About an Industrial Career

If you are applying to enter job market this year and desire an industrial career, these are some suggestions.

1. Recruiters more and more use social professional network to find potential candidates. It is advisable that you create a profile on http://www.linkedin.com/ or careerbuilders or monster. In creating such profile please bear in mind:
a. How you present yourself is important. You are a doctoral candidate and thus a student, but also you are an analytical thinker with good command of quantitative tools. It will be helpful if you position yourself as such and not only a student.(for example do not put Doctoral Candidate in the title of your profile, put something like applied economist, econometrician, economic analyst that describes you as a professional!)
b. Highlight your software expertise and quantitative background as well as economic coursework that required you to write.
c. In mentioning econometrics be specific about techniques you know well. Remember there are different things about econometrics, it is good to be specific: are you good at panel data or time series, logistic regression or cluster analysis? say that, econometrics is a vast field.

2. It is important that you demonstrate ability in doing tasks such as data management and data manipulation using software packages such as SAS. If you do not have any experience about these, remember if you know SAS DATA step well (thos SAS users out there know what I mean by well), you are almost there. Read a help manual and perform a few codes that require you to merge or to split data sets.
a. Prepare yourself to answer questions such as: how do you merge two data sets? How SAS merges these data sets?
b. Learn a little bit of SQL (more than a little bit actually).
c. Find a business data, something with ID codes for consumers or geographical locations and exercise with it, it does help.

3. Highlight your experience building models and doing research. The market is competitive but your potential employers want to know how much training you might require. Show it that you do not need much.

4. Many employers accept online submission, when doing so do not forget to activate the alert for the new jobs, which keeps you aware of new openings.