A great career choice today may not be the best choice a few years from now.
There are hundreds of factors that affect your employability, many of which are linked to the job market. By keeping an eye on the trends in the marketplace, you can be ready to respond as factors are changing, and proactively manage your career for long term success.
Here are three types of trends to keep an eye on, to keep you moving forward around obstacles and over speed bumps.
Employment Trends
The Occupational Outlook Handbook is compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and is comprised of hundreds of profiles of careers including job outlook, earnings, and required training. The OOH is searchable by keywords and contains internal links to related occupations that you may not have considered. Because the OOH is a broad resource, the data may not be as granular as you’ll need–a search for “pharmaceutical sales” directs you to “Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing.” But it’s an indispensable first step for your career research.
The OOH also maintains a list of resources for job-related information at the state level, which you can find here.
Beyond evaluating if a particular career path is a good fit for your goals, the biggest takeaway here is the Projections Data section, which shows projected job growth through 2018. Different fields will have different prospects, but certainly if your field is projecting negative job growth (fields such as Motor Vehicle and Parts Manufacturing, Switchboard Operators, Chemical Engineering) moving to a field that’s projecting strong growth (Civil Engineering, Network and Database Administrators, Accountants and Auditors) can give you a long-term advantage.
Recruiting Trends
If all you’re doing to reach potential employers is apply online, you’re missing some great opportunities. Recruiters are increasingly using blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other online avenues to connect with candidates.
Why is this important?
Your ability to transition into a new field is directly related to your ability to connect effectively with the decision maker that will hire you. So, if you want to be visible, you need to go where you can be seen.
Following trends in recruitment can also help you see what the challenges are that recruiters face–so that you can solve them. Won’t that make you the attractive candidate?
Some articles to check out:
eFinancial Careers Recruiting Trends for 2010
And a great blog to follow: Recruiting Trends
Market Trends
Where do these employment trends come from? They’re in some way linked to greater market trends.
Green jobs. Jobs in social media. Telecommuting. These are three of the trends that pop up in the employment space–and all are based on bigger trends in society, like increased focus on environmental issues and advancements in technology that affect the way we communicate.
For the birds-eye view of the factors that will affect your employment picture, it’s helpful to look at the big picture.
There are bunches of prolific, respected major publications–Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Advertising Age, BusinessWeek–all of which will give a broad view of business issues that can affect the employment space. Here’s a sample article from the Wall Street Journal: WSJ: Landing a Job of the Future Takes a Two-Track Mind.
A fun alternative is trendwatching.com. Trendwatching has a heavy focus on marketing-related trends — great for marketing types, and for anyone whose job is related to success in the marketplace. You know, everyone. Trendwatching provides a fresh perspective on marketing, as well as in-depth descriptions of their observations on the issue.
A great tool for trend watching – Google Alerts
So how do you keep track of all of this information? Automation is the key. To successfully add observation to your daily routine, it has to be as easy as possible. Set up a Google Alert for any term that pertains to your job search–”recruiting trends 2010″ or “accounting job outlook” or any other keyword string that works for you. Then, watch valuable info drop itself into your inbox.
How do you keep an eye on the market? Let us know in the comments!
photo credit jeremy.wilburn via flickr
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- Change is coming: Are you ready?
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