There’s no denying that the job market for New Grads is still tough. But there a few signs of improvement. CareerBuilder’s Annual Job Forecast reports that 21 percent of companies hiring New Grads will hire more than a year ago. And 16 percent plan to offer higher starting salaries. Neverthless, there’s a long way to go as the number of firms planning to hire recent college graduates is basically unchanged at 44%, down from a high of 79% in 2007. Companies planning to hire list the following activities as pertinent experience to include on resumes:

• Internships - 62 percent

• Part-time jobs in another area or field - 50 percent

• Volunteer work - 40 percent

• Class work - 31 percent

• Involvement in school organizations - 23 percent

• Managing activities for sororities and fraternities – 21 percent

• Sports activities - 13 percent

This list of activities is encouraging. There are techniques to make these most effective on your resume as well as in a cover letter. Be certain to learn how to include as many of these activities as possible. They are the evidence that you can get a job done. In addition, you want to be prepared to discuss them in detail during job interviews. Figure out strategies to describe them so they resemble tasks in a job. Employers are looking to see that you undertake challenges and meet them effectively.

Don’t follow conventional wisdom when it comes to your job search during the holiday season. The holidays actually present an excellent reason to connect with old friends and former colleagues and build or rebuild your network. Networking is a long and continuous process. Halting it at any time is not a good idea, and, in this tough job market you need to be follow your job search strategy relentlessly.

Despite the holidays companies continue their process of filling open positions. A good company is always interested in finding talented employees. Besides, if more openings occur early in the year then you will be better positioned if you have been reading your resume, setting up and enhancing your Linked-In profiles, and setting up exploratory interviews.

If you are employed and looking for a better job, you have more time during the last slow weeks of the year to spend time on your job search effort.

The bottom line this time of year is simply this: Companies do not stop posting positions. Human Resource departments don’t all close down and take vacation. This is not the time to put your job search in neutral. Keep moving forward. Persistence is omnipotent.

Don’t give up golf during your job search. I’ve found that my most successful clients at the job search game do two things well: 1) They are thorough and relentless in their job search, even following much of my advice, and, 2) They still make time for a bit of leisure. So, play a little golf. You can even make it part of your job search. Talk careers with someone you pair up with for a round. Call some long-lost acquaintances for a round and do some useful networking. If you have other leisure activities you enjoy to keep you cool during a job search, share them here.

Michael Swaine

Michael Swaine is among the world’s leading experts on programming and the software industry.  He helped launch the first personal computer newsweekly, InfoWorld. He co-authored Fire in the Valley, the seminal tech history book on which the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley was based. He was editor-in-chief of Dr. Dobb’s Journal and has written for and edited several other magazines. His latest creation is Prag Pub for The Pragmatic Programmers (http://pragprog.com/magazines). We asked him to discuss the state of programming as a profession.

Career Upshift: Are programmers feeling the pain of the economic downturn, or are they somewhat protected thanks to their skills which remain in more demand than lots of other services? Are resumes for programmers a necessity?

Swaine: Programming skills remain in demand, especially in tough times when businesses try to save money by automating processes, This to some extent makes the profession recession-proof. But all the big companies have been laying people off, and some of the layoffs have hit programmers. Programmers who work for companies have lost jobs and had to find other jobs, others have turned to independent contractor status, and programmers who were already independent contractors have seen a lot of churn in their client lists. There’s work out there, but there’s also a lot of uncertainty.

Career Upshift: Is there a shortage of programmers?

Swaine: There is a shortage of GOOD programmers.

Career Upshift: Would you advise a college student to study computer science and aspire for a career in the field? Or, has that day passed and now computing should just be a hobby?

Swaine: Yes, computer science is probably about as safe a career choice as you could make. But career is the operative word. I can’t predict the future, but I would expect even more programmers in the future to be working as independent contractors. So you may not have a job in the traditional sense, and so it would be a good idea to pick up supplementary skills in time management and simple accounting.

Career Upshift: Name a few exciting trends and/or new occurrences in the software development field? What makes each exciting?

Swaine: One is multicore processors. Writing parallel software can be like starting over from scratch as a programmer. It requires a major mind shift, and there are many important techniques and algorithms yet to be discovered.

Also, no dominant programming language. There are preferred languages for specific tasks, like Ruby on Rails for Web app development, but we don’t have a single dominant language today as we did when C or Java was the must-know language. This means that you can take time to learn a new language like Clojure or Erlang and not feel like it’s frivolous.

Career Upshift: What skills make for a good programmer?

Swaine: The mandatory skill or attribute for a programmer is focus. If you have spent many long sessions at a game console, you have what it takes to be a programmer. Really: you don’t have to be good at math, you just have to be anal — er, let’s say focused. To be a GOOD programmer you have to have a willingness, even an eagerness, to learn.

Being a successful programmer means always learning. And to be an in-demand programmer, you need to be very disciplined, because there’s a very good chance you’ll spend a good part of your career as an independent contractor, which is to say a small business owner with only yourself as an employee. And that requires being able to manage your time extremely well.

Career Upshift: A programmer loses his/her job after many years in a company. What suggestions do you have for getting ready to find a new position?

Swaine: Realize that you already have a new job: selling yourself. Either to a potential employer or to potential clients. Approach finding a job as a job, and don’t cringe at the idea of selling yourself, because it’s not that bad.

You don’t want a job that isn’t a good fit, so your job is just to communicate clearly something that you really believe and understand: why you and this job are a really good fit. Oh, you also need to think about the product and the packaging. You are the product. Are you satisfied with your set of skills? Do your strengths match what you want to do? Maybe it’s time to brush up on some skills, take a course, throw yourself into learning that new language. Make sure you’re the you that you want to be. And then communicate your virtues, clearly but succinctly. As for the packaging, think about the first impression you make in an interview: it may be the lasting impression you leave.