Blue collar and government jobs are among the most
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careers for U.S. graduates, according to U.S. News magazine"s 2008 Best Careers report. U.S. employers are increasingly offshoring professional jobs. This means less jobs
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college-graduate skills, the magazine says.
As in many other countries, U.S. high school students are told that college is the
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. So there"s a growing
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of skilled people in jobs that don"t require a college education. But the report also says that some rewarding blue-collar careers, such as technical work in the biomedical equipment and security systems sectors, are more
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to college graduates. These are more knowledge-based than the usual blue-collar jobs.
Government is becoming an employer of
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. Corporations, fueled by pressures to compete globally, continue to get ever
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. Non-profit organizations are increasingly strapped for cash. Government is able to pay employees well,
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their practices are economically sound, the magazine says. The report also indicates that social
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may be the enemy of contentment in career. People are flocking in greater numbers to careers in the law, medicine and architecture. Yet recent surveys of job satisfaction in those professions
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a less-than-rosy picture.
Many people invest in the stock market hoping to find the next Microsoft and Dell. However, I know from personal experience how difficult this really is. For more than a year, I was
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hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars a day investing in the market. It seemed so easy, I dreamed of
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my job at the end of the year, of buying a small apartment in Paris, of traveling around the world. But these dreams came to a sudden and dramatic end when a stock I
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, Texas cellular pone wholesaler, fell by more than 75 percent
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a one year period. On the worst day, it plunged by more than $15 a share. There was a rumor the company was exaggerating sales figures. That was when I learned how quickly Wall Street punishes companies that misrepresent the
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In a panic, I sold all my stock in the company, paying off margin debt with cash advances from my credit card. Because I owned so many shares, I
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a small fortune, half of it from money I borrowed from the brokerage company. One month, I am a winner, the next, a loser. This one big loss was my first lesson in the market.
My father was a stockbroker, as was my grandfather
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him.(In fact, he founded one of Chicago"s earliest brokerage firms.) But like so many things in life, we don"t learn anything until we experience it for ourselves. The only way to really understand the inner
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of the stock market is to invest your own hard-earned money. When all your stocks are doing
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and you feel like a winner, you learn very little. It"s when all your stocks are losing and everyone is questioning your stock-picking
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that you find out if you have what it takes to invest in the market.