Internship is the New Entry-Level Job

New college graduates are finding that many entry-level jobs have disappeared or require a higher level of skill than used to be commonly needed. The high unemployment rate for people age 20–24—11.3 percent in July—reflects this environment. According to The Wall Street Journal, automation is a key factor contributing to this trend.

Automation has eliminated many entry-level jobs in several industries, such as finance and insurance. Credit analysts, loan officers, and especially insurance underwriters have seen demand tapering off. For example, employment of insurance underwriters has shrunk by 13% from 2003 to 2013. One finance industry insider estimates that it now takes 30 percent less staff time to complete valuation calculations, thanks to software that analyzes financial statements.

To be sure, automation has expanded entry-level jobs in other industries. For example, it is estimated that entry-level jobs for computer systems analysts have increased by 20 percent over the past decade. Automation also has created new occupations, such as social-media manager. This kind of work did not even exist 10 years ago, but now employs thousands of workers, especially young ones.

The onslaught of automation has happened for reasons beyond increases in computing power. The Great Recession has caused firms to seek ways to squeeze greater productivity from workers, especially new hires.

This trend has changed the nature of the work that recent graduates do in industries other than technology. Instead of crunching spreadsheets and preparing reports, entry-level workers may be expected to meet with clients, identify problems with entrenched procedures, or serve on teams for new product development. New hires therefore have greater need for skill at interpersonal relations, communication, and critical thinking.

Traditionally, college grads in entry-level jobs paid their dues in positions requiring technical skills commonly taught in the classroom. Only after some years at this level were these workers expected to have mastered the soft skills needed for more complex assignments. But now the model for career growth seems to be changing, and ironically this is happening just in time for the millennial generation, who are notorious for their impatience with the traditional model.

Young workers may be eager to take advantage of these new opportunities, but to succeed in this environment, they will need to have acquired skills that usually are not taught in the classroom. This is why internship is such an important adjunct to a college education these days. In effect, internship is the new entry-level job. And this implies that interns need to avoid placements in which they are locked away in a windowless room doing technical tasks. Their internships need to include experiences that will build their soft skills.

For more tips on getting a lot out of an internship, I recommend the guide developed by the University of Michigan, adapted from Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.: Making the Most of Your Internship (PDF).

Recent Trends in Work Conditions

Money isn't everything. When choosing a career, most people also consider the work conditions. Will the job be mainly indoors or outdoors? Will it involve a lot of time pressure or high-impact decisions that add stress? It's nice to be able to choose work conditions that agree with you, but sometimes the jobs that are available do not offer exactly what you want, so you have to make compromises if you want to earn a paycheck.

As the economy changes over time, there are changes in the salience of various work conditions that people deal with on the job. I decided to identify recent trends in work conditions by examining recent data about occupations and about the changing levels of employment in occupations. Which work conditions are becoming more prevalent and which are receding?

Here is the procedure that I used to track several work conditions:

• I used workforce estimates for the years 2006 through 2012 from the Occupational Employment Statistics survey of the BLS. Note that this covers most but not all workers; self-employed workers are not included.
• For each occupation, I multiplied the workforce size at each year by the numerical ratings for various work conditions in the O*NET database (where they are called Work Context elements).
• For each year and for each work condition, I summed the products for all occupations and summed the workforce sizes of all occupations.
• For each year and for each work condition, I divided the sum of products by the sum of workforces to get an overall quotient that indicated the level at which that work condition was significant for the nation’s workforce during that year.
• Finally, I graphed the changing levels for each work condition.

Note that each chart below uses a different vertical scale, and that this scale is selected to emphasize the vertical movement of the curve. If I had plotted all the curves on a single chart, the vertical movement of some of the curves would not have been as evident. I'm more interested in the direction of movement than in the absolute value of the movement.

The first two charts show the trends for outdoors and indoors work. (Actually, in O*NET, the specific work conditions I used were "Outdoors, Exposed to Weather" and "Indoors, Environmentally Controlled.") As you might expect, the two curves are almost mirror images, and the general trend is away from outdoors work (although there has been a leveling-off in the most recent years). One factor contributing to that trend is the increasing mechanization of agriculture. Another factor is the decline in construction work that followed the collapse of the housing bubble.

You may wonder why the two preceding curves are not exact mirror images--why indoors work falls off very slightly during the recovery even though outdoors work does not pick up by a comparable amount. I found that the slight dip in indoors was offset by slight increases in work done in interior environments without climate controls (such as the jobs done by some warehouse workers and mechanics) and in enclosed vehicles (such as the jobs done by transportation workers and many sales workers). These mini-trends reflect the job growth that happened following the Great Recession, in which office jobs did not return as fast as some skilled blue-collar jobs.

You can see more evidence of this mini-trend in the following chart, which shows the trends in sedentary jobs.This chart shows a curve almost identical to the curve for indoors work.

The trend in what O*NET calls "Degree of Automation" may surprise you by its downward slope. Isn't automation constantly increasing? Understand that the curve represents not the amount of automation being used but rather the number of workers whose jobs involve a lot of automation. Most employees in manufacturing have worked with automation for a long time, so when automation reaches the point that it eliminates a manufacturing job, that's one less automation-related job. An additional drain on automation-related jobs was occurring in the years 2006 through 2009, when many highly automated jobs were being shifted to plants in foreign countries.

On the other hand, you'll note that the slope has pretty much leveled off in the most recent years. I interpret this to mean that automation is not a threat as much as it is the new normal. It's getting harder and harder to find new ways to automate jobs, and the great bulk of automation-using jobs that can be shipped overseas already have been offshored. Nowadays we're actually seeing an increase in advanced manufacturing jobs.

If automation is the new normal, what does this mean for you as a worker? It means that you need a high level of skills, either for doing the things that automation can't do (making sophisticated judgments or using people skills) or for doing the technological work of creating and programming automated equipment. And this is true no matter whether your work is indoors or outdoors, standing or sitting.

Unhappy, Staying, but Not Stagnating

The consulting firm Accenture drew some attention recently with a survey of 3,400 business professionals in 29 countries that found that fewer than half of the respondents were satisfied with their current jobs. Men and women showed a similar level of discontent: only 42 and 43 percent reported job satisfaction.

The respondents showed a slightly greater gender divide when they identified the reasons for their frustration: being underpaid (cited by 47 percent of women versus 44 percent of men); a lack of opportunity for growth (36 percent versus 32 percent); no opportunity for career advancement (33 percent versus 34 percent); and feeling trapped (29 percent versus 32 percent).

For me, the most interesting finding was that nearly three-quarters (70 percent of women and 69 percent of men) plan to stay with their companies. The headline that many news services used for their coverage of the survey was something like “Unhappy Workers Do Little About It, Says Survey.”

But the research actually found the workers showing quite a bit of initiative. More than half of respondents (59 percent of women and 57 percent of men), say that, this year, in an effort to enhance their careers, they will work on developing their knowledge and/or a skill set to achieve their career objectives.

It’s no surprise that so many are planning to stay with their present employer. The economy is not offering a wealth of job openings in many, perhaps most of the countries surveyed. But another factor that is easily overlooked is the size of the companies that were surveyed: medium to large. Such employers may be expected to offer a modicum of opportunities for internal job movement, even in a slow economy. I expect that a survey of people at small companies would find more workers who are looking elsewhere for green grass.

Dissatisfied workers like the ones uncovered by this survey were some of the people I had in mind when I wrote 2011 Career Plan. My boss at JIST Publishing, Sue Pines, suggested that I model it on Suze Orman’s Action Plan, and I made a point of using a tone that is much more pushy (although I prefer the more positive and classier-sounding “hortative”) than I’ve ever used in my previous writing.

The idea is to goad readers into taking action. I want readers to commit to a specific career goal, whether it is achieving greater security in their present job (“Safeguarding”), seeking a promotion (“Climbing”), moving to another employer, but in the same occupation and industry (“Decamping”), moving to another employer and industry, but in the same occupation (“Revamping”), or switching to a new employer and a new occupation (“Reinventing”). For each goal, I suggest a strategy and specific action steps for pursuing that strategy.

For example, if acquiring better skills is part of the strategy (as it should be for the many Accenture-surveyed workers who want to climb the ladder at their present company), I identify ways to build skills, with tools that readers can use, such as the text of an e-mail that requests a skill-testing work assignment.

One of the premises of 2011 Career Plan is that this is a good year to take career-building action because job opportunities in the United States are finally starting to improve. When I wrote the book, in 2010, there was still a considerable amount of fear that a double-dip recession would reverse the few employment gains that had materialized by then. Since that time, however, my optimism is starting to look warranted. This month we are seeing much more encouraging news about job growth. The unemployment rate finally fell below 9 percent in February. The drop of almost one percent over the previous three-month period was the largest our economy has seen in nearly 28 years.

There are still some worries that rising oil prices will dampen economic growth (one more reason we need to shift to a green-energy economy!), but on balance 2011 looks like the time when dissatisfied workers--or anybody concerned about job security--should be making an action plan and taking steps to put it into effect.

My Advice to PhDs in the Humanities

Last week I was invited by the Career Services office at Rutgers University to be part of a panel speaking to humanities PhD candidates about careers outside of academia. I was at the receiving end of a similar panel discussion many years ago, when my PhD degree was new, so I was happy to pay back the debt I owed. I’ll give you the gist of what I said last week.

Your career will change many times during your working lifetime, and you will find ways to pursue interests you don’t expect to pursue. You also will find the need to develop new abilities and use abilities you don’t realize you have. But your immediate need is to find a job that matches the interests and abilities that you can identify now. You should start by clarifying these interests and abilities.

The panelists I listened to when I was a new PhD referred to a career-development book that helped me but that now is definitely showing its age. I’d rather you buy my books, but I’ll explain to you what specific career-development exercise in that book helped me. Take a sheet of paper and divide it into three columns. In the leftmost column, write the names of some jobs you have held or work-relevant accomplishments. In my case, I had done some college teaching and had written my dissertation. In the middle column, write the major tasks that you did in these jobs. Regarding the dissertation, I mentioned settling on a topic, identifying research resources, taking notes on research, organizing the notes, organizing what I wanted to write, and so forth. In the rightmost column, identify the skills you used to accomplish these tasks. Then notice which skills turn up most often and decide which you enjoyed using most. That should point toward your goals for your next job.

In my case, I realized for the first time that teaching did not satisfy me as much as researching and writing. That became my job target. At this time, my wife was working at Educational Testing Service and was passing on to me the job postings that she considered relevant to my background. I rejected two of these because they didn’t fit this new career goal, but the third was for a job researching and writing about careers for the SIGI computer-based career information system. I’ve been doing variations on this job ever since.

However, I’ve had to develop many new skills along the way. One of these is working with technology. In the early days of the SIGI system, we typed up information and handed the paper to the person who operated the ridiculously complex mainframe text-entry program. After a couple of years, I was given the responsibility of developing a database about college majors and learned a crude text-editing program. But the technical specifications for the database kept changing, and I needed an efficient way to be able to manipulate the text to match. My boss convinced me to take a computer-based course in BASIC to learn the skills to do this. Several years later I took three one-day courses, paid for by ETS, to learn Microsoft Access, a skill I still use almost every workday. I taught myself Excel from a manual.

I had struggled with math in high school and had avoided it in college, so I had assumed I’d never find a workplace use for my interest in technology. But now I was able to find an outlet for this interest and develop the appropriate skills. I’ve also needed to develop my writing skills in ways that I didn’t expect. Writing the narrative screens (as opposed to career information) to develop the SIGI PLUS system, I had to find ways to get my points across and extract input from users in an interactive format with highly limited space. Once ETS decided to get out of the career development business, I had to learn a different style to write books for JIST, my current employer. Actually, writing for JIST demands not one style but several. My recent book 2011 Career Plan called for a pushy style quite different from what I’d used previously, and I needed to use a simplified style for the Quick Green Jobs Guide and other booklets in that series.

As a JIST author, I also have needed to develop skills related to promoting my writing, such as the ability to make a good impression in a television interview.

Our economy does not have many obvious career paths for humanities PhDs, or in some cases the obvious careers don’t have a good outlook. When you look for work, it probably will help you to think not in terms of occupations but in terms of skills you want to use. I was not looking for “career information developer” as a job, and I would have missed the opportunity at ETS if I had confined my job-hunting to the obvious research-and-writing occupations such as journalist. You can increase your options if you avoid stereotyping yourself with a pat occupational label.

Because your career path is not obvious, your career is going to have many ups and downs. When you encounter adversity, don’t lose faith in your long-term prospects. When I was downsized from ETS, my 16-year-old daughter said to me, “Think of this as an adventure, Dad.” And it does help to put your career downturns into the larger context of the narrative arc of your life. Think of your immediate career difficulties as a plot complication and not as a tragic denouement.

The other really important lesson to take away is the importance of networking for finding jobs. Although I found my job at ETS through a job posting, this is no longer the most effective method. I found my job at JIST through networking with a JIST author whom I knew from a professional association. I started as a consultant, preparing the data-intense content for books, and I gradually increased the amount of prose I wrote and the number of hours I worked for JIST.

In my panel presentation at Rutgers, I discussed networking at greater length, but I’m not going to discuss that here because it would duplicate other blog entries.

My story was not greatly different from what the other panelists had to say. Although the specifics of their careers differed from mine, we all pursued new interests and developed new skills over the course of our careers, and we got hired for almost all of our jobs through networking. Humanities PhDs have tremendous potential for rewarding careers if they are willing to do the work (which never ends) of discovering and fulfilling their potential.

Classroom Subjects versus Workplace Skills

Education is supposed to prepare us for our careers, but sometimes there appears to be a disconnect between the two. While in college, we are often forced to take certain required courses although we can’t see how they can ever help us in our careers.

Some of these courses may contribute to noncareer goals in life, such as being good citizens. History and political science courses obviously serve this purpose, and I wish that some of the people who are presently shouting about the Constitution had a better grounding in those subjects. Courses in the arts and literature may contribute to our leisure-time enjoyment of these fields.

But let’s set aside these “area requirements,” as they are often called, and focus on the required courses within college majors. Even some of these seem to contribute little to preparing for the putative career goals of your major.

This is true for math courses in particular. Sometimes it seems as if everyone studies more math in college than they ever will use in their careers. I was struck by this thought as I worked on Panicked Student's Guide to Choosing a College Major: How to Confidently Pick Your Ideal Path, which is due out in April of next year.

However, there are good reasons why so many math courses are required.

The curriculum developers who design the majors want you to be able to understand the people you’ll work with. In many jobs, you do not use a lot of math but work with people who do, so with a background in mathematical concepts you can understand how these other workers produce their results and can tell the difference between meaningful and misleading results. You can challenge the output of those workers and ask them intelligent questions. For example, market research managers need to understand the procedures of the statisticians who design market surveys. Physicians need to understand the procedures of the medical science researchers who make new discoveries about disease processes and pharmaceuticals. Many different kinds of workers need to understand how to interpret statistics about their field, and you can’t really understand the meaning of a statistic unless you know how it was derived, including the sampling method that was used. (I’ve blogged elsewhere about the importance of the sample in studies.)

Another consideration is the hard-to-predict outcomes of your career. While you’re still in college, you may not know that you’re going to specialize in research, which requires quite a lot of math in most industries. Or you may not realize that you’re going to change careers 10 years out and will be able to retrain much faster if you have a good command of math.

Math is not the only subject that college students need more than they may realize. Employers often find that new hires are woefully deficient in verbal skills. A 2007 report (PDF) by the National Endowment for the Arts surveyed several recent studies and found “simple, consistent, and alarming” indications that the reading and writing abilities of workers are not meeting the needs of employers. A 2004 survey by The College Board of 120 corporations in the Business Roundtable found that one-third of workers fall short of employer’s expectations for writing skills. The survey also found that writing is a regular part of the job for two-thirds of all employees. So if you think that your major requires you to take more English courses than are necessary, maybe you’re not aware of what level of writing skill your career goal actually will demand. And, as with math skills, the success of an unanticipated future change in your career may hinge on your verbal skills.

Innovation and Job Opportunity in Manufacturing

One of the central points in my new book, 2011 Career Plan: The Best Moves Now for a Solid Future, is that it’s important to upgrade your skills if you want to compete in the economy of 2011. The book has many specific suggestions for how to do this. But maybe you’re wondering why a high level of skill is so important.

It’s because of the current nature of our economy. The days are long past when an American kid fresh off the farm would be put in front of a machine that stamps out auto parts (or something comparable), could learn how to use that machine in a few minutes or hours, and would take home a comfortable paycheck at the end of the week. Those hayseeds-turned-factory-workers are now working in China and other low-wage countries.

But does that mean manufacturing in America is dead? Not at all. Manufacturing was actually one of the first industries to bounce back from the depths of the recession. It has seen its growth slowing in recent months, but no more so than almost all other industries. This week, Ford Motor Company reported that it just had its most profitable quarter ever, netting $1.69 billion and paying down it debt faster than planned.

Innovation is what has kept American manufacturing successful and will allow manufacturing to continue to provide jobs. It’s particularly striking to see how manufacturing compares to other industries in a study (PDF) by the National Science Foundation that looks at innovative products and processes. NSF surveyed 1.5 million for-profit companies and asked them about their practices for the years 2006–08.

The study found that “22% of the manufacturing companies introduced product innovations (one or more new or significantly improved good or service) and about 22% introduced process innovations (one or more new or significantly improved method for manufacturing or production; logistics, delivery, or distribution; support activities).” Compare this to the mere 8% that is reported for both kinds of innovation in the nomanufacturing industries.

I’m particularly interested to note that the 22% figure applies to both kinds of innovation. It indicates that the high level of innovation is motivated by more than just the need to compete with low-wage overseas workers. If wage competition were the only issue, American manufacturers would simply be upgrading their processes--for example, using more robots or economies of scale. But American manufacturers are being equally innovative in the products they offer. New products open new markets and draw new purchases from existing markets.

What does this mean for job opportunities? If all the innovation were happening only in manufacturing processes, most of the resulting jobs would be for engineers and engineering technicians. But new product development (NPD) is a multidisciplinary field that also involves marketing managers, technical writers, artists, commercial designers, logistics specialists, cost estimators, and perhaps even anthropologists. (Not long ago I did a presentation for an NPD team, and the most effective presenter that day was an anthropologist.) NPD work is highly collaborative, so it requires excellent people skills and communication skills. It also requires a high level of creativity.

So America’s most innovative industry sector is going to need a wide variety of highly skilled workers. This drives home the most important point in 2011 Career Plan, that today’s economy requires you to hone your skills.

Career Tips to Increase Your Visibility

In one of my recent books, 2011 Career Plan: The Best Moves Now for a Solid Future, I make the point that one way to improve your job security is to make yourself more visible. My blog this week enlarges on this topic.

The basic point is that your employer will value only the employees they are aware of; likewise, prospective employers will be much more likely to hire job applicants who are familiar to them. You may be doing superlative work and you may have a dynamite performance appraisal or resume for showing off your accomplishments, but employers don’t like to have to read these documents. You need to find other ways to make your employer (or prospective employer) aware, on an ongoing basis, of your outstanding skills and achievements.

In the book, I suggest that the reader “start an in-house Web page, newsletter, or bulletin board showcasing the project you’re working on and soliciting suggestions from people outside the project. This will encourage them to buy into the project and make your efforts look not purely self-promotional.”

Blogging is another platform, and you can use it to build a national reputation. Focus your blog on some niche in your industry that you are well-informed about. If you can’t think of some such topic or you don’t have time to maintain a blog, consider being a frequent commenter on an existing blog. Anyone who follows a blog over time starts to recognize and appreciate the particular expertise of the people who are frequent commenters. That could be you.

Much of the impact of blogs is achieved passively; that is, blog readers come to your blog, and that’s how they become aware of you. However, you can use your blog for making active connections: Include interviews. Record a telephone interview of someone who is of interest to your readership (making it clear to the subject that you are recording the conversation), transcribe the interview, and post it on your blog. With a somewhat higher level of tech savvy, you may be able to post the interview as a podcast. Each time you do an interview and make it available, you will be connecting not only with your readers but also with the person being interviewed. This increases your visibility two ways.

Twitter is often referred to as “micro-blogging.” You can use it like a blog to make yourself a highly visible hub of information, and Twitter has the advantage of being very brief, so it can reach readers who are carrying smart phones or who simply don’t like to read long articles.

Still another way to make yourself a wellspring of information--and therefore more visible in your industry--is to publish a business directory. (I learned this idea from my cousin, Arlene Hershman, former editor of Dun's Business Month.) Assemble and publish a directory of facts about businesses and/or people in your industry. Obviously, it helps to focus on some specialized industry niche or to include some facts that are not available elsewhere (or not available in a single place). Doing the research for this directory provides an excellent pretext for you to contact everyone who matters in your industry (visibility-enhancer #1).

Being the conduit of this information is visibility-enhancer #2. Although you can get exposure by posting the directory on the Web, you may consider using teasing as a strategy: Post only a sample of your contents and make would-be readers pay a nominal subscription fee or at least register with you to get the full directory. By requiring your information-consumers to do this, you make them (a) pay additional attention to who you are, (b) place a higher value on your content, and (c) identify themselves to you, so you have a valuable list of subscribers. You need to assure your subscribers that you will not sell this list, but you may want to use the list yourself. It can expand the base of people or companies you can call for research purposes. Better yet, it can expand your network of contacts who will be helpful for future (or present) job-hunting.

The Recession Has Ended?

By now you’ve probably heard the news that the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009. That’s the verdict of the economists on the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research. This means we have already been in a recovery for 15 months. Why doesn’t it feel like that? And what does this mean for your job prospects?

Many of the indicators of recovery that the economists examined show that this recovery is weak. For example, the gross domestic product in the second quarter of this year advanced only 1.6 percent, a slowdown from the 3.7 percent of the first quarter. In July, existing home sales were at their lowest level in a decade.

But not all indicators show weaknesses. To me, the most startling figure is that corporate profits last quarter ($1639.3 billion) were only 1 percent lower than they were at their pre-recession peak ($1655.1 billion). They have risen steadily for the past six quarters. In other words, companies are sitting on a mountain of cash.

That’s why it’s all the more startling that job creation has been so dismal. In fact, we have actually lost more jobs than we have gained since the recovery began.

You may be wondering how corporations can be making such big profits while economic growth is tepid and so many people aren’t working. The reason is productivity gains. American workers who are still employed keep on producing more output relative to what they’re paid. It’s important to understand why this is happening. Some of it is because the workers are putting in longer hours. Some of it is because businesses have invested in machinery and computers that increase workers’ output. And much of it is because we have a leaner, meaner workforce. So many low-skill workers have been laid off. The work that they used to do has either been shipped overseas or is being done by machinery and computers operated by high-skill workers.

Here’s an indication of how lean and mean our workforce has become: Workers over 25 who have a bachelor’s degree or higher had an unemployment rate of 4.6 percent in August, while those with only a high school diploma had a rate of 10.3 percent. Compare that gap of 5.7 percent to the gap of only 2.6 percent when the recession began. Figures for the duration of unemployment tell a similar story. In August, the median duration of unemployment for the college grads was 18.4 weeks, compared to 27.5 weeks for the high school grads. Three years ago, there was only about one unemployed day of difference between the two groups.

There’s little reason to think that this lean, mean workforce will be able to get fat and lazy anytime soon. A report this week from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco says that "capital utilization" (i.e., investment in machinery and computers) has been one of the main drivers of recent productivity growth but notes that the level of investment has been below historical averages. The report concludes that businesses will be able to squeeze still more productivity out of the employed workforce through increased capital utilization rather than through increased hiring.

What is the implication for your job prospects? To be part of the leaner workforce, you need to be meaner. By “meaner,” I don’t mean more ruthless (although you do need to be aggressive in your job-hunting), but rather that you need to be one of the high-skill workers. You need to aim for the highest-skill work that you’re capable of and--better yet--you should plan to upgrade your skills. If you’re still in school, plan to get a higher-level degree than you might have had in mind originally. If you’re out of school, think about formal or informal training to upgrade your skills. And be sure to do more than thinking and planning. Commit to some specific action.

This is the central theme of my latest book, 2011 Career Plan: The Best Moves Now for a Solid Future, and it’s why I take a rather pushy tone in that book. It’s also why so many of my recent blogs have been about the theme of improving your skills. Your job survival in this economy depends on taking action to be one of the highly skilled workers.

Improving Your Skills, Part 3

In two previous blog postings, I wrote about getting ahead in your career through informal learning. This kind of learning is a frequent method for advancing a career, and so I cover it in some detail in my new book, 2011 Career Plan. But, in the same book, I also discuss formal coursework. This does not always have to mean earning a college or graduate degree. It can consist of a single course.

About 15 years ago, I was fortunate to get my employer to pay for me to be trained in Microsoft Access. I had three days of training in the basics and, later, two days covering intermediate topics. What I learned in these two courses I now use on the job virtually every day.

Here are some of the features of a formal class or program that differentiate it from informal learning:

• The learning goals are clearly spelled out.
• The instructor (whether it’s a human, a computer program, or a booklet) has a reputation for knowing the subject and being able to teach it.
• There’s some way to measure how much you learn.
• When you’re finished, you get some kind of recognition for what you’ve learned—for example, a piece of paper or a mention on your performance appraisal.

The last bulleted item is what makes this form of learning especially valuable to you.

However, some courses are a better choice for your career than others. Following is a checklist that I developed for the 2011 Career Plan to help you assemble the facts about a course or workshop and decide whether or not it’s a good choice.

Facts to Know Before Signing Up for a Course or Workshop

__ The expected learning outcomes of the course are clear to me.

__ The learning outcomes match the skill needs of a current or potential employer.
__ The learning outcomes contribute to a skill I want to develop.
__ The learning outcomes do not repeat what I already know.
__ The course has no prerequisites I can’t meet.
__ I have evidence that the course provider can teach me successfully. (Examples: reputation of provider; testimonial of a course completer; demonstrated skill of a course completer; recommendation by my employer.)
__ I will learn more or better than I could by teaching myself instead.
__ I will be able to show evidence of how the course has improved my skills. (Examples: certificate of completion; documentation of a completed project.)
__ The course is offered at a time convenient for me.
__ The course is offered at a place convenient for me.
__ I can afford the cost of the course (perhaps by getting my employer to pay).

Note that you don’t have to check off every statement, but the more you agree with, the better. If several of the statements are not checked, maybe this course is not a good move for your career.

Improving Your Skills, Part 1

This blog is a departure from my usual focus on career information. It’s about career advancement. Many people who want to get ahead in their careers think their only option is to get an additional college degree, certification, or other formal credential. In my book 2011 Career Plan: The Best Moves Now for a Solid Future, due out in September, I explain some other strategies for getting ahead.

You advance in your career by improving your skills. Degree programs and other formal courses are not the only way to do this.

Let’s face it, nobody knows exactly what to do on the very first day at the worksite. Every new worker needs at least a little informal on-the-job training from experienced workers. Why should this end once you’ve learned the job? When you see co-workers using a skill that you don’t have, ask them to show you how. Most co-workers will be happy to teach you, if it doesn’t take up too much of their time.

Another way to learn informally is through independent study. In fact, this may be your only option if the skill is so arcane that local classes are not available. A few years back, I was involved in a project for a university in Saudi Arabia and realized it would be useful for me to learn some Arabic. This was before 9/11, and it would have been difficult for me to find an academic course in the language, so I undertook a self-instruction program using a textbook and homemade flash cards.

I managed to teach myself a smattering of Arabic, but the program eventually ran aground because I lacked a study partner. Study partners help reinforce each other’s learning and keep the learning program on track. Without a study partner, you’re more likely to give up quickly.

In 2011 Career Plan I include a checklist of characteristics that are good to have in a study partner:

Characteristics of a Good Study Partner

__ This person is interested in learning the same skill that I want to learn.

__ For the skill that I want to learn, this person is now at roughly the same level.

__ For the skill that I want to learn, this person has roughly the same aptitude for learning.

__ This person is as committed as I am to keeping the study program going and staying on task.

__ This person and I can agree on what book (or other learning resource) to use in our program of study.

__ This person and I can get along reasonably well.

__ This person’s schedule and mine allow time to meet regularly for study sessions.

__ This person is able to find time to do the homework required between meetings.

When you’re filling out this checklist, it helps if you know which statements you feel positive about. However, you may be unsure about some statements. For example, you may not know how committed the study partner is until you have started studying together. If you feel neutral about some statements, you may choose to give the person the benefit of the doubt, start studying with this person, and eventually decide whether the arrangement is working out.

On the other hand, if you already feel negative about several statements, maybe you should consider finding someone else as a study partner