During the 1997-98 school year our department tried to contact potential employers of students with interests in some aspect of Organismal, Ecological, or Evolutionary Biology. Almost every potential employer we spoke with mentioned the following two pieces of advice.  

1. EXPERIENCE! To land a job, you must have some relevant experience. Do anything you can to get that experience. Some possibilities include internships (see below), part-time employment, volunteering, working on a faculty research project or senior honors thesis, and many more. Many of the employers we talked to themselves "fell" into their first few jobs by being interns, lawn-mowers, gofers, and other "low-level" employees, then moving up the ladder through lucky turns of event. Note that experience (even at "low level" jobs) helps you make contacts, and your contacts may find more uses for you if they like your performance (remember that reliability counts for a lot with employers).
2. People and communication skills are important. The ability to cooperate, collaborate, follow directions, read, and write is important in most jobs (yes, even in science!). In many ways, the specific classes you take as a student are much less important to potential employers than whether you learned to apply these people and communication skills during the classes. You must be able to get along with others, and be able express yourself clearly on paper and in person.

 

Many of our contacts also mentioned the following as well: 

3. Know how to use dichotomous keys! Environmental biologists often run into critters they don't know, and must figure out species identifications on their own. Courses that include species identification (e.g., Entomology, Flora and Taxonomy, Ichthyology, Vertebrate Zoology, Herpetology, and Invertebrate Zoology) are therefore very useful for many of these jobs.
4. There is a shortage of botanists trained in basic plant identification, plant communities, and plant ecology.  
5. A broad biological background is more important than the specific area of biology you specialize in. GIS (Geographical Information System; a computerized approach to storing geographical and ecological data) skills are often useful as well. Being comfortable (not necessarily expert) with computers is also helpful.  
6. Experience with controlled burns and other ecological management tools can be a big plus to some government and private employers. Consider volunteering with the Nature Conservancy or ODNR to get such experience.  
7. The Environmental Studies Certificate offered by the University of Akron can be a plus, as long as the employer is made aware of exactly what that certificate means (such certificates from other schools may be pretty rinky-dink).  
8. Make sure there are no obvious misspellings or other mistakes on your application materials! Especially when many people apply for a job, mistakes can quickly eliminate you from consideration, since they may indicate that you don't care enough or aren't attentive enough to proof-read your application. (One employer said that he automatically discards any application that has even a SINGLE spelling mistake!!!)  
9. Many, but not all, Field Biology jobs require a Master's degree.  

Potential employers/internship providers 

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RJ Mitchell