Though most career skills will be applicable to all professions, the importance of each will depend on your career choice. For example, a doctor or salesman will need to possess strong people skills, while a graphic designer working behind the scenes with client deliverables may find success focusing more on time management.

Did I learn any skills in college?

Thankfully, working through college has helped you develop key skills that will aid you in your career path. The actions that helped you survive college such as balancing work and homework, cramming with late nights, rising early in the morning, attending to deadlines and learning how to juggle five different classes will all serve you in your career advancements.

1.   Communication

Communication skills are essential for any career and workplace. Though this trait is more important in areas such as public speaking or sales jobs, learning to communicate is also an essential trait when interacting with coworkers, varying personalities and culture backgrounds.

Employers value communication above most other traits because it not only enables you to fare well amongst your peers, but it also allows you to communicate effectively with clients verbally and in writing.

Your first communication test will be your cover letter and resume. If you can pass that test, you will be one step ahead of the game.

2.   Problem-solving

Your career will skyrocket if you can learn to solve problems and create solutions. Businesses are built on the idea of creating solutions for a specific audience of people.

In order to become an effective problem solver you will need to possess analytical and creative skills. Analytically, you will use reason, initiative and persistence. Your creativity will also be useful to help you devise new, fresh approaches to the problem.

It can be rare to possess equal amounts of analytical and creative skills, so teamwork is essential. Your communication skills are needed here as well which will enable you to contribute to a team effort and solve the problem quickly and efficiently

3.   Time Management

When you were juggling and organizing your class projects, you probably didn’t realize you were honing your time management skills. Most jobs require you to possess the ability to multitask. Whether taking a phone call while writing a report, or answering an email while your boss is waiting on an important project, these actions are essential to becoming successful in your career.

You will most likely be faced with multiple tasks at once, so it’s important to know how to prioritize while ensuring that all projects are completed on time and with excellence.

4.   Honesty

Honesty and trust comes more into play the “higher up” you climb the corporate ladder. Your employer will want to know you can be trusted especially with trademarked information. Integrity is often not talked about in a “cut throat” world of professionals trying to get ahead. But, if you stay true to yourself and remain honest, you will always come out successful in your career endeavors.

5.   Initiative and Drive

Does your employer see passion? Do you see every obstacle as a chance to learn and grow? Drive and passion are essential for any person seeking long-term success and growth in a career path. You must be motivated to think outside of the box and passionately achieve your personal and company goals. Initiative will help you “stand out” in the workplace and make you appear as a leader.

Take Notice

As you begin your career journey, start noticing these skills even in your personal life and begin to take them more seriously. Your personal life will not only be enhanced, but your new employer will also value what you bring to the organization.

This question is being bantered around the country as:

• An increasing number of middle-aged workers are deciding if it’s worth it to start a second career
• College students are deciding what careers to pursue
• Many of the ten percent of Americans who are currently unemployed decide if it’s worth it to take jobs they suspect they won’t enjoy

How Much is Job Satisfaction Worth?

A white paper evaluating 500 job satisfaction studies (covering over 250,000 employees in total scope) put out by Occupational and Environmental Medicine (OEM medical journal, April 27, 2005) concluded that job dissatisfaction was associated with mental and psychological problems, self esteem, anxiety, and job burnout to a significant degree. The correlations were in the .4 to .5 range, and anything that is above a .3 correlation is considered significant.

But how much is job satisfaction actually worth? Is there any way to quantify this in dollars? Lucky for us, John Helliwell and Haifang Huang with the University of British Columbia (both are economists) have quantified various aspects of job satisfaction by associating percentages of income increases. They rated aspects of job satisfaction on a ten-point scale and correlated increases or decreases in ratings with financial wealth. Their conclusions were published in December of 2008 in the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Helliwell and Huang’s analysis asserts that:

• A one-point improvement in your trust in the management is equal to a 36% raise
• A one-point improvement in having enough time to finish your tasks is like getting an 11% raise
• A one-point increase in how challenging you find your job to be (that you feel you are using your skills and are a skilled employee) is worth a 19% raise

What Contributes to Job Satisfaction?

This leads us to question what exactly determines how satisfied we feel when at work.  Most of us want to blame what we do—meaning what career path we’ve taken—which is only one piece of the puzzle. The following aspects contribute to job satisfaction:

• What tasks you actually do each day
• The environment in which you do those tasks
• The amount you’re paid to perform as expected
• Who you work with (coworkers and managers)
• How much you feel appreciated or respected for your position and performance
• Commute time and stress
• General atmosphere and morale of the workplace
• Facility and amenities provided at the workplace

What Factors Matter For Your Personal Job Satisfaction?

Not everyone gains job satisfaction from the same things, just like not everyone would enjoy being a surgeon or an accountant. It’s important to evaluate what makes a job more or less enjoyable for you personally as you evaluate the worth of a job opportunity. Ask yourself the following:

• Do I work better in an office, home office, on the road, in the field, or outside?
• Do I enjoy managing or doing the work myself more?
• Do I prefer social contact or to work alone?
• Do I flourish best under supervision and with deadlines, or am I happiest without restrictions?
• Do I work best under pressure or without pressure?

Once you’ve determined what factors make you the happiest, you can start identifying the career paths that would be most conducive for your ultimate happiness.

What Does This Have to Do With Education?

When choosing a college major or deciding whether or not to pursue a second career, you’ll need to evaluate several things. It’s easy to think switching career fields or choosing the perfect college major is the only solution, but in actuality, how you get to perform your job (and with whom) may be a bigger factor than what you actually do. Keep this in mind as you evaluate education and career opportunities.

Unfortunately, the cost of a four-year college degree has risen 600 percent since 1980, which has lead to a staggering result: Currently two-thirds of all college graduates have student loan debt when they receive their degrees—roughly to the tune of $24,000 (on average).

This begs the question, is the cost of a college degree worth it in this economy? To answer that you have to ascertain what a college degree will get you over the long haul. Consider that even though the overall unemployment rate in America is just under 10 percent, it’s only 4.3 percent for college graduates. And over a lifetime college graduates make considerably more than those who never obtained a college degree at all. That alone seems like a good reason to go to college.

But what about all that debt? On average it now takes a recent college grad at least year to find a career-oriented job that pays a reasonable wage. But if a person is forced to take out loans to pay for college, how will they make the loan payments if they can’t find a job right away? With college debt now over $800 billion and growing, it surpasses credit card debt as the largest financial sinkhole in America.

According to the website The Project on Student Debt (which is an initiative of The Institute for College Access and Success) taking out student loans to pay for college is not a bad idea IF you engage in the right kind of loans. Federal student loans are legitimate forms of financial aid; private (bank) loans are not.

Not All Student Loans Are Created Equal

Turns out private loans are the biggest credit risks to students and should be avoided at all costs. If the only way you can go to college right now is to take out private loans, then you should probably put college on hold and work for a while to save up. A private college loan with a bank is no different than a credit card, which means they (the banks) solely dictate your interest rate, your payments, and payment schedule. Typically these loans are uncapped and cannot be erased by bankruptcy. This debt will follow you around FOREVER, wreaking havoc with your credit score, which can prevent you from starting a business, buying (or renting) property, or even getting a job (many HR departments use applicants’ personal credit scores in the vetting process). Is a college degree worth all that stress? Not likely.

A federal student loan, however, is designed to be manageable (and the application is easy). They’re backed by the Federal Government and controlled by Congress (not a bank’s board of directors). Therefore, the purveyors of these loans make every effort to work with you on repayment. For example, federal student loans are unemployment deferred (meaning you don’t make payments unless you have a job), the size and frequency of your payment is based on your household income, and if you become disabled, die, or the school you’re attending ceases to exist, then the loan is cancelled. Plus, they can be forgiven in exchange for certain types of community service. And if you’ve consistently paid on the loan, the remaining balance will be forgiven after 25 years.

What Can Colleges Do to Help Students Avoid Bad Debt?

According to The Project on Student Debt, colleges and universities are taking a more proactive role in counseling students on the riskier aspects of private college loans. Financial aid offices already talk up the benefits of federal student loans, however, they seldom mention anything about the pitfalls of private loans. Some schools have even gone so far as to require financial aid counseling for any student who does not pay cash for their education. And many colleges’ financial aid offices are coordinating with other colleges to employ common debt-avoidance practices, which includes monitoring cashier and bursar offices to track incoming private loan tuition payments so that the financial aid office may counsel students on managing debt before it gets out of control.

Plus, as of October, 2011, the federal government will require all U.S. colleges and universities to provide online “net price calculators” to help students and their families figure out how they’re going to pay for college, taking into consideration exactly how much long-term college debt they can handle.

The sad truth is not many people can afford to pay for college now, which means they either have to get scholarships or take out loans. But with fewer scholarships being handed out, loans have become the go-to solution for most co-eds. This is okay, as long as you borrow wisely and from the right lending institutions. With a little bit of effort you can avoid graduating with that dreaded debt monkey on your back.