"People who graduated from college in a recession earn 2.5% less"

January 18, 2010 Business Week cover story, The Disposable Worker, looks at how a recession affects graduates and how more jobs are temporary, with no basic benefits, and how workers are happy to have them.

This quote, partially seen in the title, is the most disheartening:

For workers, research shows that chronic unemployment and underemployment cause lasting damage: Older people who lose jobs are often forced into premature retirement, while the careers of young people are stunted by their early detachment from the working world. Even 15 years out of school, people who graduated from college in a recession earn 2.5% less than if they had graduated in more prosperous times...

2009 SLA Salary Survey

The 2009 SLA Salary Survey has been released. Accessing the actual survey results and mini-reports will cost $. Individuals can also purchase access to the SLA Salary Calculator (9.95 for SAL members and 14.95 for non-members).

LibraryWorks

The LibrariansYellowPages and Library Associates, a recruitment firm, have partnered together to offer a job board called LibraryWorks. Currently all of the postings point back to LibGig, also a creation of Library Associates.

I don't know if their plan is to become a vertical search engine for library jobs or if this is just another way to drive traffic to their postings. The interface is clean and has a nice mix of jobs, but you can't sign up alerts or subscribe via RSS. It's early days, but so far days of meh.

Not a day without a conference

Marian Dworaczek has posted a list of upcoming conferences that are relevant to librarians.

DOL Job Tool Challenge

The Department of Labor is running a Job Tool Challenge to find the best online tools for job seekers. The submission period has passed, but you can vote on the tools that were submitted. Tools include social media tools, blogs, vertical search and job or career matching services. You can use these tools as a current job seeker or integrate them into your media instruction classes in libraries.

• The Project
• The Job Tool Challenge, for voting on the tools.
  

Help from resume reviewers

I am looking for librarians who have been involved in a recent hiring campaign at their library (past year) who would be willing to give advice about how to properly format resumes. Librarians from any type of library, including special and people who work outside of traditional library fields are most welcome.

ere shares the bad news

ERE.net shares the bad news on job losses, but puts some perspective to the reports.

Two Perspectives on Work

CBC's Spark has two perspectives on work, from Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow, amongst others, and Matthew B. Crawford, the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft.

Going freelance

Gina Trapani explains how to go freelance. I don't know how many people still hold on to the misconception that you quit and "hang out your shingle" but her advice on how to build gradually, getting your name out there and when to give your work away is helpful and probably true to most freelance experience (it is to mine).

Jason Alba on Twitter

Jason Alba, creator of JibberJobber, also the writer for the JibberJobber blog, has a good post on using Twitter effectively. I agree: people are busy, they don't like technology, and there isn't a great deal of evidence yet that all of the effort put into job seeking on Twitter can actually lead to a job.

For librarians, using Twitter for information sharing makes sense. If you just happen to get a job out of it, double bonus points.

Who's reading your email?

According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, it's getting a bit tougher--before the courts anyway--to monitor an employee's email. What I found fascinating is that 38% of companies have someone on staff whose job it is to read outgoing emails.

And that means your personal accounts, too. At least if you access them from the office:

In another case this year, Bonnie Van Alstyne, a former vice president of sales and marketing at Electronic Scriptorium Ltd., a data-management company, was in the thick of a testy legal battle in Virginia state court with the company over employment issues when it came to light that her former boss had been accessing and reading her personal AOL email account. The monitoring went on for more than a year, continuing after Ms. Van Alstyne left the company. Ms. Van Alstyne sometimes used her personal email account for business purposes, and her supervisor said he was concerned that she was sharing trade secrets.

The supervisor, Edward Leonard, had accessed her account "from home and Internet cafes, and from locales as diverse as London, Paris, and Hong Kong," according to legal filings in the case.

Ms. Van Alstyne sued Mr. Leonard and the company for accessing her email without authorization. A jury sided with her, and the case eventually settled.

Um, she left the company. Continuing to access her personal account after she is gone sounds like stalking to me. I wonder if Mr. Leonard is still with the company?

Best and Worst Metro Areas

SimplyHired has released their data on the best and worst metro areas for job postings for September 2009. The results compare the number of non-duplicate posts to number of unemployed in that area.