One Day, One Job » transportation

Active Transportation Alliance

Willy Franzen — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:44:58 +0000

It may seem counterintuitive, but people who live in cities are typically much more active than their rural and suburban counterparts—at least when it comes to transportation. I always associate activities like walking and bike riding with open space and the great outdoors, but urban centers are actually much more inviting for self powered transportation. Here’s an example: my parents live 1.2 miles from a great restaurant, yet we’d never walk there—it’s too dangerous. There are no sidewalks, and the cars on the road usually drive well over the 30 MPH speed limit. However, in Chicago, where I live, I’d easily walk 1.2 miles to go out to dinner. There are sidewalks, crosswalks, and plenty of streetlights to keep me safe. With that said, there are quite a few ways that Chicago can improve the city for active transportation, and that’s why the non-profit organization Active Transportation Alliance exists.

Be an Active Job Seeker

It’s hard to argue with the fact that walking and biking are often superior to driving. Not only do you get some exercise, but you also generate less pollution and noise. You’re also constantly interacting with people and adding to the sense of neighborhood. Still, driving can be pretty tempting—as long as you can find somewhere to park. That’s why the Active Transportation Alliance “works to improve conditions for bicycling, walking and transit and engage people in healthy and active ways to get around.” Nobody likes walking down a poorly lit street at night or riding a bike on a road where the area near the curbs is riddled with potholes. Walkers and bikers need advocates, and in Chicago they have the Active Transportation Alliance exists. If you want to help lead “the charge for a transportation culture that values safety, health, sustainability and choice,” then you should check out jobs at the Active Transportation Alliance. Right now they’re looking for Program Assistant for their Pedestrian Program, and it looks like a great opportunity for a new grad. Check out the job listings for details on how to apply.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

What’s your preferred mode of transportation?

Southwest Airlines

Willy Franzen — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:08:56 +0000

Periodically the news is riddled with stories about how the airlines are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Lately the focus of doom and gloom commentary has shifted to finance and insurance companies, but that doesn’t mean that the airlines are doing any better. There’s one company that is seemingly never in the conversation about struggling airlines – Southwest Airlines. If you’ve ever flown Southwest, you probably know why. They do things differently, and it makes flyers happy. Even though it seems like almost no one can succeed flying commercial routes, Southwest continues to impress. A One Day, One Internship reader tipped us off to some amazing internship opportunities at Southwest Airlines, so we thought that we’d look at their entry level jobs today too. Air travel isn’t going anywhere – it’s too important to us, so don’t write off an entire industry because the other losers can’t get their acts together.

Future Booking at Southwest

Honestly, I’ve never heard of a company cited in more case studies than Southwest is. When I was studying Human Resources in college, I swear that I heard about Southwest’s corporate culture every week. It must make the CEOs of other airlines sick to their stomachs. Just look at the honors Southwest has received recently:

Ranked 12th on Fortune’s “Most Admired” list in 2007
Made Forbes “Platinum List” in 2007
Ranked by Business Week as one of the top “50 Best Places to Launch a Career”
“Most Admired Companies Among Women” by Professional Womens Magazine in 2006
“100 Best Corporate Citizens” by Business Ethics magazine for eight years in a row
“Corporate 100” by HISPANIC magazine since 2000
Included in the “Top 100 Most Innovative Technology Organizations” by InformationWeek in July 2007

And in case you aren’t already dreaming about working for Southwest, you should know that they offer “FREE UNLIMITED space-available travel anywhere Southwest Airlines flies” in addition to a laundry list of other benefits or “freedoms,” as they like to call them. To get a sense of what kind of jobs are available at Southwest Airlines, you should first look at their position profiles. These will give you a brief overview of each type of job that Southwest offers, so when you look at their actual job listings you will have a good understanding of what you’re looking at. Their Careers site is exceedingly simple, and really easy to navigate. It’s also loaded with information. We love (LUV) it.

Of the 39 non-internship job openings that we’ve identified on Southwest’s site, here are some that might be a good fit for a new college grad.

There are certainly more jobs to look at, some with slightly higher experience requirements. Most of the jobs are located at Southwest’s Dallas, TX headquarters (Ramp Agent openings are in Denver, Philadelphia, and Baltimore). Applying online for any of these jobs should be quite easy, so get to it!

Southwest Airlines also offers an RSS feed and e-mail alerts to notify you of new job postings, so if you don’t see anything that you like right now, you can sign up to be notified of future opportunities.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Have you flown Southwest? Did you LUV it?

Exponent

Willy Franzen — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:00:28 +0000

Imagine getting a job as a MythBuster, except instead of debunking urban legend, you’re investigating real life problems that plague businesses and sometimes hurt people. That’s what you could be doing at Exponent. Founded in 1967 by five Ph.D.-level researchers, Exponent was originally known as Failure Analysis Associates. They started out in the energy industry studying stress and fracture mechanics, but very quickly they were “investigating and analyzing accidents and failures of all kinds.” They eventually became The Failure Group, and were listed on the NASDAQ with the ticker FAIL. In 1998 they realized that they had outgrown their name, and changed again to Exponent, because it means “one who expounds or interprets.” We don’t usually get so deep into how a company chooses it’s name, but with the popularity of the FAIL meme (see also: FAIL Blog), we thought that you might be amused.

Failures Need Not Apply

Despite their fascination with failure, Exponent has a staff of nearly 800 people with backgrounds in over 90 scientific and engineering disciplines. In other words, people who work at Exponent deal with failure often, but they try to keep it at an arm’s length. Are you still not sure what we mean by failure? Here are some examples of projects that Exponent has worked on: investigating defects in automatic revolving doors; determining the path and altitude of Delta flight 191 which crashed and killed 134 people; recreation of the accident that killed James Dean for an NBC series, and testing the Suzuki Samurai for rollover vulnerabilities. There are many more projects that Exponent has worked on, and you can view multimedia presentations on many of them in the Exponent Multimedia Archive. We could keep writing about Exponent’s work for hours – it’s that interesting – but they have a plethora of entry-level job opportunities that we need to talk about.

Entry-Level Jobs to the Xth Power

Exponent’s web site is about as entry-level friendly as we’ve seen, although they could do a better job of making sure that new college grads can navigate to the right jobs. When you visit Exponent’s Careers Page, you’ll notice that they’ve prominently linked to their University Recruiting page. Their approach to University Recruiting on the web is really cool, but it’s not intuitive. There’s a text box that allows you to enter in your school name to search for current alumni from your school and to learn about upcoming recruiting events on your campus. There’s also a list of the 20 schools from which they employ the most alums. For instance, take a look at Cornell’s page (I’m not biased or anything – GO BIG RED!). It’s a really cool way to engage students, but it only works if the students go to a school that Exponent has a page for. A lot of students probably end up on the University Recruiting page and don’t know what to do next.

This is where a little searching helps. If you visit Exponent’s How to Apply page, you’ll see information for entry-level candidates. Here they direct you to contact their College Recruiter, Jenny Irwin, at jirwin@exponent.com or to take a look at their entry-level job listings (these are opportunities specifically for new grads). Here you’ll find a ton of fascinating jobs in a variety of locations. We will warn you, however, that seemingly all of the entry-level jobs currently listed with Exponent require some sort of advanced degree (MS or PhD). Since so many Engineers seem to stick around and get a Masters, we thought it would still be appropriate to feature Exponent’s jobs today.

Some of the most recent listings on Exponent’s site include Engineers, Vehicle Engineering (Menlo Park, CA and Natick, MA); Scientists, Public Health & Industrial (Menlo Park, CA; Bellevue, WA; Wood Dale, IL; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Oakland, CA; Irvine, CA; Philadelphia, PA; Alexandria, VA; and Washington, DC); and Engineers, Technology Development (Menlo Park, CA; San Diego, CA; and Washington, DC). There are many more opportunities listed on their site, and you can apply online through their applicant tracking system. If you want to work for Exponent but are just finishing up undergrad, then you better start thinking about graduate school.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Do you feel like your entry-level job search is a failure of such grand proportion that Exponent may have to investigate what happened? Subscribe to One Day, One Job (it’s free), and make sure that doesn’t happen.

uShip

Willy Franzen — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:00:49 +0000

Once when I was in college, my roommates and I got together and decided to ship a mini donkey to our next door neighbors whom we didn’t get along with. We thought that it would be the prank of the century. Then we asked ourselves, how the heck do you ship a donkey? Ok, that wasn’t a true story, but it’s still presents an important question. How do you ship a miniature donkey? As far as we know, UPS, the USPS, DHL, and Fedex don’t ship donkeys. uShip, on the other hand, provides a shipping market place where anyone can find a way to ship a mini donkey. With uShip, anyone can sign up, list an item to ship, receive bids, select a winning bid, and ship nearly anything nearly anywhere. You can even sleep easy knowing that the guy who is transporting your prized donkey has been moving livestock across the country and getting great feedback on uShip for years. uShip calls themselves “the online shipping marketplace,” and their raving fans seem to agree.

uShip, uWork

Had enough about the donkey? We thought so. uShip’s business is pretty simple, but it’s also pretty darn smart. Traditional mail and parcel carriers leave a lot of customers unserved. These people who have unusual things to ship often are left with no idea what to do. uShip takes the guessing game out of shipping. By allowing shippers to bid on jobs, uShip removes the burden of logistics from the person shipping stuff and puts it on the shippers. uShip typically offers jobs in a number of business areas; however, they only have one opportunity right now for new college grads. Since they list their departments (Business Development; Community, Trust, and Safety; Corporate; Development; Marketing; Product Strategy and Development; and Strategy, Reporting, and Analytics), uShip seems like they might be open to getting cold called about positions. The one entry-level job that they do have listed is Strategy, Reporting, & Analytics Associate, which requires some specific knowledge, but should be a good fit for a lot of new grads. uShip is located in Austin, TX, and you can apply for a job with them by a cover letter and resume to jobs@uship.com.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

What’s the weirdest thing that you’ve ever shipped?

Transportation Learning Center

Willy Franzen — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 13:18:31 +0000

Last month we wrote about the National Association of Railroad Passengers on One Day, One Internship. They are a non-profit organization that is all about promoting the growth of transportation by rail. Today we’re going to look at jobs at the Transportation Learning Center, which is a non-profit organization that promotes all kinds of public transportation. There seems to some overlap between the objectives of these organizations, although NARP appears to be passenger driven (no pun intended), while the Transportation Learning Center’s agenda seems to be driven by transportation workers (once again, no pun intended).

I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad…

The Transportation Learning Center is committed to maintaining and growing public transportation’s role in our everyday lives. They do so by building “labor-management training partnerships that improve organizational performance; expand workforce knowledge, skills, and abilities; and promote career advancement.” This seems like a good way of achieving their goals, since public transportation is surprisingly labor intensive. It may seem like the train drives itself, but there are plenty of people behind the scenes who are making sure that you can snooze every morning while you are on your way to your first entry-level job.

The Transportation Learning Center pursues its mission through a number of programs and publications. Their programs include the Transit Training Career Ladder Partnerships, the National Standards for Training (surprising fact: elevators and escalators are considered public transportation in this training program), and the National Framework for Apprenticeship. The Transportation Learning Center doesn’t just do these programs because they think they’re good; they back them up with studies. The organization puts out a number of publications that evaluate the effectiveness of labor-management training partnerships.

So what kind of jobs does the Transportation Learning Center offer? Right now they’re looking for an Office / Program Assistant. This is a clear cut entry-level position for a new college graduate. There will be a lot of administrative work in this job, but there will also be opportunities to do research and communications. This looks to be a great opportunity to get a foot in the door for someone who is fascinated by transportation and labor-management relationships. The job will almost certainly grow as you prove yourself. The Transportation Learning Center is located in Silver Spring, MD and you can apply by sending a resume, cover letter, and salary expectations to info@transportcenter.org.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Are you planning on using public transportation once you get your first job?

jetBlue Airways

Willy Franzen — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 13:00:19 +0000

Well, we made it back home from vacation, but not without 3 hours of sitting on the runway due to Curacao’s random decision to close their airspace. Our pilot told us that we had to file a flight plan through Venezuelan airspace instead, and Venezuela’s being run by an unfriendly dictator didn’t make that the easiest – or fastest – process. By the time our new flight plan was filed, Curacao had lifted the flight ban and we finally went on our merry way. As painful as it was to be on the runway for 3 hours, jetBlue made it pretty bearable. They gave us drinks and snacks, although they did plead with us to take it easy, as they were running out and did not have catering services at this airport. Of course the request to back off the goodies created a run on the galley, but the flight attendants were still able to do a full snack and beverage service in-flight despite the excessive pre-flight demand. It was also nice to have the most legroom in coach and a little tv in the seatbacks in front of us. Another One Day, One Jobber flew a different airline out of the same airport at the same time and had a much more miserable experience – no food, no movies, and too much air conditioning with no blankets. jetBlue has been ranked by Conde Nast Traveler as America’s Best Domestic Airline for 6 straight years now, and their unparalleled devotion to customer service is the reason.

We think the best place to find an entry-level job is at a company that does something you can be passionate about. The company you choose to work for should offer a product or service that you love, work towards a goal you admire, or be at the forefront of a field that you find fascinating. It is impossible to perform excellent customer service without extremely happy employees. We love the flying experience that jetBlue offers, and that’s why we think they might be a great place to work after you graduate college. They even offer a Customer Bill of Rights that ensures fair treatment and compensation for bad service when it happens. No other airlines can pull off this kind of guarantee with their pissed off flight attendants and incompetent ticketing agents. We’re not sure which came first, great customer service or great places to work, but we do know that the two are consistently linked.

As for finding a job at jetBlue, you’re going to have to go through their search page, which is unfortunate. A search only interface is a pet peeve of ours. We prefer it when jobs are listed in an organized format that is accessible to job searchers and search engines like Google. The good thing about JetBlue’s search interface is that it lets you specify your search to only entry-level jobs. We also recommend looking at jobs at the Professional level (2 to 5 years experience) because some of these seem to be a better fit for top college grads. We wish there was a descriptive term in recruiting that differentiates between entry-level jobs requiring little education and those that require a college degree (if you can think of one, leave it in the comments and maybe we’ll start using it).

We are consistently impressed with the attitudes of jetBlue crewmembers (what they call all of their employees). With a focus on a strong service culture and excellent benefits (we can’t find information on flying benefits for crewmembers, but we’re sure they exist), it’s not a surprise that jetBlue is succeeding because of its people. Although the only information about on-campus recruiting by jetBlue that we were able to find is that they went to a career fair at Harvard in 2005 and have had some sort of training partnership with NYU, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t looking to hire new grads.

Note: On April 23rd we revisited entry-level jobs at jetBlue Airways.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

Have any good flying stories from your Winter Break? Share them with us in the comments.