President Obama's budget projects hundreds of thousands of new job openings in government and for government contractors during his first term. How do you find and land one well suited to you? Here's a guide.

Where are the jobs?

Especially when aiming for a government job, I reject the standard career-counselor advice to use your network to gain access to people with the power to hire you. My clients increasingly find that it's more time-effective to search the best job Web sites regularly by keyword and zip code for on-target job openings and then craft a top-notch application for each.

So where are the jobs?

• About 85% of federal jobs are not in D.C. They're typically in major cities, both around the country and overseas.

• To access the federal-job postings, start with www.usajobs.gov, which, as of this writing, lists 47,059 openings. That site has recently added a link for positions created by the stimulus package. Many of those positions will be filled through accelerated hiring procedures. To access that directly, go to http://jobsearch.usajobs.gov/
  a9recoveryjobs.asp.

• Visit the individual Web sites of your favorite federal agencies. You can access the major ones from http://dcjobsource.com/fed.html. An agency may have special positions and recruitment programs listed only on its site. That means you'll be competing with fewer job seekers. Also, some federal agencies -- for example, the FBI, Federal Reserve, Government Accountability Office and CIA -- don't have to advertise their jobs on www.usajobs.gov.

• An even more under-the-radar source of federal jobs is www.fedbizopps.gov. It lists positions, including many overseas (Iraq or Afghanistan, anyone?), that are filled via personal service contracts. Those jobs are less secure than government jobs but usually pay more.

• Federal agencies, especially the EPA, State Department, FBI, FDIC and Treasury Department, often fill unadvertised openings at job fairs. Some are listed at www.govcentral.com/careers/
  articles/1871 and at www.fedjobs.com/chat/jobfairs.html.

• Some private temporary agencies staff federal temp positions. Some of those agencies are listed on www.state.gov/
  m/dghr/flo/c21666.htm.

• If you're a student, a good route to a permanent government job is a federal internship. The site www.makingthedifference.org lists 200 federal internship programs. Also see www.studentjobs.gov.

• There's a directory of federal jobs set aside for veterans and people with disabilities: apps.opm.gov/sppc_directory.

• For state, county and city jobs, visit your local government's Web site. To find yours, enter, for example, "government jobs" and "Chicago" in a search engine.

• Lots of stimulus dollars are going to federal contractors -- independent firms that the government hires to do its bidding. Want to become one? The government's portal for potential contractors is www.fedbizopps.gov. Also see www.recovery.gov, which reports where stimulus dollars are going. Want to work for a government contractor? The 100 largest are listed at www.usaspending.gov. Smaller contractors list openings on their own site. The good news is that many or most such openings are aggregated, along with literally millions of other job openings, at www.indeed.com and www.simplyhired.com. Another approach: Regularly check the business section of your local newspaper or a dedicated business periodical, such as Crain's or Business Times, for announcements or articles about companies that have just received government contracts.

Which jobs should you apply for?

1. Because there are so many applicants for most government jobs, you probably won't stand a chance unless you at least minimally meet most or all the requirements listed in the job announcement. Save your energy for the good fits. There are so many government openings, for everything from chef to chief, you'll likely find plenty.

2. Federal jobs will be most abundant in areas the Obama administration has listed as priorities: renewable energy, the environment, infrastructure, health care and education. Lily Whiteman, author of How to Land a Top-Paying Federal Job, says jobs are particularly plentiful for contracts and grants managers, procurement officers, financial managers/auditors, IT specialists, intelligence experts, and people with knowledge of the culture and language of Middle East countries.

3. Don't worry if your first government job isn't perfect -- your priority should probably be just to get into the government. That means applying for jobs you're fully or even overqualified for. Once you're a government employee, you'll find it easier to transfer to something you'll like better.

Landing the job

Finding on-target job openings is the easy part. The challenge is to become the winning candidate -- especially now, with all the publicity around ObamaJobs and the private sector offering so few full-time, long-term positions with benefits.

Applying for a government job is usually cumbersome. That's good news for you. So many people get frustrated with the application process that they do a shoddy job. If you craft a solid application for all the jobs you can, you'll likely prevail. And remember, the pot at the end of the rainbow is quite golden: moderate work hours, unmatched job security, great benefits, and ample vacation and holidays. Thank you, taxpayers.

My job-seeking clients are finding these to be the most potent approaches to beating out the competition:

• Research your target agency. Whiteman suggests you review its Web site and, particularly, its recent press releases. Then reflect your knowledge of the agency in your application.

• Call the hiring manager to get application tips. Yes, there's a chance you'll be viewed as pushy, but there's a greater chance you'll get inside information or even develop enough of a relationship to gain an edge against the competition.

• Use a two-column cover letter. Hiring managers are overwhelmed with applications, so yours should quickly and clearly demonstrate that you're a great fit for the position: On the left side, list the job's major qualifications; on the right, say how you meet each requirement.

• Tell PAR stories. In interviews and in job-application essays (in federal job applications they're usually called KSAs, which stands for knowledge, skills and abilities), tell one or more anecdotes that demonstrate you have one or more key attributes listed in the job announcement. Each anecdote should usually follow the PAR formula: a problem you faced, how you approached it, and its positive resolution.

• Create a portfolio. Consider creating a Web site consisting of your work products and resume. Of course, include its URL on your job applications.

• Make sure your message is clear. Whiteman says that before submitting an application, it must pass the "30-second-test." Ask a person you trust to identify your best attributes from your application in 30 seconds. If he or she can't, it's unlikely a hiring manager will be able to do so.

A Socially Responsible Plan

Definitions vary, but a widely embraced one is that a socially responsible business focuses on the so-called triple bottom line: profits, people and planet.

This often means that rather than shoot for maximum profit, a company offers a product or service that meets an important need -- for example, providing laptop computers to some of the billion people who live on less than $1 a day.

It also means treating workers, suppliers, and customers better than a pure profit motive would justify, and making not-so-profitable efforts to improve the environment, or at least to keep damage to a minimum.

Of course, if a business is too Mother Teresa-like, its costs will be high and its revenues low. Translation: You will be out of a business and all your employees out of a job.

How can you be socially responsible and still stay in business? These actions are likely to at least pay for themselves:

Treat your workers with respect. This costs little or nothing yet can facilitate the recruitment and retention of top people. You needn't pay above-market salaries. You may even be able to pay slightly under-market as long as your workplace culture does three things:

• Encourages earned praise and does not tolerate bullying, backstabbing and the like.

• Provides workers with ample opportunities for real input -- for example, sharing all financial information with workers, inviting their suggestions and offering cash rewards for those implemented.

• Nurtures each worker's career development (ask bosses to help each supervisee develop a career plan, and provide or pay for needed training).

Make inexpensive but highly visible donations that prompt current and potential customers and employees to buy from you rather than from a competitor. Examples:

• Donate your product to the needy -- and be sure the media know about it. For example, if you make blankets, donate some of your warmest ones to the poor of Siberia. Not only will you get good-guy PR, but also, in future marketing, you can advertise your blankets as "Warm enough to make Siberia comfortable."

• Provide the bibs for runners in a high-profile competition. Say you financed bib numbers for San Francisco's Bay to Breakers race, which attracts 100,000 runners. For the cost of some paper numbers, 100,000 people would wear your company's name, viewed by the throngs watching the race on the streets and on TV.

Such donations will offer the impression that you're a good corporate citizen and so, as increasingly is the case, if you need government permission or money for something, you'll have a leg up.

Reduce your carbon footprint. Doing so -- for example, buying used or recycled products rather than new -- may improve profitability as well as your green image. Be sure your Web site, media outreach and products trumpet your efforts. You'll likely attract more customers and good workers in excess of any costs.

Use jump-start charity. Donate to build future demand. For example, give free software licenses (the marginal cost of which is near zero) to one school in hopes that word of mouth will make the district's other schools want to buy it.

Be extraordinarily honest with consumers. In selecting and training salespeople and in marketing, be genuine: Outline your product's strengths and weaknesses as well as which consumers it is and is not ideal for.

For example, an education provider, whether a tutor or a college, that explains what sorts of students are best served will yield more satisfied customers and, in turn, referrals. Plus, your acknowledgment that some potential customers would be wise to turn to a competitor would probably attract other customers as well as employees who are proud to work for an unusually honest firm.

The Bottom Line

After you do all of the above, your business will probably be not only socially responsible but also more profitable. Today, standard corporate practice is to divert some of that profit to charity. But I believe that's unfair to employees and, if it's a public company, to shareholders.

If you want your firm to be even more socially responsible, consider awarding bonuses to worthy employees and declaring a dividend for shareholders, inviting them to donate some of that bonus and dividend to their favorite charity. That way, each person gets to choose the charity they feel is most worthy.

More important, that approach is likely to lead to wiser expenditures of charity dollars than if a company makes the decision. It takes a lot of effort to dispense large sums wisely, and staffs of corporate foundations are often longer on idealism than on the hard-nosed business skills needed to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of charitable options.

Extended version of my argument in my debate against Kati Haycock, president of Ed Trust

Education Writers Association National Conference, May 1, 2009

I want to thank the Education Writers Association, in particular, Lori Crouch and Lisa Walker, for inviting me here today. Lisa invited me here 21 years ago to discuss my book How to Get an Ivy League Education at a State University. I was unable to come and am most pleased to be here now. I believe that few people have potentially greater impact on society than education writers--In shining a light on education's excellent and terrible, you can affect the lives of literally millions of students, our future.

Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when a client who is the first in her or his family to go to college and spent five, six, eight years attempting to get a degree, taking on a mountain of debt, and triumphing over the odds, finally got the degree and yet is unable to land a job more professional than what he could have gotten as a high school graduate. Typically, that person attended a not-prestigious college, struggled to get even a modest GPA in one of the easier and less marketable majors, for example, sociology or art.

This may be even sadder: A career counseling client, a woman could not pass the GED tests no matter how hard she tried. She so wanted to be a lineman. She said, "I love to climb stuff!" If she'd gone to a high school with career and technical education integrated into its curriculum, she would have graduated on time and gone into a great high-paying job. Instead, she was a high school dropout, couldn't get a job and sold drugs to support herself and her child. She had low self-esteem and thought she was stupid. But she was body-smart -- very physical and good with her hands. The CTE programs were all post-secondary and required at least a GED, so she was locked out.

Too, I believe that a career-prep high school program could have made all the difference for a kid like Danny, the boy my wife and I have mentored for a number of years. He just was not academically oriented. When he was in the 9th grade, his reading ability was at the 5th grade level--Shakespeare was Greek to him- and he couldn't care--he liked fixing things, being adventurous and in the outdoors. And his high school which offered no career-prep program made Danny feel that unless he was good in academics, went to college, and got a degree, he'd be a second-class citizen with no career future. So perhaps not surprisingly, despite our mentoring efforts, Danny was constantly in trouble, dropped out of high school, and is unemployed.

My dream is a Student's Bill of Rights that would include students' right to an informed choice between two high school paths: a high-quality pre-college path and a high-quality, non-dumping-ground career/tech path--which could include community college, apprenticeships, etc. What does "informed choice" mean? Each student would know, for each path, how much growth similar students have made in their reading, writing, thinking, mathematical reasoning, and employability.

Why, increasingly, don't we give kids choices in their high school education--including a high-quality, non-dumping-ground career-prep option so they feel there is hope for them even if they're not academically oriented? It's largely the colleges' fault. We like to think of universities as beneficent nonprofits, partly because you and I are their success stories: we have good jobs that we probably couldn't have gotten without degrees, we may have liked college and grown from it.

But as someone with a Ph.D. from Berkeley in education evaluation who has taught at four universities and been consultant to 15 college presidents, I must reluctantly admit that universities too often act less like beneficent non profits than like businesses--and not the most honorable ones. I'm not talking about community colleges here. It is mainly universities and their lobbying/marketing organizations that too often use unsavory, sophisticated tactics to get as many students to enroll as possible, whether or not a student would be better served somewhere else: for example, at a community college or in an apprenticeship program. Examples:

¨ Universities' marketing and media relations machines trumpet the terribly misleading statistic that college graduates earn a million dollars more over their lifetime. Why misleading?

-- For starters, even the College Board, whose customer is the colleges, admits that it's only $600,000.

-- Far more important, that million-dollar-more statistic hides the fact that the pool of college-bound students is brighter, more motivated, and has better family connections than the pool of the non-college-bound. So you could lock them in a closet for four years and they'd earn much more than the non-college bound.

-- Perhaps most important of all, that statistic is retrospective--reporting what past generations of college students earned. That bears little relation to what today's college graduates will earn over their lifetime. Why? Back in 1970 we only sent 40% of high school graduates to college. Now it's 70%. --so colleges accept many weaker students. As a result, professors so dumb down classes and/or focus on teaching their arcane research rather than the basics undergraduates need that even the half of freshmen that graduate (and half do not, even if given six years!) graduate with frighteningly poor skills in reading, thinking, etc. (See the summaries of Pew Studies and data reported in the president's Spelling Commission report in "America's Most Overrated Product: Undergraduate Education,' which appeared last year in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

So, we now have many more college-degree holders but who have far weaker skills than previous generations of college graduates have at the same time as employers of white-collar workers are demanding ever higher-level skills and those employers are therefore hiring ever more foreign workers on H-1B visas, offshoring ever more white-collar jobs, and turning ever more of the remaining jobs into temp and part-time jobs, and automating still others. Virtually no expert expects those hiring trends to reverse. Indeed, over the lifetime of today's graduates, those trends will likely accelerate.

For example, most experts agree that soon, most jobs whose work product can be sent over the internet will be offshored to low-cost countries, for example, China, India, and Viet Nam, where the work can be done for 50 to 90% less--decreasing the demand for U.S. engineers and computer science majors. Even some U.S. journalism work--copy editing--is being offshored. (Important side note: Our leaders are wrong in calling for increasing our number of scientists and engineers--Even if we don't project into a future of greater outsourcing, there already is an oversupply--even our PhDs are having a hard time finding work.)

So in guiding a high school student whether to attend college, it is crucial that that student consider not what college accomplished for past generations but what it's likely to accomplish in their lifetime.

Of course, for many high school students, college still is a wise choice. But that's far less often true for the 200,000 students that the so-called four-year colleges admit each year who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high school class. According to Clifford Adelman, who until recently was senior researcher at the U.S. Department of Education, two-thirds of those students will not have completed their bachelor's degree, even if given 8 1/2 years! And even if they defy the odds, most of them will have graduated near the bottom of a not-prestigious college's class, and majored in minimally marketable majors, for example, sociology or art, en toto rendering them minimally employable.

Think of how many bright degree holders you know that are not earning a middle-class living. Indeed, millions of bachelor's holders return to community college--144,000 in California alone last year--for career training because their bachelor's degree couldn't land them a job. The situation is far worse for the many college students each year who graduated in the bottom half of their high school class. Most of them end up dropping out of college, with a mountain of debt (that you cannot discharge through bankruptcy,) having learned little, having devastasted self-esteem with often terrible consequences to them and those around them, and with no more than a McJob.

Instead, if they had attended a career-tech program in high school and perhaps at a community college, they would likely have acquired a marketable skill--for example, the massive number of Obama-created jobs that are needed to rebuild America's infrastructure. The colleges have been doing such an effective job of deceiving students into believing they'll be second-class citizens if they don't go to college, that we have shortages in many technical and trades fields--for example, machinists, welders, masons, etc., careers that are honorable work and pay a lot more than what the average sociology major is earning today.

Of course, universities do far more than just trumpet misleading statistics to try to build their enrollments and coffers. I could talk at length about the deceptive techniques that universities use to market to students and parents but today, I just want to point out two of their particularly potent under-the-radar tactics:

¨ Universities pull strings to get their professors key roles on state K-12 curriculum selection committees. These professors are masters at manipulating statistics and bury the other committee members with reports packed with deceptive statistics such as "You'll earn a million dollars more" thereby "proving" that college-prep courses are crucial for all.

¨ The same professors who are masters at using statistics when it serves the universities' purposes, use lame excuses (they claim, for example, that error variance in feasible study designs limits validity. In fact, that has only a modest effect) to claim it's impossible to provide useful statistics on how much value-added comes from attending college: how much growth in reading, writing, thinking, etc., derives from the undergraduate education at their institution. They particularly bury statistics about how much learning accrues for the 200,000 students each year that "four-year" colleges admit from the bottom half of high schools' graduating classes. Or even their four- and five-year graduation rates? Let alone how well employed their graduates are? A linchpin of a Student's Bill of Rights is to provide that crucial consumer information to all prospective college students. After all, we require tire manufacturers to mold into each tire's sidewall, its tread life, temperature, and traction ratings yet we allow students to make arguably the most important (and most expensive) decision of their life based on the colleges' sales material: Madison-Avenue-inspired brochures and websites, and highly trained salespeople: tour guides and the misleadingly titled admissions counselors. All but the top 5% of colleges are minimally selective and their "counselors" will rarely counsel a student to attend a college other than their own let alone a non-college alternative, such as an apprenticeship.

Exacerbating the misleading "everyone-to-college" movement, EdTrust, uses bumper sticker rhetoric such as "High standards for all students." Unfortunately, the data does not support such a simplistic prescription. For example, the just-released major study conducted by Stanford University researchers of the effectiveness of forcing more students into a college prep curriculum-- requiring all California students to pass an exit exam consisting of college-prep material--showed a significant decline in student achievement and a decline in high school graduation rate. Ed Trust presents its own data which leads to the opposite conclusion but I would be remiss if I didn't point out that a wide range of experts have called Ed Trust data misleading, even dishonest. I would have thought that such criticism would most likely come from right-wing groups but most of the outcry has been from Democrats. For example, respected liberal U.S.C education professor, Stephen Krashen wrote an article entitled, "Don't Trust Ed Trust." Gerald Bracey, who for two decades in the prestigious Phi Delta Kappan has authored reports on the state of education, wrote an article in the Huffington Post called "The Education Trust's Disinformation Campaign." A Democratic member of the California State Board of Education, Jim Aschwinden said "Everyone knows Ed Trust is a sham. Go talk to Carol Liu, a Democratic senator who wanted to investigate Ed Trust and was stonewalled but eventually found out that the statistics EdTrust reports about its poster-boy program--San Jose Unified School District--were bogus." Dr. Barbara Nemko, Napa County Superintendent of Schools, the 2004-5 regional Superintendent of the Year, and her congressional district's 2009 Woman of the Year, has had first-hand dealings with Ed Trust and visited their so-called model program in San Jose. She is in the audience. Dr. Nemko, raise your hand. Feel free to talk with her after the presentation.

In contrast, a number of studies from neutral researchers rather than from advocacy groups support the value of career-prep programs for not-academically-oriented students. (These are listed on the Research Fact Sheet on the Association for Career and Technical Education website: acteonline.org:)

• CTE graduates are 10-15% more likely to be in the labor force, and earn 8-9% more than graduates of academic programs, according to a Russell Sage Foundation study. [i]
• In a Gates Foundation report, 81 percent of students who dropped out said that “more real world learning” may have influenced them to stay in school. [ii]
• Seven years after graduating from high school, CTE students had earnings that increased by about 2 percent for each additional high school CTE course they took. [iii]
• A ratio of 1 CTE class for every 2 academic classes was shown to minimize the risk of students dropping out in a National Research Center for Career and Technical Education (NRCCTE) report. [iv]
• 90 percent of respondents to the Skills Gap Report indicated a moderate to severe shortage of qualified skilled production employees, including front-line workers, such as machinists, operators, craft workers, distributors, and technicians. [v]

Let's move beyond statistics to the human. Especially when so many factors affect graduation rates, let alone success-in-life rates, despite my having completed 30 graduate level credits in statistics, I believe that sometimes, common sense is a wiser guide than statistics for setting education policy. So imagine you were a kid entering high school and you were still reading on a sixth grade level, had lots of trouble with basic math, and to top it all, you felt unmotivated to do schoolwork. Burned out on school, you had heard that your high school was one of the 340 in California to have a Partnership Academy (http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/gs/hs/cpaoverview.asp), school-within-a-school, with a family atmosphere, designed mainly for the at-risk and not-academically oriented, in which many of the courses were in a career path of your choice--perhaps health care, the arts, green construction, or business, where you learned reading by, for example, reading a book on how a boy grew up to become a wonderful nurse, and in which you went on lots of field trips to see people at work in a range of occupations--from chef to heart-lung-machine technician. You also heard, correctly, that not-academically oriented kids in Partnership Academies ended up with higher reading, writing, and math scores, and better career prospects than if they had to take a standard college-prep curriculum filled with geometric theorems, the halide series of chemical elements, and--you who is reading on a sixth-grade level-- Shakespeare.

But now, all of a sudden, you're told that this consulting group, Ed Trust, had come to your district and convinced the district (for a $40,000 fee) to take that option away from you--You'll have no choice but to be force-fed a curriculum full of the sociopolitical causes of the Peloponnesian Wars, stochastic processes in chemistry, simultaneous equations, etc. How would you feel?

You're told it's good for you. So you try but reading on a sixth-grade level and not very motivated to do schoolwork, when you relentlessly experience the frustration of not understanding the classwork and seeing other kids understanding, might you be tempted to feel like a loser and give up, and perhaps like so many kids, turn to drugs or alcohol, join a gang, or drop out? Forcing a one-size-fits-all education down the throats of even not-academically-oriented kids is likely the core cause of the decline in student achievement and increase in the dropout rate when California tried an experiment in which you couldn't get a high school diploma unless--no matter whether you're academically-oriented or not--you passed an exam filled with college-prep material.

Ironically, a one-size-fits-all curriculum, which was intended to avoid minorities being tracked in dumping-ground classes has resulted in that very thing. For example, in EdTrust's showcase district, the San Jose Unified School District, if a student cannot succeed in its one-size-fits-all curriculum in its regular high schools, the student is shipped to one of its many alternative schools or an adult school--which have disproportionately high percentages of students of color.

Both from a logical point of view as well as in looking fairly at the data, I cannot imagine a worse approach to helping all children to live up to their potential than to insist on one-size fits-all education. It's ironic that EdTrust says it values diversity yet insists on a one-size-fits-all education. Imagine that someone told you that in order to renew your membership in EWA, you had no choice: You had to have college-prep-level expertise in math and science. Mightn't you think that was unfair--forcing everyone into a narrow box determined by some out-of-touch entity? Mightn't you drop out of EWA? That's what one-size-fits-all education is doing to our children, our future.

When you hear educational leaders spout politically seductive bumper sticker slogans like, "All students can learn to high standards" and "Everyone to college," I encourage you to do what you learned in J school: Dig. Go visit high schools with large numbers of the kids we're talking about --sub 50%ile SAT scores and less than B averages--See them in a randomly (not principal-selected: one great teacher isn't scalable.) Usually, you'll discover how that the classes are college-prep in name only--they're dumbed down, depriving the students in those classes who should be preparing for college with a rigorous education. Or if the class is rigorous (geometric theorems, etc) many kids in the class are getting little out of the course, much less so than if instruction was more practically oriented--estimation, conflict resolution, budgeting, using databases, and of course, career-related instruction.

I urge you to visit those inner-city schools in which EdTrust says most kids are satisfactorily completing a rigorous college-prep curriculum.. See if common sense really is defied--Decide for yourself whether it's really wiser that kids who can't read sixth-grade level material be taught Shakespeare instead of learning to read a manual that will enable them to install solar panels on our roofs.

Compare Ed Trust's showcase schools with the new generation of non--dumping ground career and technical programs in high school. For a master list, see www.acteonline.org/promisingprogramsearch.aspx

Ask colleges, "How many students do you admit each year from the bottom half of their high school class? What percentage of them graduate in 4 years? 5 years? How much growth do they make in reading, writing, thinking? What percentage of them are, after graduation, employed in work requiring a college degree rather than in a McJob? Ask the college why it doesn't disclose that information in their recruitment brochure and prominently on their website? Universities are supposed to be benevolent non-profits serving students--Shouldn't they offer the same level of disclosure that tire manufacturers must?

As part of a Student Bill of Rights, bachelor's-degree awarding institutions should offer such information and high schools should provide similar information for its college-prep and career-prep programs. Imagine if a physician recommended you undergo a treatment that would require many years and cost a fortune without disclosing the odds of its success and its negative side effects. He'd be sued and lose in any court in the land. Yet colleges routinely do this yet we not only don't punish them, we reward them with ever more tax dollars in the form of Pell Grants, Stafford, and Perkins loans, which merely allow the colleges to raise their tuition yet higher.

Of course, no one wants a child to become a plumber if they could have been happier and more successful as a journalist or physician. Nor do we want to see a student who could have profited as a human being more from attending college than in an apprenticeship. But a one-size-fits-all education ensures that many, many children will be less likely to enjoy career and life success merely so they can learn elitist material irrelevant to their lives: quadratic equations or they don't graduate, Spanish 3 or they don't graduate, the causes of the War of the Roses of they don't graduate, the intricacies of table of chemical elements or they don't graduate. We are forcing many, many students down the path to life failure--unnecessarily.

Educational leaders are at the moment of truth: deciding whether to perform yet another Tuskegee experiment on children: forcing them--without even disclosing the risks--into a one-size-fits-all curriculum that is worse than risky.

I dream of an America in which students, with the help of their parents and counselors, will, with full disclosure, be able to choose the path more likely to enable her or him to flower. Especially if your child was struggling in school, wouldn't you want that for your child?

1. I would know that each nanosecond of wallowing mires me deeper into self-pity and inactivity and turns that chip on my shoulder into a boulder. So my job search would start immediately.

2. I'd tell myself (even if it's slightly delusional) that being terminated is for the best. I might actually say, as a mantra, "The layoff will pay off," hoping the affirmation will strengthen the neural pathway storing that thought. It's like exercising a muscle: The more you use it, the stronger it gets. That may not work, but what do I have to lose by trying?

2a. To help make that mantra a reality, I'd ask myself a few questions: What can I learn from the layoff? Should I vet my next employer more carefully? On my next job, do I need to work harder? Acquire new skills? Be lower-maintenance? Make myself better liked by peers? Do I need a job target that better matches my strengths and avoids my weaknesses? If I didn't know the answers, I'd get a 360-degree evaluation, based on candid, anonymous evaluations from former bosses, co-workers, customers and the like.

3. I'd make minimally painful cuts to my expenses:

• Eat at home: A dinner of broiled chicken breast and steamed broccoli with garlic is a lot cheaper and more healthful (albeit less enticing) than that Indian buffet I too often crave.

• Use free entertainment: Borrow videos and books from the library, invite friends over (and serve them Two Buck Chuck wine from Trader Joe's), take hikes, watch good (or even bad) TV, and surf the Internet.

• Stop unnecessary spending. Anesthetizing my angst with shopping will only amplify my stress. So, no new gadgets, no new clothes. I have enough to last until the economy recovers -- well, maybe not that long. And my next vacation will be after I get a job offer. The best way to ease my misery is to help someone in worse shape: Volunteer at a hospital, an animal shelter or a hospice.

4. I hate searching for a job and would want to get it over with as quickly as possible, so I'd cram the entire search into one week. Yes, it'd be a helluva week, but doing it in one week would mean that all I'd have to do later is take calls from people I've contacted and go to interviews. What would I do during that killer week?

• Start blogging in my area of professional expertise. It's easy to do, and it's free. Just use Blogger. Every day, I would write a 100- to 300-word post that would impress my target employer. I don't need to be Shakespeare; I just need to present good ideas clearly.

• Twitter. Don't know what that means? Twitter.com enables you to post statements of 140 or fewer characters -- called tweets -- to the site, searchable by keyword. Your tweets should be a parade of your ideas that would impress your target employer. So as a career counselor, I might post, "Want to work w/ your hands but have no real skills? Be a home weatherizer: Obama's put $5B aside for low-incomers to caulk and insulate their home."

  After I started Twittering, I would search Twitter.com (by keyword or name) to find fellow Twitterers (among the more than five million) who could hire me or refer me to someone who could hire me for my target job. I'd follow their tweets and, where it moves me, compliment them or "retweet" them -- that is, repost their tweets. That Twitterer (a potential employer) would notice me and might follow my tweets. In addition to my tweets that would include attempts at brief brillance, I would send non-desperate tweets and direct messages to my target Twitterers about my job search. For example, "UC Berkeley career coaching operation just shut down. So looking for another univ.-based coaching job. Any leads?" And such is how a relationship begins.

  My Twitter profile would include a link to my blog (which would include my bio) so that when my target employer gets curious about me, he might be further impressed. My Twitter profile would also include keywords that describe me. I'd focus, of course, on those that would appeal to my target employer, such as "career coach, "career columnist," "contributing editor, careers" "NPR San Francisco radio host" and "ABC San Francisco radio host." That way, an employer looking for someone like me can enter keywords and find me.

  My clients are telling me that this sort of Twittering is worth the time, more so than even developing your profiles on the vaunted king and queen of social media, LinkedIn and Facebook. Twitter is fun, and it yields good information, job leads and interviews.

  Watch this video interview with Twittering expert J.T. O'Donnell for tips.

• Cold contact the person with the power to hire me at the five to 20 employers I'd most want to work for, even though they're not advertising an on-target job. I want to get to the hirer early, before the job is advertised.

• My method of cold contact: Call, then e-mail, then call again:

  1. I'd call after hours, leaving messages such as "Until yesterday, I was a career coach at the University of California, Berkeley, but it cut the program so I'm looking for my next job. I'll be e-mailing you my portfolio, which includes a résumé, a video introduction of myself and a white paper [an impressive term for a short term paper] I wrote, "Seven Keys to Highly Effective Coaching."

  2. Using www.visualcv.com, I'd e-mail the aforementioned package. If I hadn't heard back in two days, I would call again during the day, when I had a chance of reaching the hirer, and would say, "I'm the Berkeley career coach who sent you his visual resume and portfolio . Not having heard from you, I assume you're not interested. But I know how things can fall between the cracks, so I'm taking the liberty of calling to follow up. If you think we should talk, if only to provide some advice as to where I should turn, I'd welcome hearing from you. My phone number is [repeat twice]."

• Call or e-mail the ten to 50 people in my network most likely to have a job lead for me. These could include former co-workers, fellow alumni, recruiters, relatives, my lawyer, haircutter and clergyperson. I'd give them the pitch, ask if they know anyone I should talk with, and ask if they're willing to keep their ears open for potential jobs.

• Answer five to ten on-target want ads. I wouldn't waste my time answering ads for jobs that don't appear to be a perfect fit. Today, want ads often generate mountains of applications. To make clear that I'm a perfect match, I'd use a two-column cover letter. On the left side, I would list the job requirements and, on the right side, explain how I meet each one.

For years, I've been pushing my clients to get a 360-degree evaluation -- that is, asking their boss, co-worker, and supervisees for anonymous feedback on their work.

I've also suggested using a 360-degree evaluation as a fast track to personal growth, getting feedback from friends, relatives and romantic partner(s).

But to be candid, few of my clients have responded to my exhortations and -- hypocrisy alert -- neither had I.

An easy evaluation

Because I want to practice what I preach and because -- especially as I get older -- I want to do everything I can to avoid becoming stagnant, I decided to get a 360-degree evaluation.

A new Web site, Checkster.com, makes it easy to get anonymous, work-related feedback. I did a five-minute self-evaluation at the site and then entered the e-mail addresses of eight people from whom I wanted feedback (you can choose from three to eight). They included my six most recent career-coaching clients, plus my editors at Kiplinger.com and U.S. News & World Report.

Checkster.com sent each person an e-mail inviting him or her to give me feedback anonymously, using the five-minute questionnaire. They were given a week to reply.

Five of my six clients responded; neither of my bosses did. Hmmph. (Once three or more people responded, I was notified of who did and didn't respond but was not told which questionnaire corresponded to which person.)

What I learned

My evaluations confirmed a number of positive aspects about me, which I'll refrain from recounting to prevent suspicious readers from thinking that I devised this column as an opportunity to toot my own horn. On the negative side, I got a few useful nuggets:

• Two of my clients said they wished I were more available between sessions. Now that they mention it, I'm guessing that some of my other clients feel that way, too. So from now on, I will more regularly invite my clients to send me e-mail about their progress and any stumbling blocks. I'll invite my needier clients to e-mail me every day with a rating of their progress..

• One of my clients wrote, "Because of his enthusiasm/energy, at times I felt that Marty was not fully in tune with someone who may just work more slowly, calmly." Although feedback from a single source should be taken with a grain of salt, that comment rings true. So I will redouble my efforts to modulate my energy level to accommodate my clients' natural style.

• Another client wrote, "Marty cannot solve all clients' problems, even if they are career-related: Therapy and career counseling are different."

I'm not sure I'll act much on the last one. I know that I can't solve all my clients' psychological problems, and perhaps I should consider referring a few more to therapy. But too often I've seen therapy actually make clients worse. Yes, therapy patients may gain insight into the causes of their problems, but their life is often no better for it.

Yet frequently, in just a few minutes, I'm able to help a client identify irrational beliefs and even the childhood roots of those beliefs that have kept the client stuck. Clients are then able to move forward and implement their action plan.

How to react

The way I responded to the last client's feedback illustrates an important principle. Some people feel the need to act on all feedback, while others reflexively reject all criticism. The sweet spot is to consider feedback and then accept or reject it on its merits.

I understand that you may still be reluctant to do a 360-degree evaluation. You could get bad news or criticism in a tough-to-improve-on area -- for example, being told you're "too intense" or you often "don't get it."

But it's worth the risk. A 360-degree evaluation is arguably the most potent way to become a better professional and usually a better person. And, especially in this lousy economy, it could even save your job.

Still unwilling? Here's a second-best solution: Do a self-SWOT. Write down your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Now what, if anything, do you want to do differently? More of? Less of?