Find Out Where You Should Work (and Live)

A few weeks ago I spoke to two groups of students about their careers. The response was quite heartwarming as several students lined up at the end of my speech to ask private questions or simply say “thanks – that was great advice.”

This morning I read through the comments they made on the post-speech evaluations and decided to postpone my next post and get back to these gracious undergraduates with a little more instruction.

Although I covered a lot of ground, the section that really jumped out was when I asked them to use some tools on careersecretsauce.com to decide where they should work after they graduate.

A huge number of students wrote that they really appreciated this section and planned to spend more time on this type of research in the future.

While my advice is focused on college students, it is equally applicable for anyone who’s unhappy with where they live and/or work.

The truth is most students will move home and live with their parents after graduation; some will stay in their college town to find work. Those with the right internships will have a job offer in hand before they get their diploma that is located in their ideal place to live.

The first step to doing this is to figure out where the best location is for YOU, so I decided to create a post that describes these tools and provides instructions on how to use them.

Here goes:

Find Your Ideal Location – http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2007/index.html

For this I recommend Money Magazine’s Best places to live web site. It has a rather simplistic list of the top 100 best places to live, which I wouldn’t waste much time with. The thing that I find useful is the application that allows you to set your own priorities and search for your ideal location.

 Research Future Job Growth – http://www.projectionscentral.com

The next step is to look at the geographies you like and figure out what the employment prospects are for that region. Projectionscentral.com is tremendous tool that aggregates state employment projections under a search engine to help you see where the most jobs openings will be in your field and what the growth rates look like for the next ten years.

I am not recommending moving to somewhere you don’t like because they have a lot of job openings, but rather make a short list of places you’d like to live and then see which one has the best job outlook for your vocation.

Discover The Best Companies – http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2007/

Fortune magazine has a web site that ranks employers by region and gives you there rationale. It also has a personal selection tool that you can use to find your ideal employer.

Identify Who’s Hiring Today — http://www.getthejob.com

Once you have an even shorter list of possible places to start your career, you can go to getthejob.com and see what the current openings look like and who’s hiring. I like this site, but careerbuilder.com and monster.com work equally well.

Investigate Salary and Cost of Living – http://www.salary.com/

The final step is to research the prevailing salary for your job class in the locations you’re considering moving to. I think salary.com does a great job at this, but again there are other sites that do equally as well.

Once you’ve gotten this far, you can go back to the locations you’re interested and research the cost of living by going through the real estate and living sections of the local newspapers.

This is an Iterative Process

The decision on where to live after graduation is very important, but very personal. I recommend that you access these tools and run a number of scenarios to identify the best location for you personally.

Next Post – Money Questions for The Magic Moment