Tags: economy, jobs, careers, employment

Categories: The Economy

MAYNARD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Employers’ entry-level hiring plans are conservative compared to prior years according to MonsterTRAK’s annual nationwide survey of college students, graduates and employers. However, findings indicate that 54 percent of companies surveyed still plan to hire 2009 college graduates.

MonsterTRAK is the channel of Monster.com®, the leading global online career and recruitment resource and flagship brand of Monster Worldwide, Inc. (NYSE: MWW), that connects college students and recent graduates with employers looking for qualified entry-level and internship candidates.

Employers Still Hiring

While 71 percent of employers reported a decrease in the total number of planned hires for 2009, those still planning to hire college graduates fell only five percentage points from 2008 (from 59 percent to 54 percent). However, that five point drop is substantially smaller than the 17 percent drop reported by employers last year with respect to graduate hiring plans (from 76 percent in 2007 to 59 percent in 2008).

“While the percentage of employers planning to hire college graduates in this year’s MonsterTRAK Entry-Level Job Outlook has declined somewhat compared to last year, it is encouraging that over half still plan to hire 2009 graduates,” said Jesse Harriott, senior vice president and chief knowledge officer at Monster. “However, because there is more competition for entry-level jobs compared to years prior, graduates should do everything they can to stand out among other job applicants in this challenging labor market environment."

Employers reported that although growth opportunities and job fulfillment/interesting work remain important to graduates, they are, in the current environment, re-emphasizing salary, job title, and benefits/time off. In addition, relevant work experience gained 9 percentage points from last year, while previous work experience grew by 8 percent, indicating that employers are looking for candidates who can hit the ground running. Volunteer work also gained ground as an attractive candidacy attribute, with 7 percent more of the employers surveyed citing it as valuable experience.

(Read the entire release.)

Tags: economy, economic crisis, employment, job search, hiring

Categories: The Economy

(New York, April 6, 2009) The Conference Board Employment Trends Index (ETI)™ fell again in March. The index now stands at 90.1, decreasing 2.3 percent from the February revised figure of 92.2, and down 22.1 percent from a year ago.

“While we see a continued sharp fall in the ETI, the decline was not as strong as in the previous four months, suggesting that the most intense stage of job losses may be behind us,” said Gad Levanon, Senior Economist at The Conference Board. “However, the drops in each of the eight components of the ETI in March signal that many more jobs will disappear over the next several months.”

The 20-month-long decline in the Employment Trends Index™ is seen in all eight of its components, most notably over the past six months in temporary-help hires and part-time workers for economic reasons.

The Employment Trends Index™ aggregates eight labor-market indicators, each of which has proven accurate in its own area. Aggregating individual indicators into a composite index filters out so-called “noise” to show underlying trends more clearly.

The eight labor-market indicators aggregated into the Employment Trends Index™ include:

Percentage of respondents who say they find “Jobs Hard to Get” (The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey)

Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance (U.S. Department of Labor)

Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now (© National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation)

Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Part-Time Workers for Economic Reasons (BLS)

Job Openings (BLS)

Industrial Production (Federal Reserve Board)

Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis)

The Conference Board publishes the Employment Trends Index™ monthly, at 10 a.m. ET on the Monday that follows each Friday release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment situation report. The technical notes to this series are available on The Conference Board website: www.conference-board.org/economics/employment.cfm.

Tags: economy, economic crisis, employment, jobs

Categories: The Economy

Mountain View, Calif. (PRWEB) March 31, 2009 -- Elance, the leading site for online work, today released its April edition of the ''Elance Online Work Index,'' ranking the top skills businesses are seeking on the Web.

Based on data from more than 100,000 jobs posted on Elance over recent months, the Elance Online Work Index reveals that IT and marketing skills continue to be in high demand with businesses in search of specific expertise in open source technologies, computer programming, design, online marketing, social networking and writing. Top skills in demand include PHP, MySQL, HTML Graphic Design, Writing, AJAX, Adobe Illustrator, WordPress, Photoshop, Flash and Blogs. New data also show surging demand for social media skills and skills that deliver world-class web and application user experiences.

Notable hiring trends surfacing in April's Elance Online Work Index include:

• Open Source on the Rise: The overall trend of businesses migrating to open source technology solutions is stronger than ever with PHP (#1) programming now topping the Index followed closely by MySQL (#2). Demand grows for a variety of other open source skills including Joomla (#18), Drupal (#48 - up 10 spots), osCommerce (#49 - up 20 spots), Ruby on Rails (#73 - up 27 spots), and Linux (#74 - up 13 spots).

• User Experience Paramount: With more pressure than ever for companies to compete based on a world-class user experience, hiring trends show accelerating interest in technologies that deliver and enable great customer experiences, such as HTML (#3 - up 3 spots), Flash (#10 - up 2 spots), AJAX (#12 - up 14 spots), JAVA (#16 - up 13 spots), and - the biggest mover on the list - Actionscript (#56 - up 43 spots).

• Social Media Rising: Social media continues to gain mainstream traction with companies that want to connect with customers, drive traffic, and become part of the conversation with customers, partners and prospects. Demand for professionals skilled in developing for Facebook, Twitter and blogging applications is growing. WordPress (#15) and Blogs (#19) crack the top 20, while Social Networking (#38) moves up 6 spots, Facebook (#61) is up 10 spots and Twitter (#93) makes its debut on the Index.

Tags: it, jobs, employment, economy, it skills, hiring

Categories: News

PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--If you are in a job search right now, or are about to start one, you don’t need anyone to tell you that jobs are tough to come by. More people are competing for fewer jobs, making it much more challenging to get noticed. Creating an effective personal “brand” is critical to making sure that you stand out from the crowd in the ways that employers are looking for today, says MRINetwork®, one of the world’s largest search and recruitment organizations.

“It’s a big mistake to rely on your traditional resume as your primary marketing tool,” says Tony McKinnon, president of MRINetwork. “Most people drag out some version of their resume that they’ve been using for years, update it with their current information, and get a very discouraging ROI for their efforts.”

McKinnon says to stand out you have to create alignment between the specific needs of the employer and the value that you bring to the market, and find new ways to communicate that value. His advice on how to do that means doing some hard work before that resume leaves your hands:

Dive in deep by learning as much as you can about the needs of the companies you want to work for. Understand:

• Their culture.
• Their strengths and weaknesses, including skills and competencies they may be lacking.
• Challenges that are holding them back from achieving their sales goals.
• Initiatives they may have tabled for the present, but will come back to when conditions improve.
• Future initiatives – and the talents they will need to achieve them.

(Read the original release at BusinessWire.)

Tags: economy, economic crisis, employment, job search

Categories: The Economy

(CNET News, Mar 31, 2009) Microsoft likes to tout the cost savings that derive from paying Windows-skilled employees less money.

That's great, if you're an employer, but if you're an engineer who needs to feed her family, the money is in Linux and Mac OS X skills, as highlighted in a recent post on the site of the Free and Open Source Software Learning Centre

Of course, once you look past the operating-system data, it's clear that open-source skills do, on average, command less of a premium, perhaps because they're in more abundant supply. Because students are more likely to have JBoss or MySQL experience upon graduation than Oracle or WebSphere experience, for example, there is greater supply to appease demand and, hence, reduce salaries, on average.

(Read the entire article.)

Tags: it, jobs, employment, it skills

Categories: News

(Carolyn Duffy Marsan, Network World) Amid the worst job market in 25 years, IT is holding steady. Most CIOs are maintaining their current staffing levels; while a few are hiring specialists who have in-demand IT skills.

Overall, companies are so dependent on IT that they can't lay off the people who keep their data center operations humming, and they're loath to let go of the developers who are working on next-generation Internet applications.

"IT remains a real safe and interesting and high-paying place to be," says David Foote, CEO of Foote Partners, which conducts quarterly assessments of IT pay trends in the United States. "The world has embraced IT…because it enables companies to deliver cheaper and better products. I'm pretty bullish on IT."

(Read the entire article.)

Tags: it, jobs, employment, economy, it skills

Categories: The Economy

From the Conference Board:

"The Conference Board Employment Trends Index (ETI)™ fell sharply in February. The index now stands at 91.0, decreasing 3.2 percent from the January revised figure of 94.0, and down 21.7 percent from a year ago.

'Over the past year, the Employment Trends Index has declined faster than at any other time in its 35-year history, with the most severe decreases taking place since the Fall,' said Gad Levanon, Senior Economist at The Conference Board. 'As job losses persist, the drop in overall earnings makes a rebound in consumer spending unlikely for the next few months. The decline in employment will only moderate once companies anticipate some revival in domestic and global economic activity.'

The 19-month-long decline in the Employment Trends Index™ is seen in all eight of its components, most notably over the past six months in temporary-help hires and part-time workers for economic reasons.  

The Employment Trends Index™ aggregates eight labor-market indicators, each of which has proven accurate in its own area. Aggregating individual indicators into a composite index filters out so-called 'noise' to show underlying trends more clearly.

The eight labor-market indicators aggregated into the Employment Trends Index™ include:

Percentage of respondents who say they find 'Jobs Hard to Get' (The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey)

Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance (U.S. Department of Labor)

Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now (© National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation)

Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Part-time Workers for Economic Reasons (BLS)

Job Openings (BLS)

Industrial Production (Federal Reserve Board)

Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis)

Tags: economy, economic crisis, employment

Categories: The Economy

Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service.

Thirty-eight percent of U.S. companies are planning to trim IT staff this year, but certain skills remain hot, according to a new study by the IT staffing company Veritude.

The poll, taken in the fourth quarter of 2008, shows that companies' hiring plans plunged dramatically in recent months. In a study Veritude conducted during the second quarter of last year, just 4 percent of respondents planned to make cuts.

In addition, the new survey found that only 38 percent of companies intend to add staff, down from 52 percent in the previous study.

One silver lining is that the anticipated cuts are not especially deep; 22 percent of those who plan to reduce staff said they would eliminate between 1 percent and 5 percent, Veritude said.

But workers with business-intelligence skills and expertise in C, C++ and C# programming should fare especially well in the weakened job market, according to the study.

Also, 17 percent of companies are now looking for Mac developers, more than tripling the previous survey's finding of 5 percent.

But demand for enterprise architects has declined significantly, indicating that companies are both reluctant to shoulder the larger salaries such individuals receive, and also scaling back on long-term project planning.

Meanwhile, the percentage of respondents that intend to hire workers on a "temp-to-perm" basis shot up to 56 percent from 27 percent in the previous study, which suggests that companies planning to add jobs are doing so tentatively.

Story copyright 2009 IDG News Service Inc.

Tags: it, jobs, employment, research, economy, it skills

Categories: News | The Economy