Newsday: Increasing Jobs for Recent Graduates?

A Graduation Gift for College Seniors: Jobs

This weeks Bloolmberg Businessweek features an article that makes the job market for recent grads look better, at least in some industries. I am hoping, perhaps somewhat optimistically, that this will transcend into the legal market.

The article highlighted a recent graduate in electrical engineering, who has been trying tried to find an internship during the recession. He delayed graduation, took pre-med classes, and ultimately applied to law school. As those of us recent law school graduates know, the tough economy brought a shocking number of people to law schools. In most parts of the country, the market cannot sustain the number of graduates, and many law school graduates from last year remain jobless. Ultimately, the young man in the article was able to find a job in the technology sector.

The article says that 2011 graduates face the best job market for new grads since 2008. However, the article describes that the growth is concentrated in finance, energy, and technology. I will be curious to see if this growth will affect the legal job market, arguably one of the sectors with the highest unemployment rate for recent graduates. I also heard last week on NPR that there are an increase in job listings from employers. I believe this was an Oregon specific statistic. However despite this increase, the unemployment rate has not decreased. This makes me think that people who are already employed are making lateral or horizontal changes, while people without jobs, remain unemployed.

This article was also interesting in that it listed some specific companies that are hiring. Of note, Zynga and Facebook will be hiring about 130 college grads, 35% more than last year. I find that college grads that are flexible in where they live after graduation have a quicker success rate in finding a job. It is more difficult when one is limited to a specific geographic area. Based on this article, I will be interested to see how the job market shapes in the next year or so for recent graduates.

Tuesday Newsday

Bloomberg Businessweek recently featured an article entitled, "Keeping Women On the Job in India." The article discussed the increasing programs that Multinational Companies are offering to women employees in India. For example, companies such as Google, Ernst &Young, Boehringer Inelheim, Wipro and Infosys are offering on site nurseries, flexible schedules, taxis so women can leave work quickly to attend to personal matters, on-site day camps when school is out, sabbaticals, extended maternity leave and enhanced training. I thought this was an especially interesting progression given that India, as the article reports, has one of the lowest rates of female participation in the labor force compared to other BRIC countries.

Ernst & Young made an exceptionally good point in the article. The company pointed out that they have spent a lot of money training these employees prior to their having children. The company has invested resources, so it is in the company's best interest to provide employees incentives to stay. I completely agree. The costs associated with employee turnover with regard to training are exponential. If more employers calculated the true costs associated with employee turnover versus offering more accommodating work environments that would encourage employee retention, I firmly believe that employers would choose providing various accommodations. Exceptional employees are hard to come by, and when a company finds one, it is important to do what they can to retain that employee even if it involves making changes to the work environment. Additionally, providing a work environment that employees enjoy, generally breeds more efficient work practices.