Like many graduating seniors, Tom Barker’s schedule after Monday is pretty wide open.

He’ll take part in commencement after earning a bachelor’s degree in anthropology with a minor in business at the University of Oregon. About the only thing on his agenda after that is to keep looking for work.

“I’m still searching for an interview,” he said last week after picking up his cap and gown at the UO Duck Store.

That’s the prospect for many graduates as they leave school and enter a job market that remains acutely weak with an overall unemployment rate of 9 percent nationally and 9.6 percent in Oregon. The best that can be said about the jobs outlook this year is it isn’t as bad as it has been.

“Jobs are being created nationwide and here in Oregon, so the job picture does look better than it did in 2010 and 2009,” said Nick Beleiciks, a labor economist with the state Employment Department. “Those were terrible years.”

That hiring remains slow coming out of the worst recession in generations isn’t news to the Class of 2011. Many seniors began working on their résumés and interview skills as early as fall term, and those who put it off have been racking up hours in the UO Career Center or their department guidance offices as graduation day approaches.

Little hard data is available on how many Oregon graduates have found work and how many still are looking. Much depends on a given student’s major, how soon they started their search and how wide a net they cast.

Many, if not most, graduates do find work, but it’s clear they face stiff competition for the jobs that are available. Those who find work often must accept positions below what they had expected or hoped for, with many graduates accepting paid — or even unpaid — internships simply to get a start.

“There’s a lot of competition,” Beleiciks said. “So they’re going to have to work a lot harder to find a position than grads did three or four years ago.”

And while Beleiciks said job seekers with a college degree still have a distinct advantage over those without a degree, it often doesn’t seem that way to graduates whose job searches are coming up empty.

“It definitely seems dismal,” Barker said. “It feels like a college degree in 2011 is about as good as having a high school diploma in 1970.”

Budget woes cut job studies

The Oregon University System used to do periodic surveys of students one year after graduation to see how bachelor’s degree recipients were faring, but budget cuts have slowed those studies. The last one, which surveyed the Class of 2005, found that 79 percent of graduates were working full time, 3 percent were unemployed and most of the rest were continuing their education.

That survey, taken in 2006, was arguably at the height of the pre-recession expansion, and no comparable data exist for current graduates. But a more limited survey of graduates from the UO’s Lundquist College of Business may give some indication of how things have changed.

The school surveyed its 2010 class three months after graduation and found that of those who earned bachelor’s degrees 48 percent had found work and 34 percent still were looking. The rest were staying in school, putting off their job hunt or starting their own business.

James Chang, career services director for the college, believes those numbers will show substantial improvement this year.

“I think the prospects for this year’s graduates are definitely better than last year,” he said. “We’ve had a couple of really bad years, but it’s definitely on the upswing.”

Greg Carlson is one graduate benefiting from the uptick. After picking up his MBA, he’ll go to work for Vestas, a worldwide wind turbine manufacturer based in Denmark, where he landed a coveted management trainee position in its Chicago office.

It’s the job he hoped for when he started the master’s degree program in 2009, returning to school in part because of the dismal job market then. Now, he said, it’s clear things are improving, at least for MBA graduates.

“It’s just a lot more optimistic; people have a lot of prospects,” Carlson said. “Last year that wasn’t the case. This year you can just tell there’s more confidence, there’s more certainty and employers are saying that they’re hiring.”

Students who started their search earlier in the year will have an advantage, Chang said, if only because they have had more time to hone their approach and work out all the bugs in their résumés, cover letters and interviewing skills. And he said those skills are more important than ever. Employers have many candidates to choose from and quickly pass over applications with spelling and grammar errors or job seekers who don’t do their homework.

“If it’s not nearly perfect, they’re going to move on to the next person because they don’t have to settle,” he said. “Students really have to have their game face on. They have to be fully prepared.”

Chang said one thing graduates are having to adapt to is a shift in hiring approaches. Where employers in many fields often used to hire their top prospects before they finished their senior year, firms now are more likely to use “just-in-time” hiring, not filling a position until the moment it’s needed.

That means it’s increasingly common for students to graduate without a job firmly in hand and face a lag between getting their diplomas and getting their first paycheck.

“It’s nice to have a sense of where you’re going before you graduate, but this is where our individual wish and the way companies hire don’t always match,” Chang said. “Generally speaking, it’s quite normal for people to secure their jobs after graduation.”

New methods of job hunting

Another change is how people find the jobs they apply for. For many college graduates, the old methods of finding jobs — through postings at their colleges or local employment offices or even online — have been replaced with personal contacts. Networking is taking over as one of the leading avenues to employment.

Yuki Yamauchi is wrapping up a business degree with an emphasis on information systems and operations management. He started looking for work last year, first in his native Japan and then here. But it was a tip from a faculty member in the UO business school that finally helped him land a job as a data analyst at a collection company in Springfield.

“If he wasn’t here, I couldn’t get a job,” Yamauchi said.

Monika Graf, another UO student, is graduating this weekend with a degree in sports business and applied mathematics and has lined up a one-year paid internship with the NCAA. She started her search in December and said it was hard to find anything through more traditional channels.

“I don’t know a lot of people that have a job coming straight out of graduation,” she said. “Those that have got jobs, it’s definitely been through networking.”

The post-graduation internship is itself part of the changing way graduates enter the job market. In years past, students did internships after their sophomore or junior years, gaining experience and connections to help them land a job after graduation.

Now, more students are accepting internships as a kind of starter job to get their foot in the door of their chosen field or employer. Deborah Chereck, director of the UO Career Center, said many will even take unpaid internships, especially after graduation, as a way to get a leg up on their chosen career.

“You’re coming in and showing what you can do for three months and proving every day that they need to find a place for you in this organization,” she said. “And we’ve seen that be very successful.”

As the cost of college has gone up and the job market has weakened, Chereck said she’s also seen more students choose majors based on employment and earning potential. While it’s still common for students to arrive on campus with the idea of exploring their interests and broadening their horizons, concerns over finding work and paying off student debt are rising, among parents especially, she said.

That leads many students to pair a major in something they’re strongly interested in with a minor in something they, or their parents, see as more practical, such as business or computer science. Chereck said the tough job market is convincing more students to be pragmatic when it comes to their post-graduation job expectations.

Employment picture alters

Matching a college education to the job market isn’t always easy, given that during the four years or more it takes to get a degree the employment picture can change dramatically. But one recent study attempts to put a dollar value on different majors by looking at the average salaries of bachelor’s degree recipients using U.S. Census data.

The results of that study, from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, aren’t particularly surprising. The top earners received bachelor’s degrees in engineering, computer science, math, business and health-related majors, while the lowest pay went to students holding degrees in the humanities, arts, education, psychology and social work.

Pay levels don’t always correlate with where the jobs are, but it does appear that students with business degrees are among those benefitting from the improving economy. Computer science also is picking up.

Matt Ginsberg, a UO professor, spun off a technology company called On Time Systems that uses advanced software to speed complex construction projects, such as ship building. That business is doing well, and Ginsberg said he’s hiring as many good programmers as he can get.

“We just have work coming out of our ears, we truly do,” Ginsberg said. “My next call is to people who sent me résumés. We’re looking for programmers at every level.”

But even with openings that need to be filled, Ginsberg said he won’t pull back on what he admits are high standards. He’s one of those employers who won’t even look at a résumé with a single spelling or grammar error, and applicants must have high grades, do well in an oral interview and then show their skill by solving a programming problem.

“We’re incredibly picky,” he said. “Getting a job here isn’t easy.”

Few jobs come easily anywhere these days. If there’s any silver lining to the dismal job markets of the past three years, Chereck said it’s the skills graduates have been forced to learn to survive.

And that knowledge — how to write a résumé and cover letter, how to research employers and prepare for interviews, how to sell yourself — ultimately could make this generation of graduates among the best ever at competing for spots on the payroll.

“As awful as this is and as awful as this has been, I think this group is going to be some of the best job-seekers for their lifetime that we’ve seen in a long time,” she said. “They haven’t walked out with the expectation that something’s always going to be there for them. It’s not an easy reality check, but I think that when they’re old enough to look back at it, they may view it as helpful.”