Q TIPS:
Quick and Quintessential Tips to Guide Your Job Search and Work Life
Job-hunting tips from the August 18, 2008, issue of
QuintZine.
As students gear up to go back to school this fall, those already in the workforce may want to consider
continuing their education, a new survey suggests. Ninety-four percent of senior executives interviewed
said their firms offer tuition benefits for their employees. Ninety-five percent of respondents said their companies
also reimburse for other forms of professional development.
The survey was developed by Accountemps, a staffing services firm specializing in accounting and finance. It was conducted by
an independent research firm and is based on telephone interviews with 150 senior executives from the nation's 1,000 largest companies.
Executives were asked, "Does your company offer college or university tuition reimbursement benefits for employees?" Their responses:
Yes: 94 percent
No: 5 percent
Don't know: 1 percent
Executives were also asked, "Does your company reimburse for other forms of professional development or training?" Their responses:
Yes: 95 percent
No: 2 percent
Don't know: 3 percent
CollegeGrad.com lists the Top 200 Intern Employers for 2008,
based on results of its 2008 Top Entry Level Employers survey.
The Top Intern Employers
list details internship hiring plans for 200 employers nationwide. Each employer page also details projections for entry- and
master's-level hiring.
Among the 2008 Top 200 Intern Employers listed by CollegeGrad.com,
53 percent anticipated hiring more interns in 2008 than 2007. Twenty-two
percent planned to hire the same number and 25 percent planned to hire fewer
interns than in 2007. But even though more than half of employer
respondents indicated they would be increasing their total intern hiring,
the total increase intern hiring is only 0.52 percent over 2007 intern hiring.
The NASA Undergraduate Student Research Project offers internship opportunities for undergraduate science and
engineering students at all 10 NASA centers and additional partner facilities. These mentor-guided internships provide hands-on, real-life,
career-related experiences that challenge, inspire, and provide practical application that complements and expands upon students'
academic education. Three internship sessions are offered: a 15-week spring session, a 10-week summer session and a
15-week autumn session. Eligible applicants must be classified as sophomores, juniors or seniors by the start of their internship.
The students must be U.S. citizens with academic majors or course concentration in engineering, mathematics, computer science,
or physical and life sciences. Find out more here.
Wondering about the maximum number of bullet points to include in each section of your resume? The answer is more than 50 years old:
Technical writers, business writers, instructional designers and others have elevated the central concept to a truism of writing, called
Miller's Magic Number, based on a scholarly article by George A. Miller from 1956. Basically, it goes like this:
A list or sequence, to be retained easily in short-term memory, should contain no more than 7 +/- 2 items.
Some interpretation has been used to apply the number:
A list or sequence could be a bulleted list or a numbered list.
Corollary: Use subheadings to break long procedures into shorter sub-procedures (chunking).
Use subheadings to break long bulleted lists into shorter, related lists.
Original article: The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some
Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information, George A. Miller (1956),
Harvard University, First published in Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.
As students gear up to go back to school this fall, those already in the workforce may want to consider
continuing their education, a new survey suggests. Ninety-four percent of senior executives interviewed
said their firms offer tuition benefits for their employees. Ninety-five percent of respondents said their companies
also reimburse for other forms of professional development.
