Flexibility and work experience.
These are vital skills to any graduate expecting to find a job after graduation, said Don Casella, director of the Career Center at SF State.
Students need to have internships and summer jobs in the career field of their choice while they're still in school, he said. Students can't expect to graduate and immediately step into a career anymore.
Students and companies that wait until graduation to look for each other won't get the best product, Casella said.
Many recent graduates are taking jobs just to get a foot in the door, rather than to obtain a career with that company, Casella said. Doing this provides people with more experience and allows them to obtain skills in a variety of jobs before settling in a career.
According to a February 1995 issue of "Career Movement and Management Facts," most job opportunities are now concentrated in networked services or systems operations, but as technology expands, so will the scope of jobs.
Job titles that weren't around a few years ago are now flooding the market. Classified ads call for "on-line service marketers," "multimedia content developer," "advanced practice nurses" and "labor and employment lawyers."
According to the January-February 1995 issue of "Career Opportunities News," the top five jobs in the U.S. are computer systems analysts, physicians, physician therapists, electrical engineers and civil engineers. Computer systems analysts moved up in the ranks 30 places this year. Last year it was ranked 31 out of 100 jobs.
Casella said these rankings are "isolated and very academic." Demographics play a big part in the types of jobs offered, he said.
Following this trend, SF State's computer science department has seen some growth in the past few years.
"The numbers are starting to climb back up," said Gerald Eisman, chair of the computer science department. He also said a lot of graduate students with degrees in other areas are coming into the program.
"Fifty to 60 percent of the graduate students aren't computer science majors," Eisman said.
Eisman said the most popular areas of study in the program are software engineering and database systems.
The students in the department concentrate mostly on the software development end of the industry. This involves writing word processing software, spreadsheets and databases.
A February 1995 "Career Movement and Management Facts" article highlighting the leading career fields said: "Almost all new jobs created in the next decade will be in service industries. One out of three will be in health, business services or social services."
With all the changing trends in the workforce, staying secure in a career is becoming a thing of the past.
"While three million jobs were created in the last year, 600,000 new job cuts were announced," a December 1994 article in "Career Opportunities News" said.
It also said temporary and leased employees are becoming a factor in the diverse job market, multiple-job holding is becoming more common, many of the traditionally male work fields are shrinking and employment opportunities will be aided by the fact that fewer young people are joining the work force.
"We're moving toward a jobless workplace," Casella said. Some factors effecting this trend are an increase in computers in offices, layoffs and more companies using temporary employees.
Having experience with the Internet helps make job applicants more flexible and may give them an advantage over the others, Casella said.
"Job security now is being able to make yourself flexible," Casella said. Cooperating with other departments in a company and letting other people in management see a variation of skills can help secure a job.
Having a broad based education with a lot of general education studies offers students more areas to specialize in, Casella said. Rather than specializing only in the area of one's major, students should learn to handle working with a broad range of topics.
To deal with employment trend changes, employees and counselors from the Career Center will teach a class in the fall called From Classroom to Career.
Students must have a job to be enrolled and the class is self-paced. It's aimed to help students network for career contacts, land internships or part-time jobs, redesign resumes and learn important skills needed in the workplace.