There has been a lot written in blogsphere recently about Generation Y. I especially liked the recent one on Times Online: Generation Y’s unique challenge — Today’s mollycoddled graduates expect a lot and employers must learn to cater to their needs. The headline says it all! Like it or not, much of the graduate market is made up of this generation, which includes those born between circa 1976 and 1994.

Also known as the Millennials, this generation is shaped by the leaders, events, and trends of its time. By far the most significant influence on this generation is the Internet. Generation Y was the first to grow up with the World Wide Web, and is used to being constantly bombarded with messages and multi-tasking.

The popularity of social networking sites like MySpace, instant messaging, and texting may explain why this generation is known for being peer-oriented and expects instant gratification. A 2008 survey by UK recruitment consultancy FreshMinds Talent, in partnership with Management Today, suggested that Millennials are generally more ambitious, brand conscious and tend to move jobs more often than ever before.

The survey of over 1,000 people, entitled Work 2.0, also revealed several misconceptions about Millennials, including that they are as loyal as their predecessors and believe that their job says something about them as individuals. The bottom line is that Generation Y is a different kettle of fish. Many of their skills will complement your more experienced employees. Once you understand your target market, make sure your hiring managers are up-to-date with the graduate hiring market. Hiring managers aren’t necessarily recruiters.

Their “fond” memories of being recruited on campus can be dated and no longer relevant. Educate your hiring managers on the current state of the graduate market. Send out articles and research throughout the year. In advertising, it takes at least three exposures to make a message stick.

Keep educating, your message will eventually get through. What are your thoughts on recruiting Generation Y? Leave a comment on this blog, we’d love to hear.

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities. 

Yesterday, I was reading the book, “Make Success Measurable,” by Douglas K. Smith, and it reminded me of a management mantra they have at FedEx (and other innovative companies): You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Which got me thinking about job hunting …

Here’s the thought: What parts of your job search do you measure?

If you’re thinking, “Huh?” or “I don’t measure anything,” you are like a dieter who doesn’t own a scale — how can you know if you’re succeeding?

The answer lies in questions. Specifically, if you ask the right questions, you’ll get the right answers needed to measure — and improve — your job search.

So, to get you started, here are three questions to ask yourself at the end of each day …

Question 1: How many networking phone calls did I make today?

Write the number down. Are you happy with it? Did you make 15 phone calls, for example? Good. Reward yourself appropriately, write down what you did to achieve that goal, then repeat it tomorrow.

Not happy with the number of calls you made? Think back to a day when you were happy, when you were “hot” on the phone, and talked to a lot of people. How did you do it? Whatever you did that worked before, repeat it tomorrow.

What if you’ve NEVER had a good day making networking calls? I would suggest that this is impossible — and I can prove it to you.

Think about a time when you made a lot of phone calls to ask an important question. Maybe it was to confirm the guest list for a party, or to find a babysitter, or to get a sub at work. If you can do that — pick up the phone and ask a question of people you know — you can make networking
calls about your job search. Because it’s pretty much the same thing.

In this case, the question you are asking is not, Do you know anyone who’s hiring? Instead, first tell others what kind of company and job you’re looking for, then ask, Who do you know that I should be talking to?

Regardless of whom you call and what you ask, the goal of each networking phone call is simple: To schedule an in-person meeting.

Question 2: How many in-person meetings did I set up today?

Ideally, you’ll schedule 1-2 meetings per day and meet 5-10 people every week.

You’ll likely set up meetings with two types of people:

a) First-level connections — people you know already.
These are your friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, et al. In my experience, however, most job leads will NOT come from these people. Rather, you will get them from …

b) Second-level connections — people you meet through people you know.These are also known as “weak connections,” and there is great power here, because there are great numbers here. Example: If you know 250 people and they know 250 people, you have access to 62,500 second-level connections.

The goal of each meeting is to get the name of someone who can either hire you, or refer you to a hiring authority. And the goal of meeting those hiring authorities is, of course, to set up job interviews.

Which brings us to …

Question 3: How many job interviews did I set up today?

This is the crucial question.

Never lose sight of the fact that all your phone calls and in-person meetings have the same ultimate goal: To get you face to face with an employer, discussing why hiring you would be the ideal solution to their problems.

Fact: In many cases, your next job may be at a company you don’t know about yet. Which is why you must put the numbers in your favor and talk to as many people as possible.

And … your next job may not even exist yet. Which is why you must research the background of every employer you meet, so you can propose solutions and ideas that prompt them to hire you before the competition does — even if they have to create a new job to do it.

To recap, here are the three vital questions:

* How many networking phone calls did I make today?
* How many in-person meetings did I set up today?
* How many job interviews did I set up today?

Take a moment tonight to answer them. When you do, you will start measuring your success, one day at a time, and you can’t help but get hired faster as a result.

Kevin Donlin is President of Guaranteed Resumes and the creator of GetHiredNow.TV. Since 1996, he has provided job search assistance to nearly 10,000 people. Author of “51 Ways to Find a Job Fast — Guaranteed,” Kevin has been interviewed by USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, CBS Radio and others. His latest product, The Instant Job Search System, is available at http://www.collegerecruiter.com/guaranteed-resumes.php
copyright (c) 2008 by Kevin Donlin

Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

1. “We’re about to go into beta testing.” This is a meaningless statement because it doesn’t matter when you go into beta testing–what matters is when you come out of beta testing. (The only hard and fast deadline for coming out of modern-day beta testing is “before you run out of money.”)

In the good old days, “alpha” used to mean “all features are implemented though not necessarily working properly.” “Beta” used to mean “there are no more repeatable bugs.” Nowadays beta means “we’ve gone as long as possible past the shipping date that we promised our investors.”

2. “I don’t know anything thing about marketing…” This is a lie of false modesty. The engineer is thinking, in totality, “I don’t know a thing about marketing, but how hard could it be compared to what I’m doing? I should run marketing and engineering. I just hope that the marketing the MBAs come up with is worthy of my code.” However, don’t worry too much about this lie because it self-corrects as the engineer misses deadline after deadline and comes to realize that he has bigger issues.

3. “I’ll comment the code, so that the next person can understand what I did.” This is a lie of good intentions. Really, the engineer did intend to comment the code but as the schedule slipped, priorities changed. The question put to management became: “Do you want me to comment the code or finish it sooner?” Guess what the answer was. Luckily, the lack of comments usually doesn’t matter because the code is so crappy that a total rewrite is necessary in a year.

4. “Our architecture is scalable.” This is the lie that I enjoy hearing the most. Typically, an engineer who has never shipped a product says this after creating a prototype in Visual BASIC. The whole conversation goes like this: “Google’s architecture isn’t as scalable as mine. They can support 25 million simultaneous searches. We will be able to easily handle a billion.”

Luckily, in most cases, the adoption of the product is slower than the CEO’s “conservative” forecast, so scalability never becomes an issue. Yeah, those clowns at Google, Yahoo, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, and AOL don’t know anything about scaling compared to the engineer…

5. “The code supports all the industry standards.” This is almost a truth but for a short omission: “This code supports all the industry standardsthat I agree with.” The engineer has made a personal decision to ignore standards she doesn’t like–for example, those promulgated by Microsoft. It’s no big deal–customers will never know…

Read the rest of his post HERE

So you have executed a successful job search and landed a new job and you are anxious to get started building your new career in a new company. Once you get over your new employee fears and get oriented to your new space, you will find it takes more than smiles and kind words to fit in.

Here are few things to keep in mind as you make the transition.

Don’t whine. At least not to the people you work with at the office. Talk about any job challenges or work related issues with friends, family or trusted colleagues in other companies, and not with your new coworkers. Avoid complaining about too much work, too many assignments or too long hours at the office. The fact is, no one really cares how much you have to do since everyone else has their own work, their own assignments, and their own long hours to deal with. Avoid becoming too cozy with the established resident whiners in your new company as well.

Make your manager aware of what you are doing and ask for feedback. A colleague once talked to me about a new energetic recruit who showed a lot of initiative on the job. Although this new worker meant really well, as my colleague put it, “She was running a great race, but she was in the wrong stadium completely.” Make sure the work you are doing is relevant and critical to the department’s mission. Additionally, make sure your work is being noticed. It will take a while for you to get into your groove in your new office, and making sure you are not working contrary to the flow is good. Watch also that you are not inheriting assignments from those who want to hand off their jobs.

Show enthusiasm and energy for the job, business or industry you are in now. If you just got hired by the largest plumbing fixture manufacturing supply company, you need to get excited about plumbing fixture manufacturing supplies business. People who enjoy the domains they work in are interested in learning more and will ultimately tend to do better on the job. If you are not prepared to have meaningful conversations about your job or the industry within which your company operates, you will not be happy.

Stay on time. If you have a problem being punctual, work really hard to correct that behavior. Be in the office on time, if not early, be back from lunch on time and do not pack up twenty minutes before your shift or day is supposed to end. Arrive on time for meetings and work harder on your own time if you have to. Of course today’s workforce is more about productivity than time spent in the office, but it is still a good idea for to show others you respect their time. Once you understand the protocols and the routines of the office, schedules can change.

Limit talk about what you did in your old job, company or worse in a class. This one is pretty hard to do, but it is something you will master eventually. It is been my experience that people sometimes don’t want to hear new ideas if they came from your old job, old company or worse from a class. Of course your prior knowledge will show in your work, but limit talking about where your skills come from. Feel free to credit publications, the media or a conference, but not your old job, company or class for new ideas.

Of course none of these tips are cast in cement. In addition to the requisite due diligence to do your new job well, you just need to heed some of these other workplace protocols that could expedite or slow your assimilation in the new environment.

Article by Marcia Robinson and courtesy of BullsEyeResumes College Blog. Robinson coaches, trains, and writes on career, workplace, and education issues for students and career professionals.

Article via Recruiting Blogswap, a service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships.

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Some people think it’s all about the money.

Over five years, Cal Poly would receive $5.9 million from the Saudi government to create an engineering curriculum, build labs and train teachers in Jubail, a sprawling oil center on the Persian Gulf.

The Mechanical Engineering faculty at the university felt strongly enough about it to oppose the partnership in a 15-3 vote.

“No matter how you cut it, we’re supporting the oppression of women,” said Jim LoCascio, a professor of mechanical engineering at Cal Poly since 1981.

My own opinion is a bit more political. Given the nature of the Saudi regime I find it absolutely disheartening that we would be investing our time, money and engineering expertise in any way over there, much less taking money from them. Or are they just giving us our oil money back?

Either way, I am disappointed that my school has begun down this road. I hope the public outcry, for whatever reason, grows to a loud enough rumble to cause the Univeristy to rethink its plans.

Brian Wood writes a great article for EDN.com discussing this very topic. He begins…

Engineers have taken a few shots in the past 20 years, especially those in the United States of America. It has become a popular sport for the collective group that brought us microwave ovens, satellite imagery, cell phones, and high definition to be stereotyped as introverted Dilbert-emulators who are long on brainpower but short on social skills … and soon on the street due to outsourcing.

Now isn’t that the truth. Later in the article he goes on to say

First, it’s a great time to be an engineer. The venture capital and financial markets are awash in investment capital earmarked for technology-focused businesses that have the prospect of earning higher-than-average return on investment. Engineers are the engines of these high-growth/high-tech companies, developing and delivering daily innovations in response to perpetual market demand for more, more, more. With product lifecycles (and attention spans) compressing at the pace of Moore’s Law, the forecast for continued engineering output is clear and sunny. The trick is managing financial market expectations so that marketing and associated “get-rich” hype doesn’t outpace product development and the laws of physics. Hopefully, we’ve all learned a few lessons from the dot-bomb debacle.

There are definitely many areas in the engineering world that will remain safe from outsourcing for many many years, especially those jobs related to national defense and the military. The real key is to research current trends for your field of interest along with the history of engineering employers within that specialty. With the right amount of due diligence it shouldn’t be too hard to find an engineering job that you will be able to keep for a long time without the worry of being outsourced.

Read Brian Woods’ complete article HERE