As this year’s college graduates get ready to enter the ranks of those looking for jobs, it’s worth considering the highest paying (and worst paying) jobs available in the United States. Indeed, if you are wondering whether or not your degree is worth the money, this list might help you make a decision.

Most jobs, of course, fall somewhere in between the extremes of best paying and worst paying. As you consider the top paying jobs and worst paying jobs (as listed by Forbes on Yahoo! Finance), you can look at your own situation, and your own options and decide what path your career should follow.
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I have been working in stereotypical big business for more than 6 years.  I even have my own little cubicle and receive the sort of memos you see in “Office Space”.  I have welcomed new employees and said farewell to the same ones a couple of years later.  I have watched employees that started around the same time as me advance in the company or move on to something else.  Although there may not be any hard and fast rules that would guarantee career success, there do seem to be a few key attributes that truly help.

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When I got my first job out of college, I found out that they required their employees to dress business casual or professional every day. I knew that might happen, but I didn’t have to be happy about it. At the time, I owned one pair of black slacks, two solid-colored blouses, and one nice suit jacket. I needed some more outfits but buying business clothing can be incredibly expensive if you are not sure of the right places to shop. I panicked just a bit, but I learned very quickly where to find the best deals and how to maintain my new wardrobe.

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Blogging started off as my hobby job.  Before I knew that I wanted to do this full time, I had been skipping around to different money-making part-time activities in an effort to find a hobby that I’d like and that would give me some extra cash to boot.  I personally worked in a local bookstore on the weekends for a few months, then tried petsitting for about half a year, and even babysat for a few weekends.  Here is a closer look at these hobby job ideas.

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This post about “a little white lie in salary negotiation” sparked a bit of a heated debate in the Daily Worth community (I discovered it through a post on the New York Times Bucks blog). The original post said:

I’d found a position I liked and applied for it. The recruiter asked for my current salary. Let’s just say I inflated the figure—and told her I was earning $5,000 more than I was. (“Everyone does that,” a successful colleague had told me. “Just don’t puff it up too much, so that figure seems realistic.”)

Some people didn’t take kindly to her advice about inflating your previous salary.

I don’t think it’s lying. I think it’s acceptable to lie about your previous salary if you are pushed to give a hard number. I also don’t think it’s appropriate for a recruiter or a prospective employer to ask what you earned at your last job. They have assigned a dollar value to you and they should base their compensation on that value, not on what your previous employer paid you. When you reveal what you earned at your last job, they make take that into consideration when they shouldn’t.
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Now that summer has unofficially started (officially it won’t be for another few weeks), I thought it would be fun if everyone shared their first summer job and what they learned from it.

My first summer job was as an intern at Periphonics, an interactive voice response company that was acquired by Nortel Networks shortly after I left. It was the summer of 1999 and I had just come home from a year at Carnegie Mellon, surviving the second “weeding out” semester, and thought I could put my awesome collection of computer science skills to work. If memory serves me, I was developing a web interface for a playback tool they were developing.
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The Huffington Post shared the thoughts of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) on unemployment this week:

Unemployment insurance “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work,”

The title of the article is a little misleading. In quotes, Kyl said that benefits dissuade people from job hunting, not that they “make people not want to get a job,” as the title states. While I didn’t hear or read about the debate, it seems like a stretch to take the quotes and twist them to match the title.

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Career Comeback by Lisa Johnson Mandell is a career book designed to help the older job seeker freshen up their resume and avoid age discrimination. If the same sounds a little familiar, it’s because Mandell was the subject of a very popular WSJ article on Botoxing Your Resume back in mid 2008. The book isn’t a longer version of the article but it does take advantage of the same idea – after a certain point, your resume would be fifty pages if you included everything you ever did. While the breadth of experience may seem like an asset, it could be a liability as employers see your wealth of experience and expertise as a liability. An expensive liability.

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