Friday Links: 5000 hours

Just a few links today, mostly focused on the class of 2013. First up, over at Brazen Careerist’s Brazen Life section, I write New Grads: 10 Goals for Your First 5000 Hours on the Job. If you stay in your first “real” job for 2 years (not an unreasonable expectation), and work 50 hours a week (more than average), you’ll get a grand total of 5000 hours in this first gig. So what should you try to do with that time to give yourself a boost for the next 40 years of your career?

Second, over at CBS MoneyWatch, I’m writing, more pessimistically, about The class of 2013: A bubble about to burst. A new Accenture survey finds that while only 15 percent of members of the class of 2013 expect to earn less than $25,000 a year in their first jobs, a full third of members of the classes of 2012 and 2011 earn $25k or less. Likewise, while most members of the class of 2013 expect their employers to offer them formal training, less than half of members of the previous two classes got such training. And more than 4 in 10 people who earned college degrees in 2011 or 2012 are working in jobs that don’t require such degrees. The real world may be harsher than this year’s graduates expect.

Or maybe the economy will improve a lot in the next 3 months!

What advice would you give members of the class of 2013?

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