If I ever have a bit of downtime, I usually do a quick scan of the homepages of newspapers and magazines. Only recently have I been cruising over to The Atlantic’s Web site. Today, Richard Florida’s blog post on where 2009 graduates want to move got my attention (and the attention of one of my coworkers, too.)
I wasn’t surprised to see that New York and D.C. were mentioned as top destinations—places that have lots of job opportunities, or so Florida explains. And further more, he says that to start your career, it’s no longer a simple choice of what job but where the job is:
In today’s highly mobile and economically tumultuous times, career success also turns on picking a thick labor market which offers diverse and abundant job opportunities. For new grads, picking the most vibrant location is an important hedge against economic uncertainty and the risk of layoff.
Florida hits on some good points, but doesn’t hit on one that was a reason why I moved to D.C. (or why I wanted to move to another big city, if not stay in Chicago.) When I received my job offer in D.C., one of the compelling reasons why I accepted it was because of the base of close friends and colleagues that lived in the area. When I got laid off, one of the reasons why I didn’t want to leave D.C. was because I had that support base here. (And I didn’t really want to figure out how I would pay for a move in case that was justified—I didn’t need another reason to cry.)
I don’t deny that grads may consider the labor situation in a city when considering where to accept a job, and I know that Florida looks at these scenarios through an economic/urban-planning prism. But I know that if networking is the way to expand your connections and potentially get a job, it helps to have people you know in the city you’re considering. Having that support network during the transition between college and the corporate world has value: It will keep grads sane by providing an outlet to explore other friends’ careers while pursuing their own, a chance to meet people in different industries, and potential happy hour buddies when office life gets a little dour.
At first pass, moving to where your friends are located doesn’t seem like the greatest career advice. Actually, I can envision my parents violently arguing with me that you shouldn’t follow friends to where they go (”Tina, would you jump off a bridge if your friends did?”) But I think it should be said that social bonds can help in kickstarting that first job of a multidecade career, and figuring out which big city has a large network of friends is something that new grads (and older grads) need to consider, even “in these economic times.”
