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Company and Industry Research

American Associations

 

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

Airlines for America  

American Accounting Association

American Advertising Federation

American Apparel and Footwear Association

American Bankers Association

American Beverage Association

American Booksellers Association    

American Forest and Paper Association

American Gas Association

American Hotel and Lodging Association

American Institute of Certified Public Accountants

American Iron and Steel Institute

American Petroleum Institute

American Water Works Association

Association of American Railroads

Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers

Auto Alliance

Consumer Electronics Association

Direct Marketing Association

Food Marketing Institute  

Footwear Distributors & Retailers Association

Generic Pharmaceutical Association

Hospitality Industry Net 

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 Coffee Association

National Mining Association

National Restaurant Association

National Retail Federation

National Sporting Goods Association  

Newspaper Association of America

Options Industry Council

Outdoor Industry Association

Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America                                    

Reinsurance Association of America

Semiconductor Industry Association

Silver Institute

Software & Information Industry Association                    

Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals

U.S. Travel Association            

Using the Encyclopedia of Associations

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".  

Encyclopedia of Associations, Sample search of all volumes


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.