Would you ever want to give up a healthy chunk of your salary? In effect, that's what you'll be doing if you disregard the various employee benefits you'll have access to in your first job. Many new college graduates simply don't understand their employers' benefits programs or their significance in real-dollar terms. "They underestimate the value of their benefits and don't ...

A professional wrestler runs for governor of Minnesota and wins. The owner and pastry chef of my neighborhood bakery is a former investment banker. A friend from college who was a computer scientist for seven years now makes her living as a sailboat captain in Seattle. How did these people get where they are today? Through a combination of luck, confidence ...

You spend most of your waking hours at work. You rarely get out for lunch, never mind dinner. You'd like to meet that special someone, but you just don't know where to look. Suddenly, Cupid shoots his arrow, and it hits the person in the next office. Out with all reason – love is in the air! Stop. Sure, meetings ...

Picture yourself working in one of the country's famous national parks this summer. Nature surrounds you, as do hiking trails and whitewater rafting trips through canyons. Or think of what it would be like to work for a ritzy resort on a tranquil, sunny beach. Are these fantasy jobs? Not likely. But they can be a great way to supplement your ...

With a job offer in hand and your first paycheck on the way, you may be daydreaming about how you’ll spend your paycheck—on a new work wardrobe, furniture for a new apartment, maybe a better car. But how much spending money can you really expect from your paycheck? It helps to remember that more than 20 percent of your salary may ...

Meeting with people who work in a career or company that interests you is a great way to get a jump-start on your dream job. They'll not only let you know about opportunities in the field, but they can also give you some great advice based on their experience. However, in order to get the information you need, you have ...

You're there on time, the job description is a perfect match and one look at the office tells you this is the job for you. So what could go wrong?Plenty. Everyone makes mistakes. But according to those who do the interviewing, job seekers for tech positions are prone to a number of common interview blunders. To avoid them, you've got to ...

If you were an employer looking at a resume, which of the following entries would impress you more? Wrote news releases. Wrote 25 news releases in a three-week period under daily deadlines. Clearly the second statement carries more weight. Why? Because it uses numbers to quantify the writer's accomplishment, giving it a context that helps the interviewer understand the degree of ...

If you want to make adults squirm like kindergartners, broach the subject of salary negotiation. Talking money makes most workers uncomfortable. And while they want such talks to succeed, they make plenty of blunders. If only they had some basic negotiation guidelines. So what’s the best way to avoid stumbling and also boost your confidence? Rebecca Warriner, a job search coach ...

Take a look at these retail stats: * The national annual staff turnover for retail companies ranges from 60 to more than 200 percent of their payroll. * Selling merchandise is highly seasonal and is readily influenced by weather, tourism and holidays. * The current retail job market is tight. Malls often post job openings for all their store tenants at ...

Imagine you're an employer and you have two resumes in front of you. One is filled wall-to-wall with text and uses four different fonts. It's also peppered with dozens of bolded, italicized and underlined words and phrases. The second resume is much more visually pleasing. It, too, offers a lot of information, but you can quickly scan the document because it ...

The best way for students to find an internship in a healthcare field is to blend Web search savvy with old-fashioned relationship building. Students have a wider range of careers in health care than ever before as new opportunities emerge in pet healthcare, drugstore-based clinics, electronic prescriptions and medical records, and specialty injection and infusion treatments performed in people's homes. Healthcare ...

I've always wanted to work for CNN. So when I got the opportunity for an internship at their headquarters in Atlanta last summer, it was a dream come true. As a CNN intern, I had to have initiative and drive to compete with older interns who had more training and experience than I did. Read on to find how you ...

There's no such thing as the perfect internship. But you can figure out which one aligns best with your career goals, and then tap your own initiative to turn that internship into an experience that will grab the attention of future employers. Take It or Leave It? How do you judge the potential value of a particular internship, especially when you're ...

It may be hard to see into the summer months with the freezing cold temperatures, but it’s time to start not only thinking about, but applying, to summer internship programs. However, getting a summer internship this year may be tricky. With unemployment at a stagnant 9%, according to the most recent data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, many ...

The end of summer brings an end to corporate internship programs’ most lucrative season. While you’ve been working hard all summer to impress your supervisor, colleagues and other interns, there is still quite a bit you can do after the internship to stay in their good graces. Email Your Entire Team Chances are, the team you worked with all summer doesn’t ...

Out of everyone in my group of college friends, I was the only one who still had the same job two years after graduation. Everyone else had changed jobs once, twice, even three times. So, I felt somewhat smug—as if I knew something they didn’t. It wasn’t until many years later I understood the positive side of job hopping. It hit ...

One of the greatest woes of an internship is that it is, more often than not, unpaid. Interns are often the hardest working employees because they want nothing but experience or, perhaps, opportunities in return for a job well done. Employers know this and, unfortunately, sometimes take advantage of the situation by keeping interns longer than necessary, making them work for ...

Whether you’ve just completed your Master’s degree and are now entering the competitive job market or you’re still in undergrad considering a Master’s program to enter, the question you face is the same: Which field has the best job outlook? There are a number of fields that are doing well even post-recession, that you might not necessarily think of at first. ...

It doesn't take much digging to find negative comments about college career centers, such as "the career center sucks at my school" or "my career center is worthless," on the Career Planning for College Students message board. These sentiments often reflect a fundamental disconnect between students' expectations and their career-center staff's many limitations. Just what can you reasonably expect from your ...