American Associations
Associations for your industry will provide overviews and statistics as well as news articles. You can identify the major associations for your industry with the Encyclopedia of Associations (52nd edition, c2013), which offers brief information on almost 23,000 “non-profit American membership organizations of national scope.” Organizations included represent: business, commercial, commodity exchanges, chambers of commerce and other types of organizations pertinent to business; once discovered, search the Internet for their web sites.
Listed here are a few sites that provide industry-level statistics and policy analysis. Note that many of them originate from trade associations, some that encourage college students to get involved:
Aerospace Industries Association
American Accounting Association
American Advertising Federation
American Apparel and Footwear Association
American Booksellers Association
American Forest and Paper Association
American Hotel and Lodging Association
American Institute of Certified Public Accountants
American Iron and Steel Institute
American Water Works Association
Association of American Railroads
Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers
Consumer Electronics Association
Footwear Distributors & Retailers Association
Generic Pharmaceutical Association
RU Hospitality Management LibGuide
Motion Picture Association of America
National Association of Broadcasters
National Association of Home Builders
National Association of Insurance Commissioners
National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts
National Restaurant Association
National Sporting Goods Association
Newspaper Association of America
Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America
Reinsurance Association of America
Semiconductor Industry Association
Software & Information Industry Association
The Encyclopedia of Associations online edition can be a great resource towards discovering information relating to potential careers.
Here are some tips as to how to improve your search experience:
The link above will take you to the "Gale Directory Library" webpage, which provides a list of products, including the International, National, and Regional Encyclopedia of Association directories.
In the upper left-hard corner, click on the "Categories" radio button. From the resulting list, pick "Organizations". Then, in the blank field, type in your search, for instance, enter "paralegal".
The default listing is in alphabetical order. For finding more pertinent associations, there are a couple of options:
1. Type an additional term in the "Find: Within these results" field. For instance, enter "Student".
2. In the "Smart Sort" drop-down menu, choose "NumMembers" to filter to the top of the list the associations in the field which have more members than the others.
When you find an interesting association, just click on its title and browse the resulting information. This will generally include information regarding the cost of a student membership, as well as publications such as salary surveys and career booklets.