My Favorite Career Websites

By Marty Nemko

Here are my favorite career-related sites as of March, 2012.

COMPREHENSIVE SITES

Career OneStop: This is a portal to federally-funded career sites offering quality help at every stage: identify your skills, find careers that fit, get trained, find money for training, and land the job. Plus, if you need human help, CareerOneStop links you to your local bricks-and-mortar federal OneStop Career Center.

The Riley Guide is a fabulous portal to sites for choosing a career or landing a job.

Job-Hunt.Another great portal. This one particularly excels in linking you to local information and resources.

BEST SITES FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

The above comprehensive sites, which link to many sites, can be overwhelming, so here are my favorite individual ones:

Which Careers Fit You

University of California, Berkeley Career Site: Extensive, well-organized information on hundreds of careers. Not surprising for a university site, the focus is on careers requiring a degree.

Vocational Information Center: www.khake.com. This site focuses on careers not requiring a college degree, usually with links to training resources.

To Research a Field or Employer

Google.com. Although not a career site, my clients and I most often end up using Google for all aspects of career research. When I want to find information on a career, I google it. When I want to find a person, for example, a VP marketing at Hewlett Packard, I google it. When I want to find the name of a professional association, I google the name of the profession along with the word “association,” “organization,” “society,” “American” or “National”. When I want information on a particular employer, I google its Web, News, and Blog tabs. .

A client of mine was unsure which of two job offers to accept. To help decide, he googled one of his potential bosses, Doug Dahlin. He discovered that Dahlin is a legend in his field, beloved by all, and was recently inducted into his industry’s hall of fame. My client’s choice became clear.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Publications. Offering far more than statistics, this site is home to the Occupational Outlook Handbook. That contains definitive narrative profiles of 250 careers, each ending with links to additional information. This site also contains other valuable publications, for example, The Monthly Labor Review.

Quintessential Careers links to Professional Associations. This site links to thousands of professional associations’ sites, for example, the American Accounting Association or the National Nursing League. Many association sites provide career information from leading practitioners. Also, such sites often include a list of its members, which is a terrific source of informational interviews and job leads. In addition, such sites often contain job listings in that field that attract fewer applicants than make it onto general job ad sites such as indeed.com or simplyhired.com.

Amazon.com. If you’re still interested in a particular career after reviewing it on Google, the Occupational Outlook Handbook, and the profession’s association website, your next stop might be Amazon, where, usually, you can quickly find a well-regarded book that profiles life in that career.

ReferenceUSA. Info, including website, phone number and executive names for 14 million U.S. businesses.

Glassdoor.com. Employees at thousands of companies anonymously profile what it's like to work there as well as salary information.

Linkedin.com. A must-participate-in site for job seekers and for all but the most successfully employed. Great for getting personal info on a company, introductions to others, plus job listings, and forums on which you can showcase your expertise. Also, recruiters use LinkedIn profiles as a major recruiting tool. So post a quality profile of yourself plus references.

SELF-EMPLOYMENT

Small Business Administration: Created by the federal government, this site offers extensive information on starting, financing, and managing your business.

FOR CREATING YOUR RESUME AND COVER LETTERS

Resumemaker.com ($29.95 for students and entry-level workers, $39.95 for others.) Here, you’re handheld in crafting your resume and cover letters from start to finish. ResumeMaker.com offers dozens of resume styles, and for inspiration, hundreds of professionally created sample resumes and cover letters Alas, like most resume/cover letter software and coaches, ResumeMaker encourages you to use canned, bragging adjectives such as “self-starter” and “team-player.” Those create distance between applicant and employer. Better to tell brief anecdotes of problems you faced, how you approached them, and the outcome. If you're just starting out, it's fine to supplement your weak or non-existent work history with avocational skills, interests, and personality characteristics.

JOB OPENINGS

Individual employers’ sites. Once you’ve identified specific employers you’d like to work for, there’s no substitute for checking those employers’ sites every few days for new listings. Or at some sites, sign up for their service which emails you every time it posts a job opening that matches your chosen keywords.

Field-specific job sites. See The Riley Guide (listed above) to find those in your field. Those ads usually attract fewer applicants than indeed.com and simplyhired.com, which aggregate job listings from all the other major job sites from craigslist.org to monster.

You can find links to hundreds of other field-specific job sites on the aforementioned portals: www.rileyguide.com and www.job-hunt.org..

The megasites: simplyhired.com, indeed.com, linkup.com. These aggregate millions of job openings. Indeed.com and simplyhired.com source from monster, craigslist, etc. Linkup.com aggregates job listings from individual employers' sites, which attract fewer applicants.

Unless your resume is extraordinary, it will be tough to land a job by answering an ad , especially on these megasites. Good jobs not requiring a very unusual skillset usually get dozens if not hundreds of applicants.What I like best about the megasites is that it's a way to get exposed to many careers you wouldn't have known about, who's hiring, and what skills are in demand.

USAJobs. It lists thousands of federal government job openings scattered all across the country and even overseas. Alas, this site only contains two-thirds of the federal openings. To find the rest, you need to search the 150+ federal agency sites individually.HERE is a portal to those sites is:

State Jobs: Thirteen million people are employed by state governments. This portal links to all 50 states’ state government jobs Web sites. For some states, the site also links to county and city job sites.

CAREER ADVICE

Career Journal: www.careerjournal.com. This includes material from the Wall Street Journal as well as articles written just for careerjournal.com, most of it of good quality. There’s ample material for those just starting out, but its focus is on middle and senior management

MartyNemko.comand MartyNemko.blogspot.com. Obviously, I'm biased--These contain my writing. But I have been told again and again that my articles offer savvy advice on picking a career, landing a job, and succeeding in it. Worth a look, I honestly believe. .

JOB SEARCH SUPPORT GROUPS

Five O’ Clock Club:Just as many alcoholics are more likely to remain sober because of Alcoholics Anonymous’ group support, many job seekers are more successful if they join a job-search group. My favorite is the Five O’Clock Club. Offering both online and in-person sessions, their weekly small groups are led by a career coach well-schooled in the proven Five O’Clock Club job search methodology. A membership costs $49 plus a moderate per-session sliding-scale fee.

Job-Hunt’s links to local support groups: www.job-hunt.org/job-search-networking/job-search-networking.shtml. This links to hundreds of support groups, arranged by state.

SALARY ADVICE

salary.com, payscale.com,andglassdoor.com. These sites estimate salary for hundreds of occupations, adjusted by location. Glassdoor and vault provide salary information for individual companies.

ADVICE I'D GIVE MY CHILD

It’s tempting to spend most of your job-search time on the Internet. But most successful job seekers spend most of their job search time networking and cold-contacting employers. They also focus more on becoming excellent than on selling themselves as excellent. I recommend you do the same.