Or, if possible, avoid places where there are no jobs.  If you find yourself unemployed, or if you are going to be graduating college this semester during a time of high unemployment, you may want to review this map. This map shows unemployment rates by county and is courtesy of The Washington Post. You can use this map to see how your county has fared over the past few years, it may be able to give you a good indication of what is happening in the area in which you live, and the direction your county is moving. For example: if unemployment has steadily increased in your county more than other counties, why? Are jobs leaving your area? Have taxes for new businesses increased to the point of making it inhospitable? Has your county’s major industry failed? Take Michigan, it has the highest state-wide unemployment–14.1 percent. You can look at that and the state of the automobile industry and realize that Michigan is probably not a good place to move. If you are planning on moving, use the map to see which areas have jobs now and which have consistently been improving.

Before you move, you should also look at the possible structural unemployment. This means that there is a discrepency between the available jobs and the skill set of the workers. If you have gone to nursing school and have sufficient training in that area then you should do well in a place where there are a lot of hospitals and not a lot of nursing schools. It sounds obvious but go where you are needed and you will have a much easier time finding a job. You can get a definition of structural unemployment and then read more about it.

However, moving is much easeir said then done, considering that most unemployed and/or young people do not have money to move. If you are going to spend the money to move then you want to be sure that jobs are going to continue to be available.