Must be very frustrating looking for employment options but keeps getting slapped in the face with ‘Degree Required’? Let’s face it. College graduates are employed at much higher rates than non-degree holders. In fact, actual statistics show:

The overall unemployment rates are hovering around 10 percent (last reported by US Bureau of Labor Statistics at 9.8% on November 2010). From these figures, only 4.5 percent of college graduates are unemployed.

With that, you don’t need to be an economist to conclude that completing some form of higher education is the best insurance against unemployment.

Online courses have been around for nearly two decades, but enrollment has soared dramatically only in the recent years as universities become way too expensive. More than 5.6 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2009 term, that’s close to 1 million increase versus the reported figures in 2008.

Virtual learning indeed began taking the internet and campuses by storm in the past few years. You now have a choice between the traditional mode of learning and learning within the comforts of your home. Like many things in life, taking college courses online can have both advantages and disadvantages.

The Rewards:

Learning Can be Done Anywhere

Online degree programs allow you to learn from home or practically in any place that has internet access. Talk of convenience and the tons of time saved. You can practically watch and listen to lectures, do homework, write papers, communicate with your instructors and classmates and even take your exams without all the traditional rituals.

Cut Huge Costs

With the ability to study from home, you can take out your carpool budget or bus fare expenses from your list. With prices of almost anything now soaring beyond control, learning materials that can be downloaded for free or at a very low cost is definitely a better option if your want to hold on to your cash. Comparatively, fees for online degree programs are also lower compared to campus degree courses.

Earn More than One Degree at the Same Time

If you are good in managing your time, you can even earn more than one degree. This puts you on a better position as far as career advancement or job promotion goes.

Be in Touch with Technology

Being able to understand the functions and advantages of technology tools might be the leading edge you could need to advance your position, or get a job in the first place. Virtual education can reach students who are not that too acquainted with these types of technology, allowing you to possibly add a new skill set to the resume you are building. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: If you are interested in writing on Environmental Graffiti please send an email to zero@environmentalgraffiti.com (the site is currently “by invite” only). Be sure to put “applicant.com” as subject and you will be provided with a special invite link (for applicant.com readers) that will allow you access right away. To learn more about the platform please read below.

Environmental Graffiti is the first environmental site in the world to bridge the gap between social media and paid-for journalism. Through a product called the Graffiti Index*, Environmental Graffiti is able to pay users for every page view they generate. If a user writes a popular article, with 100,000 views, they can potentially earn thousands of dollars, a welcome boost in today’s economic climate. Currently the platform pays 25% of all revenue and plans to scale that upto 80% in couple months.

The new site is a hybrid that brings together all the best aspects of social media and online magazines, benchmarking the social features of Facebook, Twitter and Digg, as well combining the editorial quality of National Geographic. The platform is a content democracy: users create the articles and determine which ones hit the front page. Environmental Graffiti edit the articles to ensure a strong focus on quality control.

Features of the Environmental Graffiti community include:

• Voting: the community votes the users’ best stories to the front page
• My Graffiti: a personal dashboard and quick link to all areas of the site including a users’ articles, feedback from editors, profile, traffic and revenue they have generated
• Profiles, inboxes and followers: a way to communicate with other members of the site
• Write: where users create the articles. Also includes story ideas and an image gallery to inspire
• Forums: where users can discuss issues with others who share your interests

Chris Ingham Brooke, Founder of Environmental Graffiti says

Environmental Graffiti gives you the freedom to express yourself, share your knowledge with millions of people and crucially earn revenue. From extreme sports to bird-watching, you control and create the news, the news does not control you.

Environmental Graffiti was started in May 2007 by Chris Ingham Brooke, then just 19 years old, working from a barn in Oxfordshire, UK. Armed with nothing but its fresh and eclectic take on environmental news, it took the online world by storm, generating 1.5 million unique visitors a month. After receiving requests from over 3,000 people to write articles, the new community enables users’ voices to finally be heard.

If you are a job seeker and you didn’t know this, you should – employers are as desperate to find a qualified applicant as you are to find a good paying job. Everyday thousands of ads are thrown in our face and quite a few of them are recruitment ads. Unless you are looking for a job you probably won’t notice them but there are quite a few that circulate the web, the newspapers, television and radio each day. Some we simply tend to ignore cause they are the “same old, same old” kind. However, there are a few that grab our attention. We’ve already covered creative resumes to highlight job applicant’s creativity and today’s post highlights some creative recruitment ads.

Below you will find ten creative recruitment ads that are not only amazing but almost compels you to apply for a job. Some may have never seen the day of light as they were a concept and could possibly have changed when the final version came out, and others you might have come across when you were looking to apply for a job. Enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »

If you are unemployed and live in New York City, your job search might soon come to an end.

This year some high paying jobs have surfaced on the web that paid pretty big to use social media tools such as blogs, facebook, twitter, etc. Two that got quite a bit of buzz were A Really Goode Job from Murphy Winery and 67 Days of Work from Orlando Tourism Bureau. Now Procter & Gamble has kicked off another social media related job for their toilet paper Charmin. Read the rest of this entry »

You don’t have to take the bait on that 12-month, 0% APR credit card offer cluttering your mailbox to appreciate the value of junk mail. That’s because a lot of those letters from insurance companies and coupon brochures to water park resorts have something every job hunter really does want: writing that sells.

So if you want to keep your resume and cover letter out of the circular file, you may want to incorporate some of these golden junk mail tactics to prepare killer resumes and cover letters.

Read the rest of this entry »

We did a presentation a few months back called the “job search commandments.” We uploaded it on SlideShare and since then every week we get one email from the Slideshare teams saying it’s hot on some platform. We think it’s about time we shared it here too. As of now the slideshow has received more than 18,000 views, 30+ embeds and 50 favorites. We are sure you will find these job search commandments helpful. We have included both the slideshow and the text version. If you would like to add to the commandments feel free to do so through your comments.

And here is the text version. Read the rest of this entry »

Every office has that one jerk who is so rude you wonder how he or she ever got hired in the first place. Just thinking about people like that stings even more when you consider you’re the one looking for work. But we can all learn a lesson from the a-holes.

Being nice might not make you finish last, but it often leads to finishing 2nd, which is even more frustrating. So here are 10 “nice-guy” mistakes for you to avoid if you ever hope to land a job.

1. Understating your upside

Muhammad Ali said it best: “I don’t mean to brag, but I’m the greatest.” With friends, be humble. When you’re applying for a job, though, by all means brag. Employers want to be impressed. Tell them something that will make them say, “Wow!, not, “well, she seemed nice.”

2. Acting like a friend

Friends ask how your family is. They ask about your day. They comment on how nice your office looks or how excited they are to see you. Do you know what friends don’t do? Pay you $50,000 a year. Act like a professional who wants a job, not a lonely person who’s just glad to leave the house. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to using online tools, it is extremely important that you know the slightest misjudgment on your part can cost you your job. We know that the internet has become a convenient gateway to job search, but it has also become a viable tool for employers to keep track on employees or applicants. You can say that your employers don’t have the right to fire you based on what you do after work, but if your “after work remark” derogates the company name or personnel, I assume they have the right to take action, which in most cases starts out by getting you fired.

Today we want to talk a bit about Twitter (If you would like to learn more about Twitter, check out our visual guide to twitter). The networking platform that seems to be talked about almost everyday by both traditional and new media. Although it has become the core platform for many job seekers to find jobs online, it has also established itself as a worst nightmare for job seekers and employees in a sense. Each week it seems like someone is getting fired over their use of twitter. Just search google and you will see what we mean. We’ve been looking into twitter search for a couple days and it’s overwhelming how many people talk so casually about “hating their boss” and everything else. Well, if you really want Twitter to get you fired, these five pointers will certainly help. Read the rest of this entry »

Until it’s filled, an open position is just an idea. It’s a company’s idea of how to meet their needs and accomplish their objectives. But what if you have a better idea? What about those businesses that don’t recognize their biggest inefficiencies? Try thinking less like a job hunter and more like a business-to-business sales agent, and you just may be able to sell a company on your full-time services, and do it all on your terms.

So we’ve come up with a list of five needs and objectives many businesses simply fail to meet. With a little innovation and research, you can help some company do a better job, a job you’ve designed yourself.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a term for people who enjoy the thrill of the job search: happily employed. For the rest of us, looking for a job ranks right up there on the list of things to avoid alongside root canals, traffic jams, and the plague. If you’re stuck in a job you hate, or stuck on your couch watching Oprah, it’s probably because you prefer your current state of misery to the pain of job hunting. Few things in life have the power to discourage you quite like being rejected or ignored by an employer you don’t really want to work for in the first place.

It’s that feeling of inferiority that makes the job search so dismal. So what is it about you that makes you look and feel inferior? The answers are all in your head. All the negative, depressing, defeating thoughts you entertain as you send out resumes and trudge through interviews . . . they’re all true. But you can use them to your advantage. Read the rest of this entry »