Astound, owners of several virtual event platforms including Unicruit, have been picked up by a division of United Business Media, owner of PR Newswire. The division named UBM Studios focuses on virtual events like trade shows, seminars, focus groups, and career fairs.

While we covered Unicruit’s virtual career fairs along with other competitors, this purchase is significant as for the first time, a company with some deep pockets will be able to offer and market virtual college career fairs. It hasn’t been since Monster acquired Jobtrak a decade ago, that a large company has put emphasis on college recruiting. While that didn’t turn out so well for Monster as they dissolved MonsterTRAK, UBM might find more success here.

I still think physical career fairs are not going away anytime soon, but UBM Studios does have a chance to disrupt university recruiting at a global level. Virtual events could allow organizations to reach and market to students all over the world.

A new study by the U.S. Department of Labor revealed that cities with a minimum population of 50,000 residents are experiencing new surges in hiring.

Professional, business, and technical industries (i.e., service industries) are all experiencing a growth in hiring demands. These typically include jobs that provide specific expert services for clients and customers.

However, industries that focus primarily on the delivery of goods and products, such as manufacturing, trade, transportation, and public utilities; are experiencing a diminishing need for new hires.

One of my favorite television programs is Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN Sunday Mornings.   One guest this week was Richard Florida, economist and author of the “Great Reset”.  Florida details how U.S. economy has crashed before, but historically reset itself and emerged into new eras of growth and prosperity.  While Florida believes the U.S. is in what will be a long and painful reset period, he feels the end result will be another era of innovation and prosperity, albeit no longer defined by consumption.

In my opinion, I feel the U.S. educational system is beginning a similar reset, arguably rooted with the fundamental change of the U.S. economy post World War II.

In the past 60 years, especially in the last decade, there has been increasing demand for education after high school.  Traditional four year colleges have seen growing enrollments, and specialty institutions such as for-profit online colleges have been filling an ever growing need.   This demand is clearly fueled by necessity.

Just over 48 percent of industries increased the number of online jobs postings, according to Beyond.com, Inc.’s Second Quarter 2010 Career Trend Analysis Report, released earlier this week. Beyond.com, Inc.is the largest network of niche career communities in the world.

According to the Beyond.com quarterly report, which gathers information from thousands of top-tier industry and local career sites, more than 73 percent of employers sought full-time employees, an increase of 12 percent from the previous quarter. The healthcare and medical industries boasted the largest percent gain in overall jobs posted (5.57 percent), followed by the sales and sales management industries, which increased jobs posted by 2.24 percent.

According to reports in the Monday editions of the Die Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung newspapers, the German Interior Minister has drafted a new law on the information employers can gather legally on potential employees. This law may be approved as early as Wednesday, by the German cabinet, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

If this law is approved, employers may not use any information found on a candidate’s Facebook page to decide whether or not to offer a job. However social networks that are considered to be professional like LinkedIn or Xing can be used by employers.

The strange thing is that the law does not prohibit doing a Google search for a candidate.

Accept. You just spent close to $50,000 a year on a college education-how could and why would you turn down that job, or any job? You should be ecstatic to get an offer, any offer, in this our “Great Recession.”

CNN claims, it now takes an average of more than 30 weeks to find a job, the longest time span ever since the Department of Labor began tracking this data in 1948. Therefore, while it may be incredibly attractive to take that first job offer, there are legitimate reasons to turn that job, even in this pitiful job climate.

In a recent article written by Bobbi Dempsey, Investopedia.com, she highlights 5 (Good) Reasons to Decline a Job Offer:

Experts claim that healthcare jobs are booming, accounting for over 25% of all new jobs created though 2018, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. But where does that leave those who majored in something other than healthcare or cringe at the thought of blood and other bodily fluids?

“You can’t sit around and wait for news to come out about what’s going to happen to your industry,” said Alexandra Levit, author of “New Job, New You.” “You have to be proactive about this.”

Here’s a list of the top 10 industries expected to lose the most jobs by 2018 :

What is a “green” job? It’s a term that has grown in popularity, particularly during election season.

According to Robert Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the new term “Green” job — like “e-commerce” and “social networking” before it –often generates general confusion from competing interpretations. He explains, “There’s no such thing; that’s my definition, I’m greatly in favor of investing in things that will promote a clean environment, fight global warming, and those investments will all create jobs, and I don’t really care what color they are.”

But the energy efficiency and renewable energy industries define “green” job as any job that includes:
- Energy-efficient building, construction and retrofits
- Renewable electric power
- Energy-efficient and advanced drive train vehicles
- Biofuels
- Deconstruction and materials use
- Energy efficiency assessment industry that serves the residential, commercial or industrial sectors
- Manufacturers that produce sustainable products using environmentally sustainable processes and materials

The New York Times ran the article “The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not” on April 2, 2010 about the rise of unpaid internships and the crackdown from some states that unpaid internship violate minimum wage laws. I know there are companies that take advantage of students desperately wanting an internship and sticking them with mindless work such as filing, photocopying, or as one student in the article explained “she was assigned to wipe the door handles each day to minimize the spread of swine flu.”

But for other companies that actually do provide a learning opportunity a crackdown by the federal Labor Department may mean they stop providing the opportunity so many students seek. I think about what my internships afforded me – the ever important experience, connections and great ways to build my resume – and I was happy to have the opportunity working for free. [Granted one truth raised by the article is that unpaid internships aren’t always a reality for some students who can’t afford to spend a semester or summer working for free.]

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) in 2008 50 percent of graduating seniors had held an internship which was up from 17 percent in 1992. As the article states “some experts estimate that one-fourth to one-half [of internships] are unpaid.”

After a few years of companies downsizing, the U.S. job market is recovering – but it appears to be happening slower than economists had expected. A strong first quarter gave companies the confidence to start hiring again, adding more jobs to the U.S. economy.

Employment in the US grew by 431,000 in May, but that figure was primarily driven by the hiring of temporary Census Bureau workers, the government said today. Also, the unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent from 9.9 percent in the same month. It’s getting better but we are not out of the woods. According to John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, in an interview last month, “The recovery process is slow, so it could be several months or even years before unemployment returns to pre-recession levels.”

When the job market went south, many Americans stopped their job searches out of lack of opportunities and therefore are no longer as unemployed. Now that more jobs are becoming available, more people will re-enter the job pool, keeping the unemployment rate high for now.