Dear CareerBabe:

I am a (hopefully soon to be former) secretary who wants to become a desktop publisher. How do I get accurate salary information and education requirements? Should I just speak to people in this field to get their input?

Also, if I do my research and it turns out that that is not the position I'd be happy with/isn't practical for me, how do I go about transferring my skills to possibly the same field (i.e. becoming a secretary in a company that specializes in graphic design).

Dear Diva:

The very easiest and least time consuming ways to get precise education and salary information are to locate a few good recruiters in your field and call them to ask them these questions. Here's how to find them and the other information you need:

1. Read the paper. Find specific jobs that are represented by recruiters. Call them.
   
   
2. Go to a search engine like Infoseek and search on the word "recruiters". You'll get a huge list: 23,182 "hits." Narrow it down by searching for your specific geography or skill area: "engineering, desktop publishing, teaching," etc.
   
   
3. There is also a list of recruiters published by Kennedy Publications.
   
   
4. Find Associations in your career field. Example: In InfoSeek, you can search on "desktop publishing" and then limit the search to "Associations" . (There are 294 'hits'.) One link is http://desktoppublishing.com/tradeassoc.html
   
   
5. If you are in a different field, let's say "healthcare," or "software engineering," you can repeat all these steps:

   Searching on "healthcare" alone generates almost 280,000 hits. Then you can narrow it down to "recruiters", only 736. You can go back to the general "healthcare" search, the 280,000 hits, and then search the word "associations". This will produce about 3,500 hits.

6. For the very sophisticated: learn to use newsgroups: http://www.dejanews.com. You can look at (and respond to) job postings by areas of professional specialty or geography.

CareerBabe Suggestion: Learn to search the Internet using search engines.

Good Luck!