Volume CXXXIII, Number 18 March 1, 2002 f

Class of '02 faces uncertain job market
ALISON L. McCONNELL
ORIENT STAFF

The job market faced by the Class of 2002 may be slightly different from what was anticipated before September 11 and the recession, according to Career Planning Center director Anne Shields.

Recruiting efforts and hiring levels have changed, and student interests appear to be shifting as well. "Our students this year, and students on other campuses like ours, appear to be taking a significant shift toward teaching, non-profit, public interest, and government," Shields said.

"We are seeing a greater interest in not only private school teaching but alternative certification for public school teaching. Bowdoin has historically produced a lot of people who teach in their first few years out of school, but it seems to be growing," she added. "We have a significant number looking at Americore (Americorps) and Teach For America."

According to Shields, the Career Planning Center has seen an "exponential leap" in government sector interest this year as well. "We were starting to see the shift back to public service work anyway, but I think September 11 may have given that a nudge," she said.

"Part of that is who we're bringing in as candidates from high schools-due to curricular changes in schools…I think it's a natural pendulum shift that got accentuated."

Roughly a third of government employees will reach retirement age by 2005, a figure that is receiving some press attention and driving government recruitment.

Shields indicated that, while some trends are easily observable, it is difficult to isolate their causes. "There's a lot of things happening concurrently, and it's hard to know how much of it clearly points to the economy, for example."

Additionally, data on a national scale may provide a skewed view of the job market for graduating seniors. "They're accurate for what they measure, but they're not easily [transferable] to Bowdoin," Shields said. "Unfortunately, there are no national numbers that measure for liberal arts colleges."

While it doesn't appear that the graduate school/employment mix will be vastly different this year, there may be some change. "I haven't seen a marked increase in Class of 2002 students saying 'I want to go to school next year,'" Shields said. "Most people come in and say, "I figure I'll be going to grad school or professional school at some point, in a few years."
However, a slightly lower number of students are opting for further education immediately after graduation, a shift that a lot of schools are seeing. "For a school like ours, professional education was a track that many people chose to go in, and now they're delaying," Shields said.

If students do wish to attend graduate school right after Bowdoin, they may encounter closed doors. "Business schools have, for a long time, been saying 'Go and live for a while and then come see us,'" she said. "It started off as 'Go live for a year or two,' and now the typical starting age at the top business schools is 27 or 28. The better law and med schools have begun to move in that direction as well."

Another area where Career Planning is seeing changes is in campus visits from companies. "Toward the end of the summer and then after September 11, people started to say 'We have no idea what our hiring needs are going to be, the profits were not what we expected for this quarter, and we're not hiring,'" Shields said. "In April and May, a lot of the large organizations, particularly the consulting firms, were still stalling in appointing people to positions."

The picture has improved since the initial skittishness of the fall, however. "Since the start of this semester, some of these firms have called us and said, 'OK, we're feeling a little more confident, let's talk about either coming to campus or doing some resume referrals,' etc.," said Shields.

The Career Planning Center's capability to track student career interests has increased since the introduction of the EBear database system last year. "Before this, our office didn't have a sort of registration process; we didn't know who was interested in what," Shields said.

The system allows career-planning counselors to see what trends do and do not exist. "[For instance,] there is the impression that more students are interested in finance and Wall Street than actually are, and that's probably true at most institutions of our type," Shields said. "We found last year that students were expressing much broader interests."

Obviously, differences exist between liberal arts degrees and the more specialized degrees students earn from larger universities. Shields indicated that these differences have important implications in today's careers.

"One of the challenges that Bowdoin students will face in this market is that employers are going to want immediately usable technical skills," she said. "We're starting to tell students that they're going to have to be responsible themselves for getting these skills. "One of the ways that students are starting to get these skills is through the service learning classes on campus," she said. "They're very similar to internships with their hands-on approach."

Shields said that, in her opinion, liberal arts majors who take some extra steps might even be at an advantage over others in the job market. "Liberal arts majors tend to progress more rapidly once they've decided what it is they want to do, because it's the general skills that move people into leadership and management positions," she said.

"If you have a path that you might want to follow, get the skills that will allow you to have doors propped open for you later on."