NPR: Finding A Job Is Hard For Even The Most Educated

While this story is over a year old, it still resonates for some people who have advanced degrees and are unable to seek full-time employment in their field. The Great Recession has even affected the most educated, putting them in a disadvantage with salary potential for a decade.

"A lot of people who are qualified for more higher level jobs are settling for more entry positions, and so that's a roadblock for new graduates," Coward says.

7 Mistakes First Time Job Seekers Make

Whether you're a college or graduate student, you cannot wait to accomplish your first job out of school. Nevertheless, it is important to avoid these seven common mistakes on the job search. Too often, they can derail your chances before the interview process has even begun.

Some first time job seekers may be making mistakes that they are not even aware of. If you have found yourself committing any of the below offenses, stop, and change course immediately.

1. Unprofessional initial contact
2. Missing the interview without calling to cancel
3. Dressing unprofessionally
4. Bringing friends or family to an interview
5. Being unprepared for the interview
6. No thank you letter
7. Using social media in a negative way

If you avoid making these mistakes, you will be well on your way to landing that first job.

CHE: An Open Letter to Graduate Students

Although this advice is over a year old, I find it highly relevant to new graduate students entering school this fall. These are very useful tips!

Today, I would like to address a new group: those students just beginning graduate school, specifically those full-time students enrolled in a PhD program.

As is the case with much of what we do at ProfHacker, the purpose of this post is to make explicit the unwritten rules, norms, and quirks of academia. Not that people will be intentionally keeping information from you; rather, it’s very easy to forget what it was like to be in your position and that what we take as self-evident is actually the product of specific departmental-, institutional-, or field-specific contexts. This letter cannot be a complete manual to finishing your degree in exactly four years (if it was, we wouldn’t be giving it away, that’s for sure!). Rather, it’s a distillation of what we, our colleagues on Twitter, and the commenters here at ProfHacker—a gracious lot, all—learned in our own graduate school experience.