inspiration for managers hoping to better inspire their teams.

So who exactly are these much desired organizations, and how do they attract top talent?

Every year LinkedIn aims to find out with its annual ranking of InDemand Employers, compiled by sorting through reams of data from the website. The latest edition is now out, so who made the list of America’s dream employers? Here are the top ten:

1. Google
2. Apple
3. Amazon
4. Facebook
5. salesforce.com
6. The Walt Disney Company
7. Nike
8. McKinsey & Company
9. PepsiCo

There’s no shock at the top of the list as Google and Apple retain their (unsurprising) position at the top of the heap from last year. Nor were there any huge movers, but Amazon, with its bold and much chattered-about initiatives including drone delivery and controversial hardball tactics with publishers, did climb a couple of spots from number five to number three. Walt Disney, however, was two slots less magical this year.

So what makes a company such a dream employer? LinkedIn suggests five factors that these firms emphasize when hiring that keep them so demand among talent and so deeply engaging once they hire.

Authenticity

The best companies for employee engagement, unsurprisingly, encourage team members to bring their whole selves to work. “The culture at NBCUniversal is not a faceless corporate culture, it’s a culture that allows people to have a personality. Being true to your personality while maintaining professionalism is the key to success with landing your dream job here,” says NBCUniversal (ranked #15) VP of Talent Acquisition James Ryding, for instance.

Sociability

Top employers engage deeply with candidates on social media and encourage potential hires to have deeper connections to the company than a simple scan of the webpage.

Team orientation

The firms that topped the list don’t hire many lone wolves. Adobe (ranked #24) VP of Global Talent Selection and Development Jeff Vijungco says: “We want individuals with a unique skillset that complements the team, a sense of urgency to deliver beyond what’s possible and ‘we’ rather than ‘me’ team players.”

Ambition

Top workers don’t just work — they also dream big. “When you interview, show us your passion, your innovative mind, and intrigue us with your big ideas on the impact you could have on our company, customers and our community,” says salesforce.com SVP of Global Employee Success Monika Fahlbusch.

Adaptability

If you want to hire top employees, don’t expect them to do the same thing day in and day out. One of the keys to being engaging and in demand is routinely shaking things up and encouraging employees to follow their passions. “Prospects should be open and determined about pursuing passions yet flexible enough to jump in to anything,” says VMware (ranked #19) Director of Executive Staffing Anu Datta.

Employers: How could you emphasize these five factors to bring in more top recruits?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com, contributes regularly to Forbes and Women 2.0 and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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The post How to Attract Top Talent: 10 Companies Job Seekers are Dying to Work For appeared first on Brazen Life.

“You better study for that math test,” the stereotypical concerned parent might say, “or you’re going to end up slinging coffee at Starbucks for the rest of your days!”

But now with a new announcement from the Seattle-based coffee giant, selling grande lattes might not be the the end of a barista’s educational journey. The company just announced it will reimburse employees who earn an online degree. In partnership with the well regarded Arizona State University, Starbucks is offering free tuition to the university’s 33 undergraduate and about 30 graduate online programs with no obligation to pay back anything. (Click here to tweet this news.)

Who benefits from Starbuck’s new educational program?

There are a few caveats, but the deal remains pretty sweet no matter how you look at it. To be eligible, employees need to have the grades to qualify to attend Arizona State and must work 20 hours a week or more at a company-owned Starbucks (not a franchise location).

The company particularly rewards employees who have taken some classes already and are now going back to complete their degree; students who enroll as juniors or seniors get a free ride, while workers who have less than two years of college under their belt when they enroll are eligible for a partial tuition reimbursement of around $6,500. Starbucks advisors will help employees apply for PELL grants and other forms of financial assistance as well.

What could that be worth to an ambitious barista? Arizona State tuition runs about $10,000 a year, so for a Starbucks employee who enrolls as a junior and gets a free ride through graduation, that’s worth about $20,000.

Starbucks claims it’s making the heavy investment as an effort to fight inequality and develop its workforce. “There’s no doubt, the inequality within the country has created a situation where many Americans are being left behind. The question for all of us is, should we accept that, or should we try and do something about it,” CEO Howard Schultz said in a release.

Starbucks’ workers may be the big winners of this new program, but the move is also a huge win for online education in general and Arizona State University in particular. “The company isn’t disclosing the financial terms of its agreement with Arizona State University. But the program could significantly boost the enrollment for Arizona State’s online program,” commented The Huffington Post, for instance.

What other employers will pay you to go to school?

Starbucks is far from the only big employer to offer to reimburse educational expenses, but it is one of the very few that doesn’t require employees to stick around after they complete their degrees. As InThe Capital’s Molly Greenberg notes, “this is an intriguing move made by Starbucks, as most large organizations that offer tuition reimbursement plans require their employees to stay on staff for a specified duration of time in order to also benefit from their workers’ degree.”

Who else might be willing to foot the bill for your degree? Business Insider helpfully rounded up 15 companies that provide some form of tuition assistance and details on the terms of their programs. Firms include Best Buy, Home Depot, UPS and Gap.

What do you think of Starbuck’s new educational program? Would you be more likely to work for a company that offering reimbursement for education?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com, contributes regularly to Forbes and Women 2.0 and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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The post A New Way to Earn a University Degree Without the Cost: Work at Starbucks appeared first on Brazen Life.

Is all hope of getting into a top MBA program lost thanks to your lackluster undergrad performance?

Nope, says Jay Bhatti, who served on the Wharton admissions committee while getting his MBA at the school. “Many times candidates with poor undergraduate grades are admitted if they have shown significant accomplishments after school. However, it takes time to rack up these accomplishments. Most people accepted with poor undergraduate grades were older and had a few more years of work experience,” he assures potential applicants.

That’s good news for those with impressive professional credentials but less stellar academic records, but how exactly do you best convey your growth to ensure those reviewing your application don’t get hung up on your GPA?

Wow Them With Your GMAT Score

A 2011 Kaplan Test Prep survey of 265 MBA admissions officers found that just 24 percent felt a low undergrad GPA was the leading reason for rejection. That’s good news for those trying to bounce back from a low undergrad GPA. Less good news is the fact that more than double that amount (58 percent) said that a low GMAT or GRE was key to rejecting an applicant.

The bottom line: if you flubbed your college years, your GMAT counts more than ever.

“Make sure you have a strong GMAT or GRE score, since the exam is another indication of potential for academic success,” stresses Paula Wilson, director of MBA admissions at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business in a discussion of overcoming less than impressive undergrad grades on BusinessWeek.

That could very well mean a ton of studying and taking the test more than once, so make sure you leave yourself enough lead time to adequately prepare. “If you are applying to a top 10 MBA school, you should aim for a GMAT score of at least 700,” says Bhatti. “If you got a score below 700, take the GMAT again. Even if you don’t break 700 the second time around, it at least gives the committee a more favorable opinion of your determination. This is why I tell people to take the GMAT at least a year before you plan to apply. It gives you enough time to prepare and get a good score. If you don’t get a good score, you have a lot of time to try again.”

Nail the Optional Essay

Impressive test scores are key to overcoming lackluster undergrad grades, but you can’t just get a great score, cross your fingers and leave it at that. The committee will certainly take note of your low GPA, so you need to address the issue head on in your optional essay.

“I strongly recommend that you take advantage of the optional essay portion of the application. Most schools will offer this. This is an opportunity for you to address any concerns you think the admissions committee might have about your application and to discuss, in your particular case, why you will be successful academically in their program,” advises Wilson.

What exactly should you discuss in the essay? Stacy Blackman, founder of an MBA admissions consulting company, has delved into the issue for U.S. News & World Report and says your approach depends on your circumstances. She directed one client who simply failed to apply himself during his undergrad years to write an essay that “made no excuses and admitted that he had lacked the wisdom to see the big picture during his undergraduate years. He demonstrated that he had since developed the maturity to work hard in all classes, not just those he found intellectually interesting.”

Another student who got a D in a key course due to a family crisis, however, would do better to explain the situation and own his priorities. The exact content, in other words, will vary person to person but should reassure the committee that whatever the problem was them will no longer be a problem now.

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com, contributes regularly to Forbes and Women 2.0 and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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The post MBA Applications: How to Get Accepted to Business School with a Rock Star Career But Crappy Undergrad appeared first on Brazen Life.

But what if a job ad included none of that information? What if the job ad looked like this “Open-Ended Job!” from media company Upworthy?

No job title? No candidate specifications? What’s up with this weirdness?

We reached out to Melissa Trahan, Head of Talent at London-based Passion Capital and previously a recruiter for Massive Health and Facebook, to figure out why a company would opt for such an ad and what sort of results they should expect if they do.

Should your company recruit this way?

The utility of open-ended posting, Trahan says, depends on the size and focus of the company:

Small startups have very real limitations when it comes to hiring — they can often only afford the roles they truly need, and they usually don’t have a full-time recruiter to handle the administrative stuff, like sifting through text-heavy applications to find a person they don’t even know if they need. Early startups often struggle with knowing what people they need vs. what people sound like they could be good to have around.

While these sorts of ads may expand the possibilities for a small startup, the distractions may outweigh the benefits, Trahan adds:

In theory, an open approach like UpWorthy’s could help them determine their needs, but the noise of it could well be a distraction. For companies that have the ability to hire at a faster pace and have full-timers on board to handle that process, this kind of application could be a really fun way to diversify the pipeline and potentially create new roles.

If you’re recruiting for a bigger business, it might pay to go for it.

Ambiguous ad seeks creative, flexible candidate

Open-ended ads may also be most appropriate for environments that require a lot of creativity, much like UpWorthy’s, Trahan notes, as the very act of responding to such a posting signals comfort with ambiguity — generally a plus at startups that are still too small for much structure and demand team members wear many hats.

“Perhaps this form of application is really just an audition for the creativity it takes to succeed in their environment,” she suggests.

What’s the bottom line? If your business has the HR resources to sift through what’s bound to be a highly mixed bag of applications and the sort of culture that would welcome the unconventional candidate, perhaps it’s worth a try. (Click here to tweet this thought.)

If roles are tightly defined or resources are so strained little time is left for recruiting, maybe give an open-ended job ad like UpWorthy’s a pass.

Have you ever tried posting job ads like this? Did they work for you?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com, contributes regularly to Forbes and Women 2.0 and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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The post Recruiters: When Should You Consider Open-Ended Job Postings? appeared first on Brazen Life.

Now, as we all know, it’s more about resume- polishing and internship collecting. And it seems this flurry of career prep is spreading to high schools.

The Rat Race comes to high school

That’s according to a new survey. from Millennial Branding and Internships.com. Released today, the survey asked 4,769 people (mostly students with about 300 employers thrown in) about career preparations and ambitions. The results reveal that pressure to think about resume building and internships is seeping down into high schools.

Have a look at some of the numbers:

• 60 percent of companies agree students will need to begin to focus on their careers in high school to compete for internships and jobs in the future.

• 90 percent of companies agree high school internship programs can help students get into better colleges.

• 89 percent say they’ll have a competitive advantage when looking for a college internship or full-time job.

• 83 percent said those internships will yield better paying jobs.

Parents, it seems, agree with employers that an early-start will yield benefits. More than half of students (55 percent of high school students and 57 percent of college students) reported their parents put pressure on them to gain professional experience during high school.

It’s no shock that the economy is mostly behind this increased early focus on career. “We found that the two driving factors were their parents and the economy, both of which are most likely correlated,” Millennial Branding Managing Partner Dan Schawbel told Brazen when asked what was behind the trend. “In order to get into a better college, get better college internships and eventually a higher paying job, you need to start focusing on your career as early as possible. Parents see how bad the economy is and want to prepare their children for the worst.”

Is this a good thing?

So should we stand up and cheer that internships and volunteering are inching in on the high school experience, putting a squeeze on pep rallies and studying? Schawbel is optimistic but admits not everyone sees the early focus on careers as a good thing.

“A lot of people are concerned that this study is going to change the high school experience and that they should be partying and having fun. The bad news is that the economy has changed the job landscape and if you don’t react and manage your career differently, you will wind up on the unemployment line. High school students are volunteering and are already focused on entrepreneurship. They can absolutely handle taking on jobs that will help them stand out and grow,” he said.

“Even if they were distracted from academics, we all know that work experience is much more important than someone’s educational background. You hire someone based on prior work experience and if someone went to Cornell but hasn’t even had an internship, they are immediately removed from the pile unless their dad is the CEO!” he added.

Those who see academics as preparation for leading a more thoughtful and fulfilling life, as well as participating meaningfully in a democracy, might disagree with Schawbel. Taking the focus away from studying and socializing is an unalloyed good, but it’s hard to deny that whether we like it or not, career pressure has now reached deep into the high school years.

Do you think internships in high school are a good idea?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com, contributes regularly to Forbes and Women 2.0 and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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The post More High School Kids Feel Pressure to Do Internships appeared first on Brazen Life.

You’ve got a big interview coming up. How do you prepare? If you’re a regular Brazen reader, you know the answer: research the company, polish answers to common questions and hone in on the ways your skills and experience will help you achieve results in that particular job.

But you can do all that and still flounder in the interview. Many candidates stumble at the first hurdle because it doesn’t seem like it requires a lot of effort to clear. What is it? The typical opener that invites you to tell the interviewer a little more about yourself.

This hardly seems like the toughest question you’re likely to encounter. You know your own biography, after all. But according to career coaches, this prompt is a common stumbling block for inexperienced candidates who go wrong by taking the question at face value.

Many candidates, unprepared for the question, skewer themselves by rambling, recapping their life story, delving into ancient work history or personal matters. — Nancy Fox, Fox Coaching Associates.

Fellow career coach Jane Cranston agrees:

The biggest mistake people being interviewed make is thinking the interviewer really wants to know about them as a person.

I was born in Tallahassee…

If your answer starts anything like that, you’re probably spoiling your chances of getting the job. No matter how natural it may seem, fight the impulse to start at the beginning and go in chronological order.

Instead, take the advice of Melanie Szlucha. Think of your response as a movie preview, she advises (click here to Tweet this thought):

The movie preview always relates to the movie you’re about to see. You never see a movie preview for an animated flick when you’re there to see a slasher movie. So the “tell me about yourself” answer needs to directly fit the concerns of your prospective employer.

It should also be as short and engaging as a great trailer.

If you’re looking for the exact words to accomplish this, Brazen has examples of pithy self-descriptions for interviews, and Lifehacker also has 20 ways to complete the sentence “I am someone who….”

The time travel approach

Short summations may work in some interviews, but what if you get the impression the person sitting across from you wants to go into more depth, or they push you to include biographical information or meaty details about your professional background?

Venture capitalist Brad Feld may have the solution for you. It’s one he developed over a long career of both interviewing others and telling his own story. His suggestion is to do the opposite of what comes naturally and go backwards in time:

I don’t care where you went to school (I never have). I don’t care what your first job was. I don’t care what happened 15 years ago. I care what you did yesterday, and last month, and last quarter, and last year. That’s probably as deep as I want to go in the first five minutes of our interview. I’m no longer interested in telling my own story. Each time I do it, I realize I am wasting another 15 minutes of my life.

Feld adds that hearing a chronological retelling of your story is not only boring for the listener, it’s also pointless for the speaker. Instead, he’s decided to take a new approach, one he also recommends for job interviews:

By starting with the now, and not worrying about going backward, I can get to the meat of whatever I’m communicating, or want to communicate. I’ll more quickly engage whomever I’m talking to — making the conversation immediately active instead of passive. When I need to reach into the past for a story to support an example, I will. I’ve decided that going forward, I’m telling my history in reverse chronological order whenever asked.

Do you have a set answer for the “So tell me a little about yourself” interview question?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com, contributes regularly to Forbes and Women 2.0 and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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The post How to Describe Yourself in an Interview When Faced With the Dreaded “Tell Me About Yourself” Question appeared first on Brazen Life.

And what’s true of medical symptoms and romantic quandaries is also true of your job search. Typing “after an interview” into Google Trends reveals our escalating post-interview anxieties and lays bare all our worries about how and when to follow up.

Unfortunately, though Google is great at surfacing our concerns, it’s not always excellent at providing answers. Google search results often offer exceptional advice mixed with utter nonsense.

So, what questions are people secretly nervous about after their job interviews, and what are the best available answers to their concerns?

1. Should you mail a thank you note, email or call?

Even the greenest internship candidate hoping to schlep coffee to her first-ever office knows you’re supposed to thank your interviewer afterwards. But the popularity of search terms such as “interview thank you,” “thank you letter,” “thank you email” and “thank you note” suggests many of us are confused about what form this contact should take.

Be memorable with an actual paper note? Opt for convenience (and avoid the appearance of desperation) with an email?

Unless the interviewer showed up in a bowtie and monocle and called you sir or madam (or gave other obvious signs of being extremely old-fashioned), almost all experts agree that the speed of an email trumps the personal touch of a paper letter.

“I’ve gotten scores of emails asking the same question: Should I send a handwritten or electronic thank you note?” says Jessica Liebman, who handles all of Business Insider’s editorial hiring as Managing Editor. “While it varies depending on the industry, I’d strongly suggest going with the email.”

“For most employers, an email is an acceptable form of thanks because email is a part of everyday business life and arrives quickly,” concurs CareerBuilder Editor Anthony Balderrama.

2. What should your thank you note say?

Keep it short and sweet (and just a little salesy). Here’s what Liebman says you should mention:

• Thank you for meeting (or talking) with me.
• I really want this job.
• Quick plug about why you’re perfect for it.

And what should you leave out? Kevin W. Grossman, an executive at BraveNewTalent and author of the book Tech Job Hunt Handbook, recommends you leave out anything regarding salary or benefits.

“Seriously, that’s left to when you’re made an actual offer,” he says. “And unless it was already discussed during the interview process, refrain from editorializing too much about personal or other professional issues that could affect your job performance in any direction.”

3. What’s the best time frame to follow up?

Speed counts. No matter how memorable you were, the interviewer is no doubt incredibly busy. Her good impression of you starts eroding under the onslaught of day-to-day tasks as soon as you leave the room.

Some advice encourages job seekers to send thank you notes immediately after the interview. “Same day. From your laptop in the parking lot, if you really want to wow them,” suggests Forbes.

“You can send it the day of your interview to show just how eager you are,” agrees Liebman.

But after that speedy initial contact, it’s probably a good idea to sit on your hands. Again, this depends on the specific situation. If a hiring manager gave you his card and specifically said “call if you have questions,” he may be testing your gumption to pick up the phone — but generally, calls are annoying.

“The phone call is one of the easiest ways to sabotage your image,” says Balderrama. “Phone calls are a nuisance in a way that letters and emails aren’t.”

Still, to phone or not to phone is one of the toughest decisions. The best bet for next time may to be to shortcut the conflict by getting specific follow-up steps outlined at the interview. (Click here to Tweet this thought.)

“There’s no cut-and-dried script for inquiring about next steps,” says Glassdoor career expert Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter. “But the point is, if the interviewer doesn’t tie up loose ends neatly at the wrap of the interview, take the reins to inquire respectfully about next steps. With this information in hand, it will help you gauge how to handle your follow-up communications.”

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com, writes for Women 2.0 and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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The post How to Follow Up After an Interview: 3 Questions You Were Afraid to Ask appeared first on Brazen Life.

One, it’s still a miserable economy, and the competition for sought-after jobs has risen to bloodsport levels of cruelty.

Two, when we’re 18, most of us have a pretty lousy sense of self-knowledge and limited wisdom about what careers actually entail and how to build one.

Three, grad school is expensive. Even if you’re fully funded, you’ll need to bust your butt to cover living expenses because you’ll be giving up whatever salary you could be racking up if you weren’t studying.

Put these together, and you begin to see the faint outlines of a common conundrum. Many young people flail in their early careers or are shocked by the realities they face—and by their own lack of preparation. Going back to school once you have some idea of what you’re facing (and who you are) can be tempting, but it’s a big step.

If you’re thinking of rebooting your struggling career with a trip back to get another degree, consider these questions first:

1. Am I hiding?

Brazen co-founder Penelope Trunk is one of the most eloquent (and outspoken) voices calling out many trips to grad school for what they are—a way to avoid the uncertainty and unpleasantness of an early career. But grad school won’t help you discover what you want to do, and, unless it’s something very specific like medicine or engineering, it probably won’t help you get there. Here’s a typically forthright passage from Penelope:

“If you don’t know what to do, and you go to grad school to buy time, and then you figure out what you want to do, you will always have to answer the question, why grad school? It will be hard to come up with an answer that doesn’t reveal that you went back to school so you didn’t have to deal with adult problems. Better to flail in the work world and learn what you like than put it off.”

Take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask yourself if you really just don’t want to send one more resume out into the unresponsive void or take one more unpaid internship. If you’re looking to hide out, reconsider sending off those applications and look for other alternatives.

2. Am I wearing rose-colored glasses?

And if you’re the dreamer type who’s driven by a passion for a subject that overrides more “sensible” career considerations? “If worse comes to worst, I’ll teach!” you tell yourself. Just know that only one in four grad students end up with a tenure track job, and 54 percent report feeling so depressed they have a hard time functioning. Be sure you’re as passionate as you think you are.

“Test your interest first,” suggests grad school returnee Andrew Price on GOOD recently. How? “If you’re considering culinary school, for example, maybe volunteer in a restaurant or bakery or construct some sort of cooking curriculum for yourself first. In other words, find a low-commitment version of the thing you may want to do and do that first.”

3. Am I prepared for the lifestyle change?

Will it bother you if your friends outside of academia rack up all the trappings of success while you argue with your roommates about who ate the last pack of Ramen? Because grad school will set you back financially.

“Going back to graduate school, especially after you’ve been in the workforce for a while, will put you behind your peers. For a while, you won’t be able to afford the same things your friends can, and you’ll be stuck in the library on the weekends, especially if you need to hold a full-time job at the same time. This can be jarring if you’ve been used to corporate life, and it’s something you should consider,” a recent post by The Pyramid Consulting Group warns.

If you’re expecting to keep up with your usual routine of dining out or weekly pedicures while you’re in grad school, you’re going to get yourself into the unenviable position of carrying a humongous debt burden (unless you have very generous support from somewhere).

Get real about what your life will be like or risk saddling yourself with the kind of financial liabilities that will seriously limit your choices after you graduate (forget that stint as a low-paid anything).

4. Which of my existing skills can I leverage?

Okay, so you’ve got your financial ducks in a row and you’re sure you’re doing this for the right reasons. You have a concrete sense of where you want to go and a solid idea of how another stint in school can get you there. How do you succeed? A little reflection can reveal ways your seemingly unrelated experience can benefit you.

GOOD’s Price explains, “I studied philosophy in college; now I’m doing computer science. What could be more different, right? One’s all about logical reasoning and working with abstractions and uncovering inconsistencies and the other…. Well, the other is fundamentally also about those things. Actually, the differences are sort of superficial… Even if you’re going from medieval history to astrophysics, there will be skills that transfer. At the end of the day, there are a few really important general cognitive tools—conceptual analysis, facility with language, mathematical reasoning, creative thinking—and most of them are useful in most contexts.”

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com, writes for Women 2.0 and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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The post 4 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Go Back to School to Change Careers appeared first on Brazen Life.

Yes, they’re DOUBLING. Why, you wail?

NPR explains—and, basically, it’s the usual culprit: Washington gridlock. “Republicans, Democrats and the Obama administration could not agree on a plan to keep it from happening. Lawmakers say a deal is still possible after the July 4th recess. But if they don’t agree on a plan soon, seven million students expected to take out new Stafford loans could be stuck with a much bigger bill when they start paying the money back,” reports Claudio Sanchez, who also offers all the details on competing plans to fix the issue from both parties.

So there’s hope that lawmakers and the Administration will get their act together—but in the meantime, how should you handle the rise in rates? That depends, of course, on whether you’ve graduated or are still studying.

If You’re Still in School

If you’re still studying, you want to keep your loan burden as low as possible, of course.

Yes, that’s easier said than done, but Eric Greenberg, founder and president of the Greenberg Educational Group, has some suggestions, which he laid out for Brazen in an email:

• Examine which schools are most generous with financial aid and merit-based scholarships. Don’t be afraid to negotiate with the school of your choice based on other offers they’ve received. The “sticker price” for a college is often a lot different from what many students and families pay, and it’s not uncommon for colleges to have some flexibility with tuition. After you receive your financial aid award, if the amount isn’t what you’d hoped for, meet with a financial aid officer at the college (you might bring your parents, too) and further explain the circumstances as sometimes a paper application can’t convey all of the factors.
• Explore vocational training to align with job opportunities. The stigma associated with vocational training has to go, as that’s a practical choice for many students these days.
• Consider whether it’s possible to graduate early.

Brazen, of course, has lots of other advice to help you out, too.

If You’ve Graduated With Debt

First, you might want to contact your elected officials and tell them, politely, exactly how pissed off you are that they’re playing politics with your future. It won’t help your immediate finances, but it might help the country (and make you feel slightly better).

Once that’s done, it’s time to face the facts. If you’re looking for a magic wand answer to the debt you’ve racked up, click on, as it doesn’t exist and this post won’t pretend it does.

There is, however, plenty of good advice out there on how to get a handle on your payments, sort out a budget and get the best deal you can out of the whole mess. The Project on Student Debt is a good place to start. Get Out of Debt Guy has not only a catchy name but also a lot of solid information, including on the different repayment options from the federal government (and when you should take longer to pay, which isn’t “whenever you possibly can.”)

The only bright side of this whole mess among lawmakers might be that it drives you to finally sit down and take a painful but necessary look at your situation. And hopefully, after you do that, lawmakers will just get their act together to reach a compromise, making paying it all back that little bit easier.

Hopefully.

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She is an editor at Women 2.0, writes a daily column for Inc.com and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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Those are the folks 21-year-old Spencer Thompson wants to help. Thompson is the youthful founder of Sokanu, a sort of Match.com or eHarmony for careers that asks confused career starters questions about their interests, skills and values to match them with prospective jobs, offering a 21st century update of the generally useless career counseling many young people receive in school.

In an email exchange, Brazen asked Thompson about his own career trajectory, his observations of his peers’ career struggles and what he’s learned about the mistakes many of us make in choosing the right gig. Here are his responses:

Brazen: Did you know you wanted to pursue entrepreneurship from an early age? How did you settle on being a founder?

Thompson: Growing up, I actually never even thought about being an entrepreneur. Rather, I had a fascination with science—specifically theoretical physics (weird, I know). I’m a big believer that certain things “activate” within you when you first see them. You resonate with something you know nothing about, yet you feel so closely tied to.

I felt this with physics, and it wasn’t until I was 16 that I felt it again with entrepreneurship. At that time, my mom had given me the book Think and Grow Rich. It totally changed the way I thought about the world. It is because of that book that I’m in the business world today, plain and simple.

In your experience, just how widespread and severe is the problem of essentially not knowing what you want to be when you grow up?

Besides puberty, this is probably the most widespread thing that happens to young people today. Chatting with people, the amount of pressure that exists on today’s youth is incredible. Every kid feels that pressure when they select a post-secondary school, try to get their first job, etc.

The interesting thing is that even though we know this problem exists, it is hard to introduce a solution that’s “cool” to solve it. We have seen time and time again that the right technologies spread like wildfire, but the software that has been designed for careers does exactly the opposite.

What are some of the most common mistakes young people make when trying to find a career that’s right for them?

Many people consider and pursue the career options that are shared with them by the main influencers in their life: family, friends, school and the media. The problem is that these groups will often disproportionately promote certain traditional career paths, such as doctors, teachers and lawyers.

The biggest mistake a young person can make is to limit themselves to a small selection of career paths. To know what it is that you want to do, you need to learn more about yourself. What are your skills? What are your interests? What are your values? Once young people understand this, they can discover what it is they want to be doing and explore the wealth of options that are available to them.

What about the “just stumble around” model of career discovery? Some people argue the only way to find out what we like is to try things out. How do you respond to that?

It’s absolutely important to experiment, but that doesn’t mean you’re not planning. The key is to start the process early. One of the core ideas we have at Sokanu in regards to finding your passion is the idea of “activation.” It’s the moment when you read a book or watch an interview or have a conversation with someone, and it’s as if someone has flicked a switch.

You can’t know that you’re passionate about something if you don’t know it exists, so it comes back to exploring your options and your interests early on. Once you find out what it is that lights you up, you can start pursuing it with purpose.

How about the notion that a linear career as we traditionally understand it is pretty dead and folks are now going to have to have a portfolio of jobs? Is that something you buy into, and did you design Sokanu with that perspective in mind?

The 30-year linear path still exists for a few careers, but for the most part it’s the exception, not the rule. In many ways, careers are like relationships, and most people don’t marry the first person they date. It may sometimes seem that job experiences are just “stumbling around,” but if you’re taking the time to learn from each experience and understand what it is you do and do not want from each career opportunity, then you are on the right path—it’s just more likely to be a winding road than a straight line.

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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And it paid off. You got a great-sounding gig! Only problem is, now that you’ve actually started working, you find that it’s…not so great. Forget getting your hands dirty and stretching your abilities; at this stage, you’re mostly scheduling stuff and shuffling papers. Or, worse yet, the only gig you could get didn’t even sound good to begin with.

In short, you feel overqualified and underutilized.

You’re Not Alone

It’s challenging to feel like you’re going nowhere fast in a gig skills-wise, but you can at least take comfort in the fact that you’re not alone. One new survey from consulting firm Lee Hecht Harrison reveals that 62 percent of workers feel their skills are often underutilized in their jobs.

Meanwhile, USA Today reports that, despite the ongoing recruiting war for some in-demand tech skills, half of degree holders are overqualified for their jobs, according to a gloomy new report from the nonprofit Center for College Affordability and Productivity. Depressing statistics revealed by the study include the reality that 15 percent of taxi drivers have bachelor’s degrees, while a quarter of retail clerks finished an undergrad degree.

“It is almost the new normal,” commented the study’s lead author, Ohio University economist Richard Vedder.

But knowing you have plenty of company in your crappy situation is cold comfort unless you also have some idea how to progress from your less-than-awesome current employment situation to something better.

So, what do the experts suggest you do if you feel underutilized in your job?

Attitude Counts

The New York Times advises that the first step is to stop being a drama queen (or king). This is not the only job you’ll ever have, and it’s probably not as useless as you sometimes allow yourself to believe.

“Don’t focus on what you’re not getting but what you are getting,” Caitlin Kelly, author of Malled, says. “It doesn’t matter what the job is—there are always things you can learn and skills you can develop.”

“Tell yourself the current situation isn’t the end of your career,” suggests executive coach Hilary Pearl.

Nor should you give up your power by wallowing in your frustration and exclusively blaming your company or boss.  “If you feel underused and undervalued, you can do something about it,” writes Timothy Clark, author of The Employee Engagement Mindset, on Fast Company. “Nobody can instill in you deep and rich and vibrant engagement. You have to do it. You should do it,” he adds.

All of which is grand, but is there any way to change the actual situation, not just your attitude towards it?

Practical Steps

Start by looking for a mentor to help you find a route out of your current drudgery, asking for additional responsibilities (always framed as excitement for new challenges rather than complaints about utter boredom) and studying up on your industry.

“Look at the company’s organizational hierarchy and find the person who has the job you’d like, then offer to lend that person a hand,” suggests career acceleration coach Sarah Hathorn, according to the Times.

Also, use your extra time to accomplish things outside the office—start an exercise habit, learn a skill in your off-time, volunteer or start your own side project. And, hey, armed with those accomplishments, it might not be a bad idea to mix in a little job-hunting, too.

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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The reality of the decade is, it’s often a bit of a stressful b***.

Most young people face serious career, dating and financial worries and the panic-inducing sense that the decisions you make in your 20s will weigh heavily on your future. So it’s easy to understand why 20-somethings struggling to get a precarious perch on adulthood might soothe themselves with thoughts that this is just a 10-year training wheels period that doesn’t really count.

But be warned: experts say that that thought—and several related ideas—is a lie. Make sure you’re not telling yourself these fibs:

Lie #1: These years don’t matter

If you’re telling yourself that your 20s are for self-exploration and fun and don’t really matter, you’re leading yourself astray, according to psychologist Dr. Meg Jay. She’s the author of The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now, and as she recently told Big Think, American 20-somethings:

…are living with a staggering, unprecedented amount of uncertainty. Many have no idea what they will be doing, where they will be living, or who they will be within two or 10 years. They don’t know when they’ll be happy or when they will be able to pay their bills. They wonder if they should be photographers or lawyers or event planners.…

Uncertainty makes people anxious and distraction is the 21st-Century opiate of the masses. So too many 20-somethings are tempted, and even encouraged, to just turn away and hope for the best.

Is reading this description—young adults who respond to sky-high uncertainty levels by telling themselves this life period isn’t really important—like looking in the mirror? Then it might be time to admit that this is the principal lie we tell ourselves about our 20s.

In reality, Dr. Jay says, “our 20s are the defining decade of adulthood. Eighty percent of life’s most defining moments take place by about age 35. Two-thirds of lifetime wage growth happens during the first 10 years of a career. More than half of Americans are married or are dating or living with their future partner by age 30.”

In other words, these years DO matter.

Lie #2: Now’s the time for a career identity crisis

Several lies spring from this central one, particularly when it comes to our careers. It’s natural to be unsure about your future career goals when you’re in your 20s, but don’t let that uncertainty develop into a full–fledged career identity crisis that keeps you from starting something now.

“The biggest myth is that the 20s are a time to think about what you want to do. That doesn’t work. You basically know what you want. Just start, and get the best job you can get,” Dr. Jay told Forbes.

Will you change direction? Sure, probably many times. But getting started on something is a better way to determine what suits you than abstract pondering. It’s also important for building skills, confidence and a valuable network.

Lie #3: I just want to have fun

But what if what if the best job you can get is pretty dreary? Given that you’re probably still without many adult responsibilities, like a mortgage or dependents, it’s tempting to imagine the misery you’ll experience in that entry-level gig and decide you’d rather minimize commitments and maximize fun. Maybe later when you’re ready or you find a cooler opportunity, you’ll focus on slogging it out at the office.

Besides wasting valuable career-building time (see lie number two), this approach also often badly overestimates how much you’ll enjoy goofing off. Sure, travel can be thrilling, and everyone loves a great night out, but after a pretty short time, the satisfaction most of us get out of these things wears thin. And then where are you?

As Cracked recently explained in a post that offers wisdom sugar-coated with humor, saying that you’re just not ready to settle down is often an excuse that will bite you in the butt later. Partying is definitely fun, writes John Cheese, but eventually “you start to mature and realize that every second you spend living like that is a second you haven’t spent building your career or securing your retirement or building a legacy. And the longer you put it off, the more of a head start you give your competition for the perfect job or the perfect spouse.”

And, it turns out, you probably won’t even hate that cubicle job as much as you imagine you will (assuming you’re using it to get somewhere you want to go in life). “Some people underestimate the satisfaction of working, thinking they’ll be miserable in a cube. The 20-somethings that do work are happier than those who don’t or are underemployed,” Dr. Jay points out.

Is it possible you’re taking your 20s too lightly? Or should the decade be mostly fun?  

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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Perhaps you’ve seen this illustration kicking around somewhere before:

It’s a pretty popular little image as it neatly encapsulates two truths: one, the road to success is winding and long; and two, we like to delude ourselves about that fact.

But is Gen Y more deluded about overnight success than everyone else?

That’s what Mark Quinn, Vice President of marketing at Leggett & Platt, argued recently on Business Insider. “Technology has simultaneously been the Millennial generation’s best friend and worst enemy. While they have grown up with social media and iPhones, they’ve also lived under the specter of Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Systrom, and Mike Krieger,” he writes, before explaining the pernicious effects of these exemplars of “overnight” success:

Seeing Facebook and Instagram make these twentysomethings into billionaires has upped the ante for what young people expect out of life—and their careers….It’s easy for inexperienced professionals to get caught up in the Zuckerberg example—he didn’t finish college and didn’t spend 80 hours a week working his way up in a traditional corporation. With a lack of context, it’s tempting to believe we’re all destined to be exceptions on the level of Facebook.

Rather than imagining that you too will beat the odds a la Zuckerberg, Quinn suggests “your best bet—if you plan to have a career that spans more than 10 years—is to find your niche and strategize your vertical move from there.”

Gen Y’s Particular Delusion

Is Quinn right? Are young people more likely than older folks to hanker after overnight success?

There’s some reason to support his opinion. Besides the natural optimism of youth, which is as of yet untempered by firsthand experience of the many setbacks on the way to success, other factors also nudge young careerists towards undue optimism about how quickly they can become career rock stars.

Take our fascination with entrepreneurs, for example. Surveys show a massive percentage of Gen Y aspires to entrepreneurship and ridiculously few of us have any appetite for slogging our way up to senior corporate posts. Is this because we’ve seen the rocket-propelled rise of Facebook, or did card-carrying Gen Y member Zuckerberg found his company because, like many of his peers, he looked around at adults’ corporate jobs and said “No way”?

It’s a chicken-and-the-egg question that perhaps no one can answer, but whether Gen Y’s entrepreneurialism drove Zuckerberg or Zuckerberg drove our entrepreneurialism, Quinn is right, and the result is the same. Gen Y loves startups, and startup mania projects an unhealthy image of a quick (though difficult) road to success.

Building a Better Model

Those unhealthy expectations become an issue when they lead young folks to make the wrong decisions about how and where to invest their energies and when they cause slowly climbing Gen Yers to despair because they’re not living up to some imagined standard of instant excellence.

So what’s the antidote to straight, fast and ever-upward career images? Quinn trots out the tired old metaphor of the climb up the career ladder, but in today’s world of portfolio careers and job flux, that probably strikes you as pretty unrealistic. Careers are too chaotic these days. Perhaps Tina Seelig, the director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (the entrepreneurship center at Stanford’s School of Engineering) has a better model. Think of your career as a pyramid, she advises:

Most young people believe that their career path should progress at a predictable rate, with ever increasing responsibilities and compensation. That usually isn’t—and shouldn’t be—the case. I like the analogy that Carol Bartz, [ex-]CEO of Yahoo!, used when she spoke at Stanford a few years ago. She said that you should look at the progress of your career as moving around and up a three dimensional pyramid as opposed to up a two dimensional ladder.

Lateral moves along the side of the pyramid allow you to build a base of experience. It may not look as though you are moving up quickly, but you are gaining a foundation of skills, experience, and contacts that will prove extremely valuable later. Additionally, there are often times when you slide backward. Don’t despair: Your recovery after a failure often propels you forward more quickly than if you stayed on a linear, predictable path.

Or just take another look at that doodle at the start of the post.

Do you think Gen Y often has an unrealistic image of success?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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The post Is Gen Y Delusional About How to Have a Successful Career? appeared first on Brazen Life.

But that doesn’t mean we’re putting all that online knowledge and advice to use. A new survey from Millennial Branding, a Gen Y consulting firm, and StudentAdvisor.com polled 200 young people across the country about how they’re preparing for their careers and seeking out mentoring. And forget high-tech; it appears digital natives are mainly turning to the oldest source of advice out there – our parents.

More than a third of those with mentors said their parent is their mentor, while only 10 percent found a professional mentor through social networking.

Surprising?

Not to Dan Schawbel, managing partner at Millennial Branding. After all, this generation is known for its close relationship with it’s parents, a tight bond that sometimes borders on pathological “helicopter parenting.”

“Gen Y parents are very involved in their [children's] lives and are sometimes called helicopter parents,” Schawbel told Brazen Careerist. “ I’ve even heard stories of parents coming to job interviews with them.”

The survey results then are just one more piece of evidence of the tight, collaborative nature of the relationship between many millennials and their folks, though no one can really argue that warm, supportive and trusting family relationships are something most of us want. (Though seriously, if your parents interact with potential employers directly, you’ve gone off the deep end of hyper-involved).

A Good Idea?

But just because it’s a great thing that you have a good relationship with your parents doesn’t mean it’s a great idea to rely so heavily on them for career mentoring. “If you rely on only your parents for career mentoring, then you aren’t getting all the perspectives and information needed in order to make a good decision,” says Schawbel. He suggests young people “use the internet to find mentors. Go on Amazon.com to find business authors in their field or search for them on LinkedIn and reach out.”

Other experts also question the relevance of parents’ well-meant-but-usually-slightly-out-of-date advice. Remember, when your parents were starting their working lives, the loyalty from job security model still held and globalization was barely getting started. That means parents often talk about fixed paths and risk-reduction strategies that are better suited to earlier times, when careers were more stable and demanded a less entrepreneurial approach, according to James Marshall Reilly, author of Shake the World: It’s Not About Finding a Job, It’s About Creating a Life.

Bad career advice from trusted adults, he told me earlier this year, “is a result of the increasing generation gap, and that in turn is a result of the rapid acceleration of technology. The generation gap is so large that we’re getting advice from our parents and our guidance counselors and our professors, and the advice isn’t ill-intentioned, but it’s not always right.”

“It might have been right five years ago. It might have been right ten years ago, but it’s not necessarily right now. When you look at who’s giving this advice, [they] aren’t as familiar with the resources and tools that we have now to learn and self-propel,” he says.

What do you think? Do you rely too heavily on mentoring from mom and dad?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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You might not be middle-aged with three kids and a mortgage, but that doesn’t mean your salary expectations are infinitely flexible. As an educated career starter, you probably have some amount of student debt ranging from bearable to horrific. Plus, you were hoping to expand your diet beyond Ramen noodles and upgrade your shoebox apartment with a few pieces of shiny new Ikea furniture now that you’ve finished college.

But you’ve gotten your first job offer or two, and it doesn’t look like even those modest goals are going to be met. The salaries on offer are less than you expected, and once you subtract out your rent, bills and loan payments, the bottom line is pretty pathetic.

So what do you do now?

Are Your Expectations Realistic?

The first question is deciding whether the offer is fair or well below the going rate. With so little experience in the job market, this can be a tough one for young careerists to get their minds around.

“There’s so much information that it can be overwhelming. When that happens, I think a lot of young people ignore it and they get frustrated that they’re not familiar with things. They feel a little angry that they aren’t prepared for these ‘real-life things’ that come at them when getting a new job,” Lindsey Pollak, author of Getting from College to Career: Your Essential Guide to Succeeding in the Real World, recently told Business Insider.

So, how does she recommend tackling this feeling of powerlessness and confusion? In short: research. She tells BI:

Compensation has a lot of fear around it particularly if you don’t have a lot of experience with negotiations or talking about money, so it’s something you have to prepare for. [You need to know] what ranges are common in particular industries, companies…regions of the country or the world also come into play. Do that research then think about the experience you have and decide whether you’re on the top or middle of that range. Industry web sites can give also you benchmark of what’s common in a field.

Chris Forman, CEO of job search organizer StartWire and HR expert, agrees that research is key. He suggests Glassdoor in particular, calling it a “great site for employer reviews and salary information—it’s like Yelp for jobs” in an email to Brazen.

Should You Negotiate?

Now you know exactly where your offer falls on the salary spectrum. Should you negotiate (Brazen has lots of tips on how), refuse the offer or hold your nose and simply sign on the contract’s dotted line?

Forman recommends that in the current economy, young folks simply stock up on bulk rice and beans and accept whatever is on offer, keeping in mind that it’s not forever. He writes:

Everyone has a ‘first real job‘ story. Your focus should be on getting a position at a great company…not the salary. It’s the proverbial foot in the door. Your first position is a stepping-stone. If you join a good, growing company you will have opportunity for advancement. If you have little or no experience, you don’t really have the ability to negotiate a salary. It’s better to take what’s offered, put your head down for a year, and earn a raise based on performance.

Self-Knowledge Through Poverty?

Pollak, for her part, views disillusionment as an opportunity to clarify what’s important to you. Whether you accept a particular offer is obviously very much down to your individual circumstances, preferences and budget. But whichever way you choose, she advocates paying close attention to what you like and dislike about these early, less-than-perfect gigs. As BI reports:

If you do take a job and realize that it’s not what you imagined or wanted—which happens often with first jobs—Pollak said that this is ‘an education thing’ that young people have to deal with and decide for themselves what it is that they want and don’t want in a job.

Exactly how much does being poor annoy you? How important or not is finding a very specific sort of job or finding your gig meaningful? The data that these answers represent will pay off when you’re looking for your next career move.

What’s your first real job story? Were you disillusioned by the work or the pay? And if so, how did you cope?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM.

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So if this sounds like you and you’ve decided the best way to build your career is as a freelancer, what skills and sectors should you target?

The Hottest Sectors in Freelance Nation

Online jobs portal Freelancer.com has some data to guide you. Each quarter, the site releases a report detailing what sorts of jobs are most in demand on its platform, giving young people who are interested in building freelance careers a sense of where the picking are richest.

So what are the hottest sectors in freelance nation at the moment? Here are the trends Freelancer.com says are worth paying attention to:

• Android jobs ricochet back as Apple iOS jobs stagnate: iPhone jobs tapered to a modest 8 percent growth as developers waited for the release of iOS6 in September. Buoyed by the weak iOS6 launch, Android saw a huge 16 percent growth in jobs during the last few months.

• The interactive web continues to fly: HTML5 jobs grew 44 percent this quarter as businesses and entrepreneurs scramble to bridge the gap between their fixed and mobile clients; jQuery, the javascript library of choice of interactive web apps increased by 32 percent. PHP jobs rose 19 percent as Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans promised increased mobile functionality for the lingua franca of the Web. CSS and MySQL similarly saw strong growth, up 19 percent and 18 percent respectively.

• Confidence returns to Facebook jobs in the wake of the IPO flop: Jobs that require using Facebook made a recovery this quarter with 11 percent growth. That’s after an abysmal drop of 14 percent in the previous quarter, when the company’s share price plummeted.

• Internet marketing rebounds: A flurry of updates from Google sent the online marketing industry haywire in this year’s second quarter, resulting in slumps across a broad range of categories related to search engine optimization. After a period of uncertainty, the industry has bounced back, delivering moderate growth for internet marketing (up 12 percent), SEO (up 12 percent) and link building (up 8 percent).

• Content is king: We’ve seen a new focus on content and user experience as internet marketing experts wise up to Google’s endgame. Reflecting this is a surge in jobs related to WordPress (up 27 percent), proofreading (up 26 percent), user interface (up 23 percent), graphic design (up 21 percent) and logo design (up 2 percent). In the words of Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google, “Content is King!”

The takeaway from all this should light a fire under the decidedly non-technical, according to Freelancer.com CEO Matt Barrie. “Every industry we can think of is quite abruptly turning into a software business, and every job function is increasingly being performed using software tools in the cloud,” he says.

You’re a Digital Native… and a Telecommuting One, Too

Luckily, Gen Y are digital natives, so we should have no problem polishing up our tech skills to grab the most in-demand jobs in the gig economy. And if the online, at home nature of these types of jobs worries you, don’t fret too much on that account either. As Sara Sutton Fell, CEO of remote- and part-time jobs site FlexJobs, explained in an interview with CBS MoneyWatch, Gen Y are telecommuting natives as well.

“The recent graduates from the last few years have really been putting a priority on flexibility and have a much higher comfort level for freelance work than prior generations,” she says, adding that Gen Y is also much more comfortable with work as an activity rather than a place. “They just don’t see a building as a defining structure of where you do things,”

Have you managed to use the demand for these jobs to your advantage? Tell us how in the comments!

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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The post Craving a Freelance Career? Here’s Where the Jobs Are appeared first on Brazen Life.

But ask your average young overachiever outside the state for their impressions of the town and you probably won’t hear much about broadband. So Chattanooga is taking a bold step to bring outside perspectives closer in line with realities on the ground and attempting to attract more interest in the city from the tech savvy.

Have Tech Skills, Will Move

The program, called Geek Move, is offering a substantial incentive of a $10,000 forgivable mortgage and $1,250 for relocation expenses to programmers and other geeks who live more than 50 miles from the city who are willing to move there and buy a home in one of the city’s historic central neighborhoods. To get the mortgage incentive, the tech-savvy recipient must stick around for three years. There are ten slots available.

The scheme, which is funded by The Lyndhurst Foundation, is hoping to provide the city with a double whammy when it comes to development, both nurturing the budding tech scene and helping to spur the revitalization of the historic downtown neighborhoods.

“It’s not just about having jobs, we have to create places for geeks to live. We have to have great, hip, urban neighborhoods in Chattanooga,” Abby Garrison, director of strategic initiatives at Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise, told the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Can I Apply?

So who exactly can apply? You must be a full-time developer and system administrator who can demonstrate your proficiency through experience and/or certifications. You must live outside a 50-mile radius of Chattanooga and, of course, you must be in a financial position to buy a house. But that’s not as high a hurdle as it might sound. As GeekWire points out, $10,000 goes a lot further in Tennessee than in places like Silicon Valley or Seattle. So $10,000 in a forgivable mortgage might not seem like much, especially for those who live in places like Seattle where starter homes cost in excess of $400,000. But Chattanooga, according to Zillow stats, has a median list price of just $153,500. (Seattle’s is $399,000).

Not Just Chattanooga

Chattanooga isn’t alone in trying to lure talented and energetic folks to town with impressive sweeteners. Earlier this year, Challenge Detroit set out to lure 30 young people with entrepreneurial ambitions to struggling Motor City to participate in its revitalization with a $500 a month housing stipend and a $30,000 salary to work at a top Detroit company.

The scheme attracted an impressive 900 applications and selected 30 talented winners. If you missed the deadline or if you’re more for small city charms than Detroit’s urban grit, perhaps Chattanooga might be worth a look.

Would an incentive like this make you consider moving somewhere unlikely?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM.

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And while the data certainly show a large and growing gap between the earnings of those with a four-year degree and those without, and no one would argue with your worthy high school guidance counselor’s advice that it’s generally a good idea to go to college, all this hand-wringing can have the side effect of suggesting ALL IS LOST if somehow getting a bachelor’s degree failed to work out for you.

Not so, says a recent study from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and Civic Enterprises. The research found that despite the obvious erosion of many traditional routes to middle-class earnings for non-graduates (nope, I wouldn’t bet on that factory re-opening in town), there are still 29 million jobs in America that pay middle-class wages (defined here as between $35,00 and $75,000 annually) that don’t require a bachelor’s degree. Forty percent of those pay more than $50,000 a year. (For New Yorkers and inveterate high achievers, $50,000 might not sound like a lot, but it beats the U.S. median.)

While in the past, blue-collar gigs were the route to the middle class for non-graduates, this study reveals that most of today’s jobs for non-grads are now in service sectors like healthcare or white-collar office jobs.

So how do you find your way to one of these reasonably decent jobs if you missed the boat on college? The research suggests getting one of these gigs still takes some effort, with the center suggesting five paths to this sort of steady employment:

• Associate’s degrees. Half of associate’s degrees are related to career-oriented fields, such as nursing, business, and information technology.

• Postsecondary certificates have eclipsed associate’s and master’s degrees as the second most common post-secondary award after the bachelor’s degree—about 1 million are awarded each year.

• Registered apprenticeships. Nine out of 10 apprentices are men and more than half of apprenticeships are in construction.

• Industry-based certifications such as Microsoft, Cisco, and CompTIA certifications are test-based postsecondary credentials awarded by employers.

• Employer-based training represents the largest pathway at $454 billion of spending.

Of course, while it’s great to get some counterweight to the general cultural gloom hanging over those who fail to make it out of a four-year college program, the authors of the study don’t think enough is being done to help those who need to find a non-college route to a good job.

“Compared to other advanced economies, the United States under-invests in sub-baccalaureate, career and technical education,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, the Center’s Director and the report’s lead author.

What do you think? Can you get just as good of a job even if you don’t go to college?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM.

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The post Who Says You Need a College Degree to Land a Middle-Class Job? appeared first on Brazen Life.

The report from compensation information site PayScale and Gen Y consulting firm Millennial Branding sifted through PayScale’s trove of employment data and polled thousands of young workers about their education and employment background to determine what degrees, employers and cities were especially suited to young workers compared to the workforce at large. And it turns out 20-somethings are just as obsessed with all things high-tech during the workweek as they are on weekends.

Thumbs Up for Tech

When companies were ranked for young employee friendliness based on Gen Y pay, percentage of Gen Y employees, Gen Y job satisfaction, Gen Y job stress, meaningfulness of job for Gen Y workers, Gen Y schedule flexibility and “green score,” the top five employers were all in the tech sector:

1. Qualcomm
2. Google
3. Medtronic
4. Intel
5. Microsoft

This gels with Millennial Branding’s general understanding of Gen Y’s profile and preferences, according to Dan Schawbel, the consultancy’s founder.

“Gen Y likes working for tech companies because they are high growth, fast paced, usually have flexibility programs and telecommuting options and typically allow use of social networks in the workplace. These are also companies that hire quickly and new need perspectives and fresh ideas to stay innovative. It’s also easier to be an intrapreneur where you can act like an entrepreneur and get an investment through your company — Gen Y is the entrepreneurial type,” commented Schawbel in an email to Brazen Careerist.

So Walk the Walk

Of course, with tech companies being such popular employers for your generation, competition for jobs there will be fierce (and the lousy economy that has many overqualified young people passing time in retail can’t help). Besides obviously knowing your stuff when it comes to technology, the key to getting your foot in the door at these firms is to actually demonstrate this knowledge before you’re hired, according to Schawbel. Just talking the talk isn’t enough.

“Gen Y should be using tech tools to grow their own career and prove to companies that they can give real business value through the tools,” he says.

Check out the complete report for much more on Gen Y’s typical salaries, preferred majors, and natural habitat.

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM.

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As someone at the start of their working life, you have somewhere in the neighborhood of four decades of career in front of you, so the question of what types of jobs will be around and available in the future isn’t just an academic discussion. The answer will inform your career trajectory and your choices when it comes to training and development.

Earlier this year, Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee published a book, Race Against the Machine, which argues that smart machines are making it easier for companies to produce more output with fewer people. They argue that in such a world, finding enough jobs to keep everybody employed will be increasingly challenging. Whether they’re right is still being discussed (more technology hasn’t seemed to decrease employment in the past), but no one argues that the mix of available jobs is changing.

Why Get Touchy-Feely?

So, what types of careers are likely to have staying power?

If you’re a programmer or a quant, good for you. You probably stopped reading this post a few paragraphs ago as irrelevant for your situation. But for the less mathematically gifted of us, there’s still hope.

Recently on Slate, Ray Fishman argued that the key to career longevity is reacting to the rise of machines by being more human—specifically, more touchy-feely. He writes:

If jobs are being lost to low-wage Indians and computer programs, then what today’s worker needs is a set of skills that offers the personal touch and judgment that can’t be provided by a machine or someone 12 time zones away. [Harvard labor economist Larry] Katz argues that this will be crucial for those with only high school educations, who will need to learn a “high touch” trade—like personal trainers, kitchen designers, and home health aides—where personal interaction is critical. He makes a similar argument for the college educated as well: With many clerical and lower-level management jobs made obsolete by advances in information technology or lost to off-shoring, they’ll have to reinvent themselves as, say, IT support professionals or consultants.

That means if your people skills aren’t up to snuff, you might want to think long and hard about the long-term career implications of that deficiency—and take action.

Get Creative

Another area where humans are unlikely to be outpaced by machines anytime soon is in fields where creativity is key. Despite the recent success of robot sports reporters (which this writer links to with terror) robots are unlikely to perform an opera, design a website or style a fashion shoot any time soon.

Just look at a recent report from online jobs marketplace Elance for evidence. In a statement accompanying the latest quarterly review of activity on the site, the company noted:

The new ‘Creative Economy’ has fueled hiring online; demand for creative skills such as web design (+574%), voice acting (+295%) and content writing (+256%) were each up significantly over a year ago. Companies are investing heavily in creative talent, signaling a shift in how businesses engage customers and commitment to growth.

Elance CEO Fabio Rosati commented, “For the first time, the growth rate in information technology is being overshadowed by the increased demand for creative talent.”

Maybe creative writing and dance classes aren’t just for slackers or the career-oblivious anymore.

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM, among others.

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But even being at the height of your career is no guarantee you’ll feel comfortable in your own professional skin – imposter syndrome is common even for those at the top, experts say.

“There are high-achieving celebrity impostor syndrome sufferers including Tina Fey, Maya Angelou and Sheryl Sandberg, who have all openly admitted to feeling like an impostor at some point during their careers,” wrote Caroline Dowd-Higgins recently on The Huffington Post. If the likes of Facebook’s COO suffers from occasionally feeling like she’s faking it, no wonder so many young careerists experience imposter syndrome (women are more likely to suffer than men).

So stop feeling bad about it. It turns out not only are there ways to manage your feelings of being an imposter, but the worry about being unmasked as a fraud actually has upsides.

Surf Your Imposter Syndrome

The most immediate question for imposter syndrome sufferers is, how do I make it stop?

That’s the wrong question, according to Down-Higgins. She suggests instead riding out your feelings of being a fake. In her post, she quotes Dr. Valerie Young, author of The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer From the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive In Spite of It, who advises that “when you feel yourself sliding into competence extremism, recognize it for what it is. Then make a conscious decision to stop and really savor those exhilarating mental high points and forgive yourself for the inevitable lulls.”

“The beauty of the impostor syndrome is you vacillate between extreme egomania and a complete feeling of: ‘I’m a fraud! Oh God, they’re on to me! I’m a fraud!’ So you just try to ride the egomania when it comes and enjoy it, and then slide through the idea of fraud,” writes Young in her book.

A Badge of Honor?

Another way to respond to your imposter syndrome is to be aware that the feeling actually indicates positive things about you as a professional.

Feelings of faking it are usually associated with intelligence, diligence and, paradoxically, competence. Slackers, blusterers and the genuinely incompetent tend not to stress about feeling like fakers.

Don’t believe me? Neuroscientist and former TED speaker Bradley Voytek has written on his blog, that:

Anecdotally, [imposter syndrome] appears to be fairly rampant among academics and other “smart” people. At some point during your career, possibly more than once, you will look at your peers and think to yourself, “I’m not as good as they are; I am not cut out for this…”

Listen to that voice. Understand where it’s coming from. But be aware that you’re failing to recognize your own accomplishments; you’re overemphasizing the accomplishments of others and you’re vastly underestimating the failures other successful people experience on their way to success.

The New York Times has also covered this phenomenon, rounding up research into imposter syndrome and concluding that, “in mild doses, feeling like a fraud… tempers the natural instinct to define one’s own competence in self-serving ways.”

The paper explains:

Researchers have shown in careful studies that people tend to be poor judges of their own performance and often to overrate their abilities. Their opinions about how well they’ve done on a test, or at a job, or in a class are often way off others’ evaluations. They’re confident that they can detect liars (they can’t) and forecast grades (not so well).

This native confidence is likely to be functional: in a world of profound uncertainty, self-serving delusion probably helps people to get out of bed and chase their pet projects.

But it can be poison when the job calls for expertise and accountability, and the expertise is wanting…. At those times feeling like a fraud… reflects a respect for the limits of one’s own abilities.

So don’t stress if you feel like an impostor sometimes. You’re in good company, you’re probably wrong in your fears, and, on the contrary, are probably bright and conscientious. All you need to do is ride out that feeling of faking it.

Do you sometimes feel like a fraud at work?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London. She writes a daily column for Inc.com and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch and GigaOM.

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The comfort and skill young people display when building networks has contributed to impressive public movements such as the recent Occupy protests and even perhaps to some degree the recent democratic upheavals in parts of the Middle East. It might play a major part in the flattening of organizational structures at many young people-led startups. But does all this networking have a downside?

That’s the question best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell recently pondered when he spoke at HR industry conference SHRM Atlanta 2. As TLNT reports:

Millennials, [Gladwell] explained, are all about networks and social organizations rather than hierarchies when it comes to their default organizational model. It’s the difference between how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s versus how the recent Occupy movement was set up.

In Gladwell’s view, hierarchies are disciplined, centralized (generally with one person at the top and a clear strategy from the leadership team), and makes a distinction between people on the outside and the inside (that is, you need to actually decide to join in). The civil rights movement, as set up by Dr. King, was a classic hierarchy, Gladwell observed.

The Occupy movement, by contrast, was none of those things. It had no leader like King, no central ideology or strategy (like the non-violent, Gandhi-like strategy at the heart of the civil rights movement), and no real organization or discipline. And, it’s why so many Baby Boomers and people from the older generations, who have worked most of their lives under hierarchical structures, don’t get what the Occupy protesters and movement is all about.

“One form is not better than the other,” Gladwell noted. “They’re two different forms with very different sets of strengths and weaknesses.” And in his view, we need to use both hierarchies AND networks if we are really going to succeed now and in the future.

Is Gladwell on to something? Do Millennials fail to appreciate the value of traditional hierarchies?

There is some evidence that flat structures, when taken too far, are actually bad for productivity. Several recent studies have shown that some degree of a traditional leadership structure makes groups more able to perform, and pundit Tammy Erickson has studied how a lack of defined roles leads to distracting turf wars and time-consuming negotiations of roles and responsibilities within teams.

“Collaboration improves when the roles of individual team members are clearly defined and well understood – in fact, when individuals feel their role is bounded in ways that allow them to do a significant portion of their work independently. Without such clarity, team members are likely to waste energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focusing on the task,” she wrote.

So what do you think? Does the allergy young people have to hierarchies lead them to be less effective in accomplishing difficult tasks than if they embraced traditional leadership structures?

London-based Jessica Stillman blogs about generational issues and trends in the workforce for Inc.com and GigaOM.

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Thanks to a law passed in 2007, interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans are set to double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on July 1 unless Congress passes a measure to prevent it. President Obama, as you’d expect in an election year, speedily asked legislators to please get on that. And get on that they did, though in the usual partisan manner, with Democrats and Republicans coming up with two competing bills. Both keep the interest rates at their current level for a year but find very different ways to pay for the program.

The Democratic approach? Raise payroll taxes on some wealthy individuals who use a loophole to pay less by classifying some of their income as dividends. “What, a tax increase!?” cried the Republicans, who predictably, went ballistic. They instead want to fund the rate extension by eliminating a fund for preventive health care that was part of President Obama’s health care reform bill.

The House passed a version of the bill, including the Republican’s funding proposal. But on May 24, the Senate shot down both versions of the bill, passing – you guessed it — nothing.

The result? The continued threat of a rate rise for students, and a whole lot of unappealing political posturing. (Another “controversial” measure that failed to pass: The Violence Against Women Act.)

The White House says the interest rate will cost borrowers an average of $1,000 a year. But with pundits of all stripes wringing their hands about the magnitude of young people’s debt load (if you didn’t see The New York Times recent package of the magnitude of the crisis, it’s worth checking out) and the job market for grads still pretty grim, it seems a bit rich to ask this group to pay any more at all.

Especially when we’re repeatedly told that any cuts to programs that are important to seniors are a political no-go zone. As Stephen Marche’s explained in his provocatively titled Esquire article “The War Against Youth:”

The political imperative is to preserve the economic cloak of unreality that the Boomers have wrapped themselves in.

Democrats may not be actively hostile to the interests of young voters, but they are too scared and weak to speak up for them. So when the Boomers and swing voters scream for fiscal discipline and the hard decisions have to be made, youth is collateral damage. Medicare and Social Security were mostly untouched in Obama’s 2012 budget. But to show he was really serious about belt tightening, relatively cheap programs that help young people like the Adolescent Family Life Program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund were killed.

Why? Older people vote en masse. Maybe it’s time for young people to start doing that too.

London-based Jessica Stillman blogs about generational issues and trends in the workforce for Inc.com and GigaOM.

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Some new grads don’t have much of a choice. If you want to be a screenwriter, it’s got to be L.A. Those with the politics bug head to Washington, and petroleum engineers with instantaneous job offers go wherever the oil is flowing. Or, unhappily, some recent grads simply go wherever there’s a free couch to sleep on until they get on their feet.

But what if you have a fairly general degree that can be put to use in a variety of geographies, a bit of money to get your first apartment share and a sense of adventure? Where should you go?

First off, forget about job hunting at a distance. As Penelope Trunk points out, it usually doesn’t work – you need to physically go somewhere to get a gig there most of the time.

Cultural preferences and location of family or friends will probably play a role in your decision, but the cost of living and the availability of jobs will no doubt also figure prominently in your thinking.

Helpfully, CareerBuilder and Apartments.com recently combed through their data looking for cities with available entry-level jobs at decent salaries and relatively low unemployment, as well as weighing the cost of a one-bedroom apartment (go with roommates though, you’ll save money and be less lonely.)

The result is their list of the 15 best cities for recent grads. Which locations made the cut?

• Washington, D.C.
• New York
• Boston
• Minneapolis
• Dallas
• Atlanta
• Chicago
• Houston
• Philadelphia
• Baltimore

Check out their infographic for more info on the average cost of a starter apartment and biggest industries in each city. Many of these choices – like New York and D.C. – are perpetual top choices and will surprise absolutely no one who’s ever watched an episode of Sex in the City or The West Wing.

But what if you’re looking for more under the radar home base?

Business Insider recently reported that there is a growing trend for young people to try and build their lives in smaller cities, skipping splashy but hugely expensive options like New York. Citing a Ypulse survey of 20-somethings, BI says, “nearly 60 percent prefer smaller digs—40 percent for small cities and 19 percent for the small town lifestyle.” The post also quotes Melanie Shreffer, editor-in-chief of Ypulse, as saying that Millennials are particularly interested in cities like Portland, Minneapolis, and Detroit.

And it turns out Detroit, at least, also had its eyes on Millennials. A new initiative in the city called Challenge Detroit is offering selected applicants a $500 a month housing stipend and a $30,000 salary to move to the city and work at a top Detroit company. Selections have already been for this year’s 30 participants, but if participating in the turn around of one of America’s iconic cities appeals to you, keep an eye out for next year.

What’s your top consideration when choosing where to go after graduation?

London-based Jessica Stillman blogs about generational issues and trends in the workforce for Inc.com and GigaOM.

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No, sadly, it’s not how to fend off too many adoring fans or maintain those eight-pack abs. Instead, the question that consumes both young careerists and many actors is whether to let yourself get typecast.

Just like Efron and Diesel need to decide whether to accept the “teen idol” or “man of action” label and run with it, or insist on proving the breadth of their skills with (sometimes painful) forays into serious drama or comedy, those of us on our way up the career ladder have to decide whether it benefits us more to be known as a generalist or a niche expert.

Ezra Zuckerman, a professor at MIT Sloan, examined the career trajectories of actors (and clearly made himself a popular dinner party companion, at least temporarily), revealing that those who typecast themselves (PDF) early in their careers tended to earn more, work for longer and become more famous.

And guess what? The quicker actors specialized, the sooner and more they worked.

Non-Actors Take Heed

This isn’t just crucial info for your actor friends, according to a recent HBR blog post by entrepreneur Daniel Gulati, it’s also key information for young professionals looking for advice on how to guide their careers. Being a generalist, according to both Gulati and common sense, has advantages, including the one that keeps even marginally gifted actors trying to stretch their talents: it’s more interesting than doing the same thing over and over again. Plus, in a volatile economy, the ability to be agile and shift focus sounds appealing, while landing a niche gig looks harder than casting your job-hunting net wide.

“There is a permanent new dynamism and volatility in the job market, and the cost of experimentation has fallen dramatically,” Gulati writes. But he also believes many professionals take their aversion to specialization too far. “An oft-overlooked part of this strategy is the requirement to amplify your passions and double down when you see early signs of success,” he writes. “Instead, unfortunately, I often see the people who’ve created the most options for themselves continuing to select the one that keeps the most options open. Over the long term, that is a career strategy with diminishing returns.”

It may sound like a snore or a dead-end at the start of your career, but specialization will help you earn more and stand out from other job applicants in a truly tough job market.

Guidelines to Getting Typecast

So if specializing is as lucrative for professionals as it is for actors, when do you move to narrow your focus? “For those who are truly unsure of their career passions, it makes sense to stay general. However, this isn’t an excuse to stop hunting for a specialty,” writes Gulati. He suggests that the time to specialize is when you find something you can imagine doing with great focus for a long time. Don’t force it or you’ll regret it, but don’t give up the hunt prematurely, either.

How specialized should you go? Gulati notes that this may be more a matter of chance opportunities than something you can pilot exactly. Feel your way to the correct level of specialization, he writes: “Retaining some degree of intellectual breadth is important, as is a level of future career flexibility. In practice, though, this is more a function of opportunities that come your way, rather than a predetermined strategy. Be alert: If your role lacks challenges or if you’re disengaging with the content, you’re probably being dragged too deep.”

Have you been fighting being typecast when you should be embracing it?

London-based Jessica Stillman blogs about generational issues and trends in the workforce for Inc.com and GigaOM.

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Congrats! But be warned a boatload of research says your fluency with all things digital comes at a cost – you’re pretty lousy at face to face.

That’s what a recent post on the HBR blogs by government executive John K. Mullen says, anyway. In it, Mullen warns Millennials that “the internet may have partially rewired your brain in such a way that when you meet people face to face, you’re less capable of figuring out what they’re thinking” because you’re less skilled at picking up verbal and body language clues.

Want to see the original studies? Just follow Mullen’s links:

Research suggests that excessive, long-term exposure to electronic environments is reconfiguring young people’s neural networks and possibly diminishing their ability to develop empathy, interpersonal relations, and nonverbal communication skills. One study indicates that because there’s only so much time in the day, face-to-face interaction time drops by nearly 30 minutes for every hour a person spends on a computer. With more time devoted to computers and less to in-person interactions, young people may be understimulating and underdeveloping the neural pathways necessary for honing social skills. Another study shows that after long periods of time on the internet, digital natives display poor eye contact and a reluctance to interact socially.

Could this possibly be true? Author Stever Robbins has previously complained about the same phenomenon to me in an interview, saying “there are an awful lot of people under the age of 25 who spend an inordinate amount of time communicating via text and email, and they do it even when they should be working. Get that under control.”

Robbins cited a young person he worked with who was reluctant to speak in person and constantly wanted to text instead, which Robbins felt stunted their relationship and made him less likely to help advance this young colleague’s career.

That offers a clue to what might be going on here. Gen Yers shake their heads in disbelief when we’re told we lack empathy because most of us don’t experience our friends and peers as lacking understanding or being frustrating to communicate with. But remember, even if these studies don’t pan out under close examination, and even if your brain is not all that different from your parents’, you still have to interact with older, less digitally immersed generations at work.

Like Robbins and his young colleague, this can cause a clash of expectations and styles (and maybe even hold back your career). Your brain is just probably fine, but that doesn’t mean you won’t annoy your middle-aged boss if you try to use the same communication style with him that you do with your friends.

But fret not, both Mullen and Robbins offer tips to help you blend in. Mullen’s emphasis is on learning what older generations expect in terms of face-to-face meetings like interviews. He suggests:

• Your interviewer may be specifically looking for evidence that you’re willing to make eye contact. Engage the interviewer — show a lively interest. This may not come easily.
• Make clear that you understand the importance of face-to-face meetings and that you’re willing to sit down with people. If an interviewer or a questionnaire asks how you’d contact someone in a potentially fraught situation, don’t assume that email is the correct answer.

Robbins, meanwhile, prescribes a more radical intervention:

Develop empathy, especially if the thought scares you. Commit to spending two weeks without using your cell phone. And without texting and tweeting. Do all of your communications by planning in advance and by meeting up with people and doing face-to-face interactions. If you can’t do that for two weeks to a month, seriously fix that, because it is simply the case that the way human beings are wired, the way relationships get formed is face to face. Relationships do not get formed textually. Very shallow relationships do, but the people you’re going to depend on for big breaks are going to be people you have relationships with and not necessarily the people you tweet with all the time.

Do you think young people need to train themselves to match the communication expectations of older professionals?

London-based Jessica Stillman blogs about generational issues and trends in the workforce for Inc.com and GigaOM.

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The post Do Digital Natives Really Suck at Communicating Face-to-Face? appeared first on Brazen Life.

One suggestion: become an intrapreneur. Coined way back in the 70s by Gifford Pinchot, the term intrapreneur covers anyone involved in shaking up a stale business culture to bring in innovation and get cool stuff done. And it’s a natural option for young, idealistic, entrepreneur-idolizing young people, according to a recent post by careers author Alexandra Levit on the American Express OPEN Forum blog. But despite the long pedigree of the idea and its obvious advantages, “entrepreneurs tend to think of going in-house as selling out,” concedes Levit.

Finding another outlet

But Levit begs to differ with those that are down on intrapreneurship. She quotes Ingrid Vanderveldt, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Dell: “Intrapreneurship can be just as impactful and certainly just as critical as entrepreneurship. That same drive, creativity and passion for growth that entrepreneurs have can be used inside a company to benefit customers and team members.”

The Young Entreprenur Council, which is endeavoring to #FixYoungAmerica with a new campaign, agrees with Levit, citing intrapreneurship as a viable option for Millenials. “In the 21st century, entrepreneurial thinking isn’t just for entrepreneurs. Adaptability, creativity and financial literacy are core skills for American employees and so-called intrapreneurs — innovators within larger organizations — as well,” writes Scott Gerber, the organization’s founder, recently in Time magazine.

Beware of the dark side

But don’t be deceived, trying to go the intrapreneuship route has risks, too. Spending too long in large organizations can instill practices and mindsets that are contrary to everything entrepreneurship stands for.

As VC, author, entrepreneur and general man-about-the-startup-scene Guy Kawasaki explained in a post on how to be a good intrapreneur, doing so requires you to:

Reboot your brain. Just about everything you learn and do inside a large company is wrong for intrapreneuring. For example, in a large company, you survey customers, check with the sales force, build consensus, conduct focus groups, test, test, test, ensure backward compatibility, test, test, test, and then ship. When you ship you utilize advertising because advertising is the what’s always been used. Forget these practices. In fact, don’t worry, be crappy and ship as soon as you can. Generally, you should do everything the opposite from the tried and true existing way of large companies.

He also advises, “you need to stay invisible as long as practical. Your initial reaction to an innovative idea may be to seek upper level and peer buy-in… Not a good idea.” Obviously not a ringing endorsement of the sort of collaborative environment you’re likely to find as an intrapreneur.

The obvious implication here is the habits that early career intrapreneurs might become accustomed to in a big company could undermine any later attempts at starting their own venture successfully. But if your passion is for innovation, creation and getting things done, you have as fair a shot of changing these processes as they have of changing you.

Beware the dark side of corporate life, and maybe seeing the issues that plague many big organizations will be the push you need once you’ve acquired the right set of skills (or paid off enough of those student loans) to get out there on your own.

Do you think intrapreneurship is a valid channel for young people’s entrepreneurial ambitions – or a spirit-crushing trap?

London-based Jessica Stillman blogs about generational issues and trends in the workforce for Inc.com and GigaOM.

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The post Not Quite an Entrepreneur? Try Innovating Within Your Company appeared first on Brazen Life.

In their last public opinion survey, the folks at Pew Research Center revealed something readers of this blog know all too well: Americans think young people are getting screwed in the current economy. Business Insider reports:

41 percent of Americans believe that younger adults have been hit harder than any other group, compared with 29 percent who say middle-aged Americans and 24 percent who point to seniors 65 and older. A wide majority of the public — at least 69 percent — also said it’s more difficult for today’s young adults than their parents’ generation to pay for college, find a job, buy a home or save for the future.

Of course, if you’re under 30, it probably isn’t news to you that young people are having a lot harder time getting established than previous generations. In fact, you might even be a little bit (or more than a little bit) angry about it already.

But while a good bitch about the state of things with friends is certainly a healthy way to blow off steam, when it comes to actually moving your career and financial prospects forward getting angry probably isn’t helpful, is it?

Actually, according to a couple of new studies and posts across the blogosphere, anger might actually be useful. Say what?!

While blowing your fuse at your boss is definitely not recommended, nor is using a lack of good options as an excuse for inaction, you can channel your frustration and anger productively (and you don’t even have to be in a boxing ring or mosh pit).

Dutch researchers, for instance, recently demonstrated that a quick burst of anger can actually help up break through barriers and be more creative, at least in the short term. The Freakonomicsblog has an interesting summary of the findings:

Angry people produce a higher volume of ideas, as well as more creative ones than their non-angry counterparts. The study’s authors reason that anger is usually accompanied by a feeling of intense energy and a less-structured style of thinking, two factors that lead to creative forms of brainstorming.

That burst of productivity however is short-lived and ultimately creativity is reduced as a result. The authors found that anger leads to initially higher levels of creativity than sadness, but that anger depletes resources more. As a result creative performance declines over time more for angry people than sad ones.

So, if it’s your job to be creative for long periods of time, better to be sad than angry. But if all you need are short bursts of sporadic creativity, rage away.

If you’re not stick for the solution on a problem that demands creative thinking, that doesn’t mean your occasional feelings of fury can’t be put to good use. As doctor and author Walter E. Jacobson explains in this video, ideally used anger is “a signal device” that let’s us know when we’re threatened and need to act. Rather than turning your anger on others, use it to power you to fight calmly for what you want or as an alert that lets you know you need to step back and take a breather until you can think clearly again.

Do you feel moments of rage over the economy and how it’s affecting your career?

London-based Jessica Stillman blogs about generational issues and trends in the workforce for Inc.com and GigaOM.

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If you were lucky, your parents and teachers set tasks, rewarded success and protected you as best they could from anything scary that threatened during the last 18 years, providing a stable, reliable world. Then you went to college, and things might have gotten a bit wilder, but in many ways they also stayed remarkably similar –your professors set assignments and gave out grades while TAs and phone calls (and checks) from the parents protected you from many of the world’s ups and downs.

Now you’re out on your own and looking for your job. Isn’t it reasonable to expect to find an employer that looks out for your interests, directs your efforts and rewards your successes at least a little like those surrounding you in your early life did? Isn’t that, after all, what the employee-employer compact is all about?

Fat chance. Several decades ago, workers might have been able to trade hard work and loyalty for a job that provided security, advancement and a modicum of security from life’s strongest storms – but not anymore.

According to London Business School professor Lynda Gratton, author of a new book entitled The Shift: The Future of Work Is Already Here, new career realities demand we give up our dreams of a sheltering employer that protects us like children and face up to the fact that we all need to grow up. She recently wrote in Forbes:

We are in the midst of an industrial revolution greater than the world has ever seen with all the turbulence, the challenges and the opportunities that previous revolutions have brought. Partly as a result of this, it seems to me that the relationship between companies and their employees is undergoing a fundamental shift. All over the world the old Parent to Child relationship is moving towards a potentially more balanced Adult to Adult relationship.

So what does that mean for young careerists struggling to come to terms with this new reality of work? How does acknowledging that your employer these days is in no way like your mom change how you approach your working life? Gratton offers some suggestions in The Wall Street Journal:

Temper tantrums don’t change reality. Make the tough choices. Is the current reality harsh? Sure, it is. American workers face a tough economy and stiff competition from abroad as well as from ever more efficient and intelligent technology. But covering your eyes, whining and bitching, and generally refusing to accept reality doesn’t change that.

“Being a young graduate in a country with near-zero growth is not pleasant and we know the psychological scarring this experience can leave. Context can indeed be overwhelming and it can feel as if there are no real options against which choices can be made,” Gratton writes, but “it is crucial to see choices even in these potentially more restricted contexts.”

Don’t let yourself pretend that a lack of good and easy choices is the same thing as no choices at all.

Stop waiting for someone to explain the assignment and direct your own development. In this new world, you need to set your own assignments and direct your own development because making it in a tough market is all about building skills. You need to ensure you keep learning.

“Good work provides opportunities to do exciting and stretching work with talented peers,” Gratton writes. “Bad work may pay well but in the long term erodes your intellectual capital.”

Don’t be a baby about saving and retirement. Our parents and grandparents may have had long-term employers looking out for them in their golden years, but Gen Y is unlikely to be offered these same sort of benefits.

Be realistic about this and look out for yourself. Gratton suggests most of us have three options: “Build a career that enables you to work longer (at least into your late 60s or early 70s), be prepared (like the Chinese who save around 40 percent of their income) to save a significant proportion of your income throughout your working life, [or] consider ways to reduce your consumption and live more simply.”

What do you think of Gratton’s prescriptions? Are they strong but necessary medicine for young people who are often in denial about career realities – or overly cruel?

London-based Jessica Stillman blogs about generational issues and trends in the workforce for Inc.com and GigaOM.

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The post An Easy Way to Find Career Success: Buck Up and Grow Up! appeared first on Brazen Life.

And when I spoke to James Marshall Reilly, founder of The Guild Agency Speakers Bureau and Intellectual Talent Management and the author of Shake the World: It’s Not About Finding a Job, It’s About Creating a Life, a few weeks ago, he suggested something similar. Young careerists, he felt, should stop trying to carefully plan and reduce risk and instead dabble boldly in whatever catches their interest. Only through repeated experimentation can most of us locate a career path where we’ll thrive.

But not everyone is so taken with this frenetic, constantly shifting approach to work. In fact, some note that always searching for the next newer, better gig can get pathological. Brazen Careerist founder Penelope Trunk, for one, has cautioned against perpetually searching for that perfect job and advised readers to settled into whatever gig they can get, focusing on excelling where they are at least for the immediate future.

WSJ columnist Alexandra Levit gives similar advice in a post entitled, “The Perfect First Job Doesn’t Exist.” Stop imagining the grass is always greener, she advises, and focus on what’s in front of you. She even cautions against rushing to get promoted, suggesting you “enjoy this time in which you don’t have to worry about anyone but yourself.” CAREARREALISM has also warned professionals of all ages about getting obsessed with finding your dream career.

A Delicate Balance

So which is it? Should we be constantly roving with an ear out for the faintest rumble of a new opportunity, eager to jump ship the first chance we get? Or should young careerists fight the impulse to believe there’s always something better out there and focus on whatever work is in front of us now?

Both paths have obvious risks. Spend all your time daydreaming about what you hope to be doing next, and you’re likely not only to be restless and unhappy in the present, but also less than stellar at the job you have now, missing chances to learn and develop new skills.

Plus, building a network and a solid professional reputation generally takes time and commitment. By changing paths often, you may end up skidding sideways rather than building up to better things.

Hunker down in a less than awesome job, however, and exciting opportunities could pass you by. You may even regret your lack of experience and adventure when you’re older.

As with most life decisions, the answer probably comes down to self-knowledge and finding a balance. Clearly, the two extremes of frantic job hopping or decades’ long cubicle drudgery are bad bets, but that still leaves plenty of choices between those two poles.

To decide where you should be on that spectrum, you’ll need to honestly assess what makes you more unhappy: missing an opportunity or the constant stress of watching out for one. Answers will almost certainly vary by personality and may change over time, but it’s a question each of us needs to ponder when choosing between career ADD and settling in professionally.

Which do you fear more: too much professional change or too little? 

London-based Jessica Stillman blogs about generational issues and trends in the workforce for Inc.com and GigaOM.

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When you’re young, taking advice from older people can be difficult. The short explanation of why is simple – it’s annoying. But however much your mother or grandfather may drive you crazy with unsolicited tips and suggestions, most of us know deep down that those with vastly more life experience than us have valuable insights to offer.

It’s been a bumper year for online posts and columns offering to pass on the wisdom of age to the young and curious, with The New York Times columnist David Brooks leading the way.

Over the past few months, Brooks has asked elderly readers to send in their life stories, as well as the lessons they’re learned over the decades for the benefit of his readers, with Brooks summarizing the results in a series of thought-provoking columns. Among the many insights from the project:

Divide your life into chapters. The unhappiest of my correspondents saw time as an unbroken flow, with themselves as corks bobbing on top of it…. The happier ones divided time into (somewhat artificial) phases. They wrote things like: There were six crucial decisions in my life. Then they organized their lives around those pivot points. By seeing time as something divisible into chunks, they could more easily stop and self-appraise. They had more control over their fate.

Beware rumination. There were many long, detailed essays by people who are experts at self-examination. They could finely calibrate each passing emotion. But these people often did not lead the happiest or most fulfilling lives…. Many of the most impressive people, on the other hand, were strategic self-deceivers. When something bad was done to them, they forgot it, forgave it or were grateful for it. When it comes to self-narratives, honesty may not be the best policy.

In the same vein, hospice nurse Bronnie Ware made waves online with a somewhat wrenching post on the most common regrets of the dying (not all of whom may have been seniors, but all of whom presumably were forced by short time horizons into hard reflection). The post is worth a read in full, but one regret from the list might be of special interest to young careerists. She wrote:

I wish I didn’t work so hard. This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

Of course, not all the wisdom of senior citizens is reserved for weighty matters and the most fundamental values decisions of life. Less somber advice is on offer too. For example, a recent post on Wise Bread provides a 94-year-old’s tips on making good decisions. Among the ideas:

Be grateful that you have choice. It’s natural to dread having to make a tough choice — I know I often do. But what if you thought of that choice as a privilege? My grandmother grew up at a time in which women just weren’t given much say; she was raised to listen to her parents and then later, all the big decisions went to her husband. Now that she’s all on her own, she relishes doing what she wants, even at the cost of sometimes making choices she regrets. So next time you’re struggling with a decision, remember that you’re actually indulging in a luxury that has not always been available to everyone — and that in some parts of the world still isn’t.

Do what you want. As an active and able 94-year-old, my grandmother relishes being able to do whatever she wants. Maybe some of that’s a luxury of old age, but she’s also learned that you just can’t make everyone happy, so it’s best not to try. Going with the flow can often be a way of taking the easy way out. Make the decisions that are right for you.

For those looking into the really deep dive, Stanford professor Tina Seelig (merely middle-aged but clearly onto some of the secrets of career success) has a whole book on subject entitled What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World.

When asked in an interview what single piece of advice she’d like to give her younger self, she replied:

I would tell myself that the uncertainty of life never goes away. There are always choices in front of you, challenges to overcome, and failures from which you need to recover. If you embrace the challenges and view them through the lens of possibilities, then you will not only be happier, but will be much more likely to turn the inevitable obstacles into opportunities. The world is always changing, and it is up to you to be flexible and optimistic.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received from an elder?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London and is the author of BNET’s Entry-Level Rebel column.

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The economy continues to be crappy, and while economists can argue what that means in terms of aggregate demand or monetary policy, young people are already sure what it adds up to on the ground – a few more years living with mom and dad.

Surveys show that huge numbers of college graduates are moving back home as they search for a decent job. Back in May, a study by Twentysomething Inc. found a whopping 85 percent of graduates find themselves getting reacquainted with their childhood bedroom.

Not always a nightmare

Is this always a terrible thing? Not at all, according to Oregon State University professor Richard Settersten, author of Not Quite Adults, Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone.

“It turns out that living at home can be a really smart decision in today’s economy. If it allows young people to be in school when they otherwise would not be able to afford to be, or be engaged in internships or apprenticeships that will lead to success later on, that’s a good thing,” he said earlier this year.

While the move may be viewed as incredibly uncool by many grads, the perception that living at home is lame comes down mostly to culture, not age. Parents, too, “see ‘success’ and ‘independence’ as synonyms, though no such conflation exists for many immigrants,” Gregory Warner wrote recently in the New York Times. Warner outlines how many children of immigrant families view moving back home not as “a sign of failure but as a means to achieve their financial goals more quickly.”

And then… reality

All of which is a long winded way of saying that you really oughtn’t to feel bad if you’re packing up to move back home; plenty of others are doing the same, and it actually might be a savvy financial move.

But we can’t promise the move won’t drive you crazy. After the independence of college, reverting to cohabitating with the parental unites after graduation can come as a shock to everybody – both kids and parents. So how can you make the best of the situation and keep your sanity (mostly) in tact?

A few tips:

Don’t be a brat. Sure, you may not be feeling awesome right now, but don’t take that out on your parent(s) who are, after all, helping you out. Psychology Today’s ten tips for moving home include “be appreciative — say thank you for the things your parents do for you,” “avoid ‘trashing’ your parents’ space,” and “make yourself useful.” And if you’re going to be late, they’re not crazy for wanting you to call.

Construct a framework for sanity. The situation is bound to be a bit fraught, so minimize potential conflict by planning ahead and clearing up potential trouble areas ahead of time. “If you have a good enough relationship to move back home after graduation, you should have a good enough relationship to talk openly with your parent or parents about your expectations for living together again,” Lindsey Pollak says.

If parents decide to give money, U.S. News & World Report advises,discuss the details in advance. Is it a loan? At what rate? If it’s for a specific purchase, say a car, are there any limits to what you can choose to buy without causing familial disharmony?

A timeline for your eventual departure is also helpful, suggests Money in Your 20s, which, along with other experts, suggests you, “have a specific date or goal that you are reaching for in order to move out.”

Make the most of it. Don’t even dream of moping. “If you were gone for a while you can bet on the fact that something has changed. Maybe there are new bars in town or new art shows. Maybe there are new events and festivals. Or, maybe you just need to re-familiarize with things that have always been there… Explore your city,” Grad Meets World advises.

And don’t forget that you’re doing this to give yourself space to get your life on track. This is a great time to learn a new skill (if your parents can cook, let them teach you, otherwise you’ll kick yourself later, trust me), reconnect with old friends or launch a resume–building project. And obviously, no slacking if you’re job searching, no matter how soul-sucking the process may be.

If you’ve survived the experience of moving back home, what other ideas can you add? 

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London and is the author of BNET’s Entry-Level Rebel column.

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Reports that this was a work-to-live generation rather than the other way around came thick and fast on both sides of the Atlantic. USA Today declared way back in 2005 that

unlike boomers who tend to put a high priority on career, today’s youngest workers are more interested in making their jobs accommodate their family and personal lives. They want jobs with flexibility, telecommuting options and the ability to go part time or leave the workforce temporarily when children are in the picture.

British newspaper The Guardian agreed in 2008, claiming that young people in the UK, “have watched with horror as their parents worked punishing hours in their scramble for money and status. Now… they have different priorities. They care less about salaries, and more about flexible working, time to travel and a better work-life balance.”

And even in 2009, a survey of 60,000 undergraduates claimed they weren’t letting a raging recession stand in the way of their dreams of a more balanced lifestyle. At that time, according to Tracy Lynn Drye of Universum USA, which carried out the research, GenY continued to value work-life balance above all else when listing top characteristics of an ideal entry-level employer, above even salary and meaningful work.

Recession rattled

Now that the economic gloom has persisted for several years and some frustrated members of the classes of ’09 and ’10 watch more recent grads get jobs while they remain unemployed, are young people finally being forced to change their tune when it comes to work-life balance?

Recent numbers from British consultancy JBA suggest yes. “Younger staff expressed 15-20 percent less desire than their older colleagues to choose their time and place to work. In fact, they actively seek out every opportunity to be in the office in the closest proximity to their boss,” concludes the company’s new report. Another new UK study from O2 charts the rise of “presenteeism” among workers of all generations who feel they have to demonstrate long hours in the office to secure their jobs during tough times.

GenY is no doubt afflicted as well.

In one way, it’s perfectly natural that the most unemployed generation would lower its expectations in the face of the worst economic picture in decades. But once you’ve spent years dreaming of something better, can you really go back to being jailed in an office from nine to five without generating plenty of productivity killing resentment?

Suggestion box

So what’s to be done? It’s a question with no simple or singular answer. For some workers, perhaps the solution is designing their lives to be less expensive and allow more freedom from the constant need to earn. No New York City for these types, (hello, Detroit) but choosing to spend less to work less might be the answer for folks with certain types of ambitions.

Others are blowing up traditional career paths and aiming to forge either their own gig-based, piecemeal career or start their own business. GenY is, after all, hugely interested in entrepreneurialism. This way, you may be always working, but at least you’re always working for yourself and have the flexibility to slip in some actual living during every down moment.

So what’s your solution: Are you trying to hang onto the idea of work-life balance despite the economy? If so, how?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London and is the author of BNET’s Entry-Level Rebel column.

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The post Has the Recession Killed GenY’s Dream of Work-Life Balance? appeared first on Brazen Life.

One solution to this is to apply for everything and not worry about fit. This is an all-around terrible idea. It’s miserable for you because you’re setting yourself up for an ocean of rejection, one that’s as time consuming as it is pointless. It also sucks for the hiring manager who’s bombarded with off-the-mark resumes and wondering whether foolish applicants even bothered to read the ad.

So what’s the better solution? Improve at reading job ads. Sure, it may never be a fun task, but with a little knowledge and practice it is possible to hone your skills: learning how to quickly scan opportunities, discovering what the HR folks are trying to say through all that jargon and understanding how much energy it’s worth investing in an opportunity. You’ll conserve your time so you can use it on the opportunities where you really want to shine.

Here’s how:

Step one: Scan and filter

Job ads are often filled with pointless fluff about the need for organization and excellent communication skills. Can you think of any job where those aren’t a plus? “Fluff is typically the last half of the job description…These aren’t ‘real skills’ and won’t land you an interview, so skip over them and focus on the important parts of the description,” recommends Lindsay Olsen on Business Insider’s Your Money blog.

Ignore this filler and scan quickly for significant keywords like education, experience and serious skills. If skimming an ad turns up a few interesting words that fit what you’re looking for, make sure you have the hard and fast requirements like years of experience, fluent French or a particular certification. Then, if necessary, read it carefully in full.

Step two: Read between the lines

No one’s getting nominated for any Nobel prizes based on the quality of writing in most ads, which are generally neither clear nor compelling (this amazing ad might be an exception).

So to find out more about the jobs you’ve deemed interesting, “you need to be able to extract what hiring managers implicitly want,” according to The Wall Street Journal’s Dennis Nishi. “This requires you to read between the lines of job ads.”

Nishi’s article goes on to offer a suggestion from USC professor Mathew Curtis: “Peruse other job ads from the same employer. This can give you a better sense of the tone of a company.”

Tone is important because it’s your first clue whether you’re a good fit for a company’s culture. If you’re a flip-flops at work sort of guy (or gal), an ad full of ultra-serious biz speak is probably a sign that you would need to start shopping for wing tips. Noticing tone will also help should you decide to apply, allowing you to tailor your response to match the mood, vocabulary and focus of the ad.

The location of the job ad can be another clue whether it’s worth your time to apply. “If the ad is posted somewhere that required money to change hands, the position is real and unlikely to be filled internally by the boss’ brother,” says BNET’s Dave Johnson.

Step three: Do the dating profile test

To check whether you’ve really gotten a sense of the ad, think of it as akin to a dating profile, full of euphemisms designed to present the opportunity in the best light. Just like you’d mentally translate “free spirited” on Match.com to mean possibly unemployed, or “vivacious” to mean loud in public, it’s worth taking a moment to try to restate job ad jargon in everyday language.

Does “lots of growth potential” mean a miniscule salary and long hours in exchange for the hope that this tiny company takes off? Does “self-starter” mean a boss who expects you to stay out of her hair? Can you imagine what day-to-day life would be like in this role and what tasks you’d be doing?

Just like with online dating, being incredibly picky is often counter-productive because we’re rarely good at predicting exactly what will make us happy. The dating profile test is just a check to make sure no alarm bells are ringing and you’ve thought through and understood what sort of company this is, what sort of person they’re after and whether you fit that description.

Still psyched for the job? Great, now use everything you’ve learned to apply, spending the extra time you didn’t use on spamming all those other jobs with resumes to craft the perfect pitch and find just the right person to get it to.

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London and is the author of BNET’s Entry-Level Rebel column.

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The post How to Get More Bang Out of Each Job-Hunting Hour appeared first on Brazen Life.

That’s exciting… and terrifying.

So, short of getting out your crystal ball or trusty copy of Nostradamus what can you do to prepare, particularly in the realm of work? As you’re probably still early enough in your working life to make changes or alter your trajectory, you’re in a great place to future-proof your career.

Here are some suggestions on how to go about it:

Forget out-of-date career models

Careers are over and jobs are totally last century. The unsettling death of the traditional career path and the end of long-lasting compacts between employer and employee have created a need for new models of work.

Biz school professor Lynda Gratton has stepped in the gap with her book The Shift: The Future of Work Is Already Here, predicting a future of virtual, global and highly skilled but piecemeal work. Among her recommendations: master your core skills, learn to work remotely, build your network and don’t expect to rely on big companies. Check out her ideas in more detail here.

Cultivate a flexible core

Sure it pays to have mastered marketable skills, but some experts feel that with such an uncertain job market, it’s also important to have a strong basis of core abilities to draw on if the market changes.

What do they have in mind? Things like information search, influencing without authority and tolerating ambiguity.

Play futurist

If you’re a more active type who isn’t satisfied with simply maximizing your flexibility and preparing for uncertainty, consider more hands-on options, like scenario planning.

Scenario planning, or informed, structured storytelling about the future, is common for big organizations but can also be applied to the individual. Here’s how it works. Plus, it seems sort of fun.

Go human

Betting on individual jobs as future-proof is a tricky business, but there is some consensus about general job market trends. Often they boil down to being irreplaceably human – think teachers and nurses – or riding the high-end technology skills and creative thinking wave that computers won’t soon replace.

Also, with an aging population in many countries, healthcare seems like a popular bet. In uncertain times, entrepreneurialism also offers some protection.

It’s bound to be a wild ride. But prepare, hopefully it’ll be enjoyable for you.

And of course it should be noted, as the old song says, the children are our future. Cheesy maybe (OK, definitely), but true. As the youngest generation of workers, we have the ability not only to prepare for the future but also to influence it.

Are you worried about the future of your career and, if so, how are you preparing for uncertain times ahead?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London and is the author of BNET’s Entry-Level Rebel column.

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You’re now a certified American adult, which means you’re probably pretty close to financially illiterate.

Plenty of research shows Americans are less than savvy about managing their money, including work by Annamaria Lusardi of Dartmouth that was recently highlighted on the Freakonomics blog. Some of the more alarming findings include:

• The majority of Americans do not plan for predictable events such as retirement or children’s college education.
• People do not make provisions for unexpected events and emergencies, leaving themselves and the economy exposed to shocks.
• While managing debt, Americans engage in behaviors that can generate large expenses, such as sizable interest payments and fees.
• People aren’t well informed about their terms of borrowing; a sizable group does not know the terms of their mortgages or the interest rates they pay on their loans.
• The majority of Americans lack basic knowledge of fundamental economic principles such as the workings of inflation, risk diversification, and the relationship between asset prices and interest rates.

So as you take your first few financial steps, how can you avoid some of the more gruesome mistakes studied by Lusardi?

Lots of sites offer tips for career newbies and recent grads. Much of the advice you’re probably sick of hearing; yes, you know you should try to max out your 401K contributions if your company is matching them, and no, running to Starbucks twice a day isn’t the best for your budget.

But these crucial tips will really save you the embarrassment and expense of behaving like financial illiterate:

Fight lifestyle inflation. Most college kids don’t have a ton of spending money, thus the image of subsisting largely on Ramen noodles.

Now that you’ve graduated and (hopefully) gotten a job, you’ll probably feel the impulse to celebrate by releasing the purse strings and splurging a bit. Sure, you should celebrate your new job and, by all means, never eat Ramen again. But don’t relax about money so much you end up saving nothing or not thinking carefully about financial goals.

This might feel like the end of a long road, but it’s really just the beginning.

Don’t wait to hit up your parents for health insurance. Thanks to Obamacare, you can now stay on your parents health plan until you’re 26, making it much less of a knuckle-biting stressor if you’re not covered by work.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sweat insurance. “If students have been covered by the college health plan and want to get onto their parents’ insurance plan, they have 30 days from the date their student coverage ends to do so. Miss that window, and they may be left out until the plan’s next annual enrollment period, usually at the beginning of the new year,” says NPR’s Shots health blog.

Better call mom then, huh?

Don’t be tempted by your retirement pot. You’re in your 20s, so of course retirement feels eons away. It might be tempting to dip into whatever retirement savings you have to pay for a short-term expense like tuition or credit card bills, but that’s almost always a bad idea.

Writing on Lifehacker, Melanie Pinola shares her regret: “Trading long-term financial growth to solve a relatively small problem like credit card debt definitely falls into the dumb money mistake heading. In addition to losing valuable investment growth over those years, I got hit with a pretty hefty 10 percent early tax withdrawal penalty. Taking money out of your IRA (if you’re going to be hit with that penalty) is really a last resort.”

Start saving. When it comes to personal finance, half-baked action beats much-delayed mastery, so even if you can’t reel off all the differences between a Roth IRA and a traditional one or aren’t sure what percentage of your portfolio to allocate to bonds, start saving. You can figure out exactly what to do with the money (plus compounded interest) later.

Finally, take advice. You may have learned a lot in college, but personal finance is one area where you’re still almost certainly a newbie. Lecturing on this issue may sound like fingernails on a chalkboard, but not having the money to make your dreams a reality is far more painful.

There are a ton of free resources out there. Consult them.

What’s the dumbest financial mistake you’ve ever made, and how can your fellow grads avoid it?

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London and is the author of BNET’s Entry-Level Rebel column.

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If you’re one of the people trying to beat the competition and ensure your resume stands out by pursuing an advanced degree, then you’ve probably explored the program costs and know they’re pretty steep.

Student loan debt has skyrocketed in the U.S., and while it is often worth investing in your education, you don’t want to start your adult life with a large debt burden. It will limit your options. With too much debt, it’ll be tough to accept lower paid work even if you enjoy it or to cover the expenses of switching careers or moving.

But there might be no need to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for another degree or professional qualification. Here are some suggestions from career experts:

Hit the library

Yeah, it’s obvious, but it’s surprising how often we forget that nearly everything you’d learn in a high-priced class is available for pocket change on Amazon or zilch at your local library. It’s a principle Josh Kaufman understands well. As the founder of The Personal M.B.A., Kaufman claims that you can get a solid business education on your own through his carefully selected reading list. Personalize his program to your specific areas of interest or simply look through online syllabi for reading lists from prestigious universities.

Take a mentor to lunch

Book smarts will only get you so far. Navigating office politics, networking effectively and moving up in your industry are best learned from experienced insiders. So find a professional role model or mentor and take him or her to lunch for bargain career development advice, suggest the folks at Get Rich Slowly.

Harness the power of the Internet

Sure, there’s no shortage of cute cat pictures or social media distractions online, but the Internet can nurture your brain as well as melt it. Just look at the wealth of free online courses from world-class experts. Need to brush up on how financial markets work? Learn from Yale professor Robert Schiller. Forgot your calculus? Go back to school with MIT.

College is, of course, not always a bad idea. It is often a way to flee the hard work and uncertainty of your early career for the structure and validation of the classroom. And plenty of big names including Seth Godin and Peter Thiel have questioned whether it’s a waste of time.

So prospective master’s candidates: think carefully about whether you want to write that check. A bit of hard work and creative, cheaper career interventions might serve you better. The options above are just the tip of the iceberg — affiliations with professional organizations, attendance at conferences or good value e-courses could also help you advance without getting you into debt.

Jessica Stillman is a freelance writer based in London and is the author of BNET’s Entry-Level Rebel column.

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