Gen Y quandary: A drive to succeed, but jobs are few - St. Louis Business Journal:

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Harris, a junior psychology majod at in Schenectady, had at least two summer internship options canceled when advertising agencies cut their intern programs to save This week—after more and with summer breakk a week away—Harris was offeredr a paid internship. Many others, whethefr students seeking internships or recent gradsx looking to starttheir careers, aren’t as fortunate. “It’sa been a pretty rough year. It’ss incredibly stressful,” Harris said. “It’w something that’s always on your mind.” Harris and othef soon-to-be college graduates belong toGeneratioh Y, known for its drive to succeec in the workplace.
More than any generatioh before them, members of Generation Y are alterinh workplace expectations in their pursuit of anequal work-life They’re unafraid to try to mold theire jobs to fit their needs. The recession and the restricted job marke t has turned those ambitions onthei head, pushing more students to delay theifr pursuit of a career for easier, more accessible alternatives. “Thies definitely wasn’t a job market for the faint of orthe unmotivated. Many say, becaus of the way the marke t is, ‘Why bother?’ ” said Thomas director of the career developmentg center atin Troy.
National trends revealed themselvez in an annual survey that Rensselaer conducts ofgraduatinfg seniors. This year, 800-plus students, or two-thirds of the 2009 graduatingf class, replied. Thirty-six percent of them said they hadfouned employment. In 2008, that figur e was close to 60 percent, Tarantelli said. “zA lot of manufacturing areas werehit hard, and Wall Street was hit hard, and thos companies recruit heavily at Rensselaer,” Tarantell i said. “It affects every Meanwhile, the 2009 Rensselaerd survey found that a thire were stillseeking jobs, while 28 percent were heade to graduate school.
“We’ve come to a point in our informatiomn society where we expect things to be instantaneous andcome easily,” he “And that’s a major issue now, for a lot of peoplde in this job market—especially young Tarantelli hints at a larger, long-term problem. It’s oftem called “brain drain,” and it’s definede by whether there are enougyh jobs to keep new graduates in the areaonce they’rd done with college. The Capital Region’ 14 college campuses enroll 58,0000 students each school year.
Yet the Albany metrko area’s population of 25-to-34 year olds, despits gains in recent years, posted a net decline of almostr 30,000 from 1990 to 2005, a University at Buffali study found. The overall decline represents a drop of20 “A lot of students don’t want to be But wherever students are, that’s where they don’t want to be. They alwaysa want to go somewhere else,” said Robert who runs Union College’s career center. Soules said the difficultr job market is a national not alocal problem. “sA number of them are telling me, ‘I’ll go home for the hang out with momand ” Soules said.
“What this economy has done is allowede more people todo that.” Fewer jobs, but they are out therer None of this is to say that entry-levek jobs can’t be found. CollegeGrad.com surveyed private - and public-sector employers earlier this year to gaugwe their plans forhiring entry-level positions. In all, almosft 158,000 entry-level jobs were reported, a 1.5 percentg decline from 2008. Co., for said it would hire 1,3590 entry-level workers in 2009. That’s down 10 percent from last year. Othee prominent area employers are also KeyCorp continues to hirebank tellers, which are entry-level positions.
But the company’sw turnover rate has dropped to less than half oflast year’s meaning that fewer positions are said Patricia Boeri, vice president of recruitingb for the bank’s northeast region.