College students today are faced with a new reality.
We are entering a job market consisting of many careers that didn’t even exist when we were born.
Because of this, school counselors are being forced to constantly update their knowledge about the job market.
Marsha Sherman, a career counselor in the Office of Career Services at the University of Tampa, said that, unfortunately, “A lot of students don’t know what they want to do.
There may be a job out there that they would really like and be good at; they just don’t know that it exists.”
Sherman went on to say that many students have shown interest in social media careers.
Employees in this field would use interfaces such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs to promote products and organizations.
A U.S. & World News report showed the rapid growth of the social media career field, stating that in 2010 there were three times as many job positions posted with “social media” in the title than in 2009.
Daniella Fusari, a senior at UT, began using Twitter to promote the Office of Career Services in 2009 when she was working as their marketing intern.
She believes the social media is more efficient. “[It] helps us get information to the students in a faster….”
Once a hobby, blogging has turned into a profitable career. Careerbuilder.com cites bloggers making around $60,000 a year by researching and writing blog posts to promote an objective or brand and engage an online community.
Green technologies have been growing rapidly over the past decades and new careers and specialized positions are popping up in all forms, some of them very surprising.
According to Careerbuilder.com, one of the fastest growing careers that didn’t exist ten years ago is the green funeral director.
Hitching onto the earth-friendly practices that have become prominent in many markets, green funeral directors incorporate environmentally friendly practices in funeral services to meet the needs of families while doing their best to reduce the carbon footprint.
Another hot career in the green technologies industry is harnessing wind energy.
The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) reported that the wind industry grew by 45 percent in 2007 as more civil engineers specialized to become wind farms engineers.
The AWEA assesses the average wind farmer engineer’s salary to be around $80,000. Christine Merry, a UT senior, plans on getting her masters in sustainability at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability.
She says that in management and finance classes, the topics of global warming and how businesses affect the environment come up often.
“I found it interesting that there are still people that don’t believe in global warming,” she said.
Merry hopes to work with advising corporations in ways to make their companies more sustainable, a job that was virtually nonexistent ten years ago.
Her goal is to eventually open her own company throughout the Caribbean that provides sustainable energy options.
At the moment, she is considering working in harnessing in wind, wave and solar energy.
When asked about her teachers’ knowledge on creating sustainable businesses, Merry said, “In business text books there is now stuff on sustainability, but teachers still have so much to learn and teach because it is such a new field.”
The same goes for many of the careers that, up until recently, did not exist.
Textbooks can only begin to provide information on these new subjects; teachers must constantly be re-educating themselves to prepare students for the quickly changing job market.
“Bigger companies are starting to realize the importance of networking and technology that younger people are more experienced in,” said Sherman.
“When it comes to hiring a person for a position, are they going to consider someone older that is experienced in dated processes or someone young that is educated in new technologies?”
College students now find themselves facing a job market that is constantly changing as jobs become obsolete and new ones are created. Students are left with the responsibility of finding a complete education in these new fields.
However, as Sherman said, “It’s exciting when you find the career you want to go into,” especially if it’s one that you didn’t even know existed. Channing Hailey can be reached at channing.hailey@spartans.ut.edu.