Class of 2009 finds challenging job hunt

associated press

David Maley left his internship at Lehman Brothers last summer figuring he would be back on Wall Street in a glamorous investment banking job once he graduated from Colgate University in May.

Now Lehman is history, and Maley is moving instead to a Cleveland suburb to start a management-training program at an industrial supply company.

Considering the job market, he’s just fine with that.

“I’m happy to have a job, counting my blessings,” said Maley, a mathematical economics major from Woodbridge, Conn. He thinks he will learn a lot. New York would have been fun — but expensive. And in hindsight, he did not find banking work all that interesting.

For many college students in the class of 2009, the postgraduation job hunt has turned into a quest for a rewarding Plan B — or in many cases, Plan C or D.

After a string of golden recruiting years, employers plan to hire 22 percent fewer graduates this spring, according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

But even that figure underestimates the drop, says Sheila Curran, an independent adviser and former head of career services at Duke. She believes the figures are even worse for the “just-in-time” positions offered in April and May that account for 80 percent of jobs for new grads.

Still, many career counselors see a silver lining. Students, they say, got in the habit of noticing only recruiters who visited campus. That was especially true of high-paying investment banks and consulting firms that made the job search easy and practically loaded top students onto trucks bound for New York and other big cities.

Now students are being forced to cast a wider net. Considering they will change jobs three times on average within five years of graduation, they may someday be grateful they developed good job-search skills now.

“In a sense it’s like, ‘Welcome to the real world,’ and it’s not a bad thing,” said Elizabeth Alexander, who works in career services at the University of Texas. “If you come out of college thinking, ‘I’m entitled to a great job,’ the first time you get laid off, it’s going to come as a great shock. Life is full of peaks and troughs.”

Counselors emphasize that job boards are not totally empty. Fields such as health care are still hiring. Even finance still has some life because smaller, regional firms are stepping up recruiting at some top schools, trying to attract talent while their big rivals cut back.

Teresa Olsen, associate director of career services at Colgate, says students there are giving a closer look to options they might have ignored in the past — such as a strong training program at M&T Bank in Buffalo.

Also hiring: Uncle Sam. This week, the federal government had more than 46,000 job openings posted on its centralized job board at www.usajobs.gov — including positions for firefighters, budget analysts and historians.

Lisa Newhouse, a senior sociology major at Texas, is considering going to work for the government on the 2010 census. She’s also looking for area jobs in marketing, and mulling graduate school in public health and nonprofit work.

Newhouse was turned down by Teach for America, which places new grads in low-income schools, but she was in good company. The program saw a 42 percent increase in applications over 2008. Around 35,000 students — including one in nine Ivy League seniors — are competing for about 4,000 slots.

“It’s been frustrating, but I think in times like these you learn a lot about yourself,” she said.