Got a recently graduated kid parked in his old room because jobs aren’t available? Maybe he needs to expand his horizons.
Specifically, your kid might consider living and working in North Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota or Wyoming. Those are the top five of the “Best states for young people,” according to a new study from MoneyRates.com.
The Dakotas? Iowa? Maybe they’re not as sexy as New York or L.A., but they’re hiring.
Richard Barrington authored the study based on eight factors: the employment rate for people ages 20 to 24, availability of rentals, median cost of housing, the youthfulness of a state’s population, cost of in-state college tuition, nightlife, access to high-speed broadband and the number of fitness facilities per capita.
The other five states in the top 10 are Montana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Louisiana and Washington, D.C. Find out where your state ranks at this MoneyRates.com post.
The author notes that North Dakota and Iowa might not be the first places you’d think of in terms of “youth culture.” However, today’s young grads have to weigh the possibility of glittering cities, cool cribs and glamorous careers against the reality of student loan payback and self-funded retirements.
“Things like being able to find a job and afford an apartment should not be taken for granted,” Barrington says.
North Dakota has the highest proportion of 20- to 24-year-olds than any other state, for several reasons: its low unemployment rate, the fourth cheapest rents in the nation and the second-highest number of nightspots.
If your offspring – or you – never imagined living in what you consider the hinterlands, I’ve got one piece of advice: Don’t limit yourself. Sure, not everyone is suited to light out for the territories. But don’t dismiss it out of hand.
Getting a job – any job – helps you avoid the dreaded employment gap in your resume. It shows future employers that you’re focused and responsible – that rather than pulling coffee and sending out resumes you decided to challenge yourself in a new place (and maybe a new industry) and that you kicked butt doing it.
Full-time employment plus a lower cost of living equals more money to put against any student loans or consumer debt, to say nothing of savings and retirement. Compound interest is your friend, but only if you feed it.
Your degree does not define you
Besides, you never know where that “any job” could lead. The study author is a prime example. A communications/English major, he took the only job he could get upon graduation: entry-level bookkeeping at an investment management company, which obviously had little to do with his training.
A couple of years later Barrington moved into marketing for the firm. He started training to be a chartered financial analyst. Ultimately he parlayed that into the post of senior finance analyst for MoneyRates.com – not something he could have predicted when he chose his major.
I’ll bring up my own life experience as well. After one year of college I ran out of money and initiative. I didn’t have any formal training but boy, could I type and boy, was I a word geek. So I got a job typesetting and proofreading for a small publishing firm in Philadelphia. There I met a woman who told me that The Philadelphia Inquirer was hiring newsroom clerks.
Took the test (hint: lots of typing) and aced it, which meant a job that paid enough to move myself and my infant daughter to Philly. (The 100-minute bus ride from rural Jersey got awfully old awfully fast.) While working at the Inky I met and married a staff writer, which meant moving back to Jersey, which meant getting a car.
Part of my job was to type freelance stuff into the computer system. Most of it was pretty dismal, and one day I said as much to an editor. “Would you like to try?” he asked.
Would I!
Since I had a car I could go cover events on weekends, write them up and input them into the system on Monday. When my then-husband was offered a job at an Anchorage newspaper, I had enough of a portfolio to get hired as well. But what really changed my life was sitting next to a reporter named Liz Pulliam, who ultimately wound up at MSN Money. A decade or so later she was instrumental in getting me my first freelance gig there. That one-off article led to a series of personal finance pieces and, eventually, full-time employment.
Taking care of business
The moral of the story? Challenging yourself in a new place – and there’s not much newer than Alaska – might lead to opportunities you could never have imagined.
If you’d told me 10 years ago that I’d be writing full-time for the Internet one day, I’d have called you a liar to your face. I simply couldn’t have envisioned making a living as a full-time freelancer for a non-print medium. But when the opportunity arose, I was perfectly positioned to take advantage.
Who knows what opportunities await your son or daughter – or you – in one of those top-10 states? Staying home and scratching out a living in the service or retail industries while awaiting that Big Break could turn out to be the right move. But it could also be a huge waste of your youth, in terms of both career and finances.
That doesn’t mean giving up on your preferred field. Staying in touch through LinkedIn and other social media and attending professional conferences can help keep you in the loop. In the meantime, you’ll be taking care of business instead of sitting around wishing your life were different.
Related reading:
- 5 ways saving for retirement is like a marathon
- If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?
- How NOT to cure boredom
- Is it ever too late to start saving?
- Cards and consequences
I agree with you. I live in Kansas. It is a great place to live. I am so glad my son doesn’t have College debt and he had the drive to find jobs in Oklahoma and North Dakota until he finally settled back in Kansas near me. He took on some tough jobs. I’m so proud of him. Sometimes you have to go where the jobs are.
Always nice to hear a happy ending, i.e., no student debt and a job after college. And you’re right: Jobs won’t necessarily fall in your lap.
Thanks for reading, and for leaving a comment.
Great advice for the recently graduated/not yet established! But for those of us who have deep roots, i.e. business and social contacts, home ownership, family, long-term knowledge of our area – not so much. Moving CAN be a good thing. Or it can deplete already- limited funds, disrupt families and social support networks, lead to depression and health consequences, and not result AT ALL in the desired “fresh start”.
Ask me how I know this 😉
Which is why I said not everyone is suited to pull up stakes and light out for the territories…Sorry it didn’t work out for you. I remember the first couple of years in Alaska as being difficult at times because I was thousands of miles away from family and had no one on whom to call if, say, my daughter got sick and I needed to go to work anyway. (Thankfully, my editor let me write at home if necessary.)
It all ended up working out for me. But it was stressful.
Donna, would the advice be the same for a young person without a college degree? Our sons are avoiding college debt until they have a definite course of action and know what they want to study, but the work prospects around here are mostly food service and retail, and frequently part-time at that. With no mortgage and no debt, they’re in an ideal position to relocate. Shoot – if my employment prospects were any better, I’d be considering it myself.
I would think so, yes. Some of the jobs aren’t necessarily highly specialized, i.e., require college degrees. And some probably are highly specialized but you get your training somewhere other than college.
If I were them I’d check those states’ department of labor websites and also the online want ads. Wouldn’t pull up stakes and move until I was sure I had a job and a place to stay, but it might also be worth flying/driving out for interviews that were set in stone.
Best-case scenario: They get jobs that lead to that specialization (for example, one of DF’s sons is apprenticing with the plumbers and pipefitters union) or they get jobs and move up (or sideways) in a company. A friend of mine made big bucks during the pipeline era by sitting in an office and moving equipment from camp to camp by phone; a friend tells of a guy she knew whose job was to drive workers to a construction site and then keep the bus running all day so it wouldn’t freeze up and die (he got a lot of reading done).
Good luck to your boys. Even if they don’t land the job of their dreams, it’ll be an adventure to see another place and maybe get a peek at work they never knew existed.
I’m from a small town in IL, but I moved to KC (the border between MO & KS) in college. I graduated with a hefty sum of student loan debt, but was very fortunate that I landed a full-time job WITH benefits 2 months before college graduation in 2010 in the middle of hiring crisis. It was a terrible job, very high stress & NOT where I saw myself, but it paid the bills. And it padded my resume with real-world work experience. After 3 years of hard work I was able to transfer within the company to a job I love. I remind my younger friends that most people have to work their way up from the pits. Not everyone lands their dream job right outta college.
Good point. Again, real-life experiences are important to share: “This is how it happened, and this is what it led to.” Thanks.
Thanks for this detailed article! We’ve been trying for months to get our son to consider going where the jobs are rather than complaining about not being able to land that perfect job. It’s been frustrating…but now I have a concise article to give him some additional food for thought. Thanks bunches!
Interestingly, I’ve got health care professional friends for whom this is also true. I don’t think they’ll be coming back to either coast any time soon because their jobs and quality of life in the Midwest are so much better by comparison.
Just had a chat with an old friend about how, a decade ago, we never could have imagined being where we are now. In many ways, even though we haven’t achieved nearly all the things we might have wanted to, we *are* living the dream. And neither of us took the paths we thought we would. Sometimes risks don’t pay off and you’re in a worse position than before, granted. For us, between flogging every opportunity possible and working really hard at trying to make the best of them, we have had the great good fortune for it to have turned out for the better.
As we often said in the Fatwallet Forums in ye olde days: YMMV.
YMMV ?
Internet shorthand for “your mileage may vary.”
Thank you!
We moved to Iowa about three years ago for my husbands job. I wasn’t sure what to expect having never even visited Iowa before. Let me say that we love it here.
Yahoo! finance also recently did a piece on a related subject. They showed now WalMart in Williston, ND is paying $17 for entry level jobs. They had a lady who moved there from FL with her husband. She went from making $8 an hour in FL to $17.40 in ND. She said she was so happy because there were so many more opportunities in ND.
My son graduated from college and there were no openings in his field. Rather than wait for a job to open for hs English teachers, he took a job as a PE aide in the elementary school. The next year, there was an opening which he was able to fill. Then, he still lived with his father rather than getting a place of his own. He saved every penny and put a hefty down payment on a home.
Looking at the states for the best job opportunities, I was struck by the low opportunities in Texas, where he lives. He married a woman from ND because she came to TX for a job. Maybe the jobs in education are different.
My daughter, a first grade teacher (specialty is reading), could not find an opening, so she took a job as a fifth-grade teacher, signing before she graduated. In six months, a job opened for a first-grade teacher. Both children just took jobs, any job in education, and their wanted position opened in six months.
I did not mean to post yet. I think their working at any job in the system made them more hirable since the administration and teachers got to know their work ethic and personality.