Career Networks: Co-ops, Internships and Full-Time Jobs
The process of job placement is a difficult one and one which includes the idea of perfect matching within networks. The idea of constricted set often plays a role when placing students at different jobs, internships and co-ops. Just like how the hospital homework problem, with the eight medical students who were qualified for at least one of the four teaching hospitals, ended up being infeasible because of a constricted set. Real life jobs aren’t as simple. When I was going through the co-op last semester there were a limited number of employers and a limited number of co-op students. The student wanted to be matched with an offer from at least one company. And the companies want at least on if not two co-op students depending on the company. This was a mutually beneficial relationship and pairing for both parties involved. However, the issue of constricted sets arises because of restrictions of major or the number of students who are in the co-op process. Additionally, there was some valuation for each student based on how badly the company wanted them especially due to the various skills they offered. If you were to make up a graph of what this matching looked like it would be
The problem with this set of matching is that there will never be a perfect matching. There is a constricted set between student B and C for company 1. There is no one that company 4 desires or is qualified for. Therefore, if this was a real life situation with real students and companies not every student would get a co-op until company 4 changed their standards or policies.
But then as we grow up and start actually looking for full-time jobs rather than internships and co-ops, it becomes a little bit more complicated of a graph. There is still the element of us selling our skills to the company to appeal to them, but unlike co-op offers, there are way more full-time jobs available. So, therefore there’s a valuation in the students with what is the best pay, city…etc can they get hired. Instead of choosing between 1 or 2 co-op offers, now students are applying to a lot more jobs and going on a lot more interviews. Now, it will still be the case that students have 1 offer and that’s the job they must take but a lot more constricted sets are formed because students might be the only job offer for two or three companies and it is more the choice of the student rather than the company (depending on the situation).
Once the first round of jobs have been accepted after college and students start working in the companies. After a few years it’s all about trying to look into switching jobs for various reasons: promotion, salary raise, unhappiness at current job. And that’s where the recent issues have arisen with LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an online job world-networking site. You can create a profile with your resume, interests and what your current job status is: employed, searching for new job…etc. This is a relatively new network created just within the past few years. Recent studies have shown the issues with the privacy settings. You can set privacy settings on your profile so that your current employer doesn’t know you are searching for a new job. So now the internal company graph of employees fulfilling certain rows has the chance to become unbalanced. If the company cannot see if the employee is shopping around for new jobs then they have the disadvantage of not being able to begin the hiring process. There are many graphs, constricted sets, perfect matching and networks which are seen in the everyday life of careers: job offers, co-op offers and even internship offers. All of these aspects to networking are important in order to keep people employed as well as companies beginning to function. It will be interesting to see as we all start to graduate and head into the working world how exactly our career path will encounter new ways to network such as LinkedIn or other unknown mobile applications or social media sites.
-mch98
Sources: http://www.cnbc.com/id/49240135
http://press.linkedin.com/about