Gathered around the evening table, members of the family often discuss the opportunities for employment in the neighborhood. The future of the younger members appears to their parents and themselves in the light of an investment. Businesses and workshops around them may offer opportunities for the ambitious and serious. The boy still in school is aware that men a few years older than he have started from small positions in either the mechanical or the business departments of local factories and that they are now doing useful work in the world at good wages or salaries. On the eve of graduation from grammar school, high school, or college he naturally wants to know where he may find his right place in life.

One of the things a good business man wants to know about a proposed undertaking is whether it is in a declining, a stagnant, or a developing state. Suppose, for instance, an investment is to be made in real estate. Few men care to buy land in a locality where values are steadily decreasing. Nor does an investor, of preference, buy land in a dead locality, where values through a term of years have not increased or decreased to any marked extent. Good sense suggests investment in a locality where values are increasing with the steady progress which marks natural growth.

When a young man faces the world and has to make his choice of a way to earn his living, three roads open before him, broadly speaking. The first is business, with its many lines. The second is that of the industries, which include all skilled and unskilled labor in the manufacturing and building trades and in agriculture. The third is that of the professions, such as engineering, teaching, law, medicine, journalism, and the fine arts.

This volume deals with the first of these divisions. It discusses the opportunities for employment in business.

But business itself divides into three branches Manufacture, Trade, and Finance. Manufacturing has a business side which is just as important as the actual work of making things. Trade is buying and selling. Storekeeping, wholesale and retail, is another name for it. Finance is that branch of business which collects and preserves and distributes the supply of money on which the business world depends. We are most familiar with it in the form of Banking.

The manufacturing industries include all mechanical or manual occupations; retail trade is typical of mercantile and commercial occupations; banking is the center of all pursuits whose nature is distinctly financial. Hence the organization of business firms and corporations, the functions and responsibilities of the various officers and business employees, the earnings, opportunities for advancement, and requirements for success are probably in large degree those found in business employments throughout the field of human activity.

When a young man takes up his work in the world he brings with him something of great worth. His working life is limited to a longer or shorter period. His abilities and his energy are in a sense his capital. His earnings are the interest society pays him for the use of them. He too is an investor. And, like the purchaser of real estate, it behooves him in choosing his vocation to consider, among other things, whether he is directing his energy and abilities into a field of declining, stagnant, or increasing opportunities.

In investigating a potential employer, for instance, it is a sensible precaution to ascertain the general background of the employer in question. Luckily, the Internet provides many different avenues in which our applicant will find the information he seeks, from public records databases to telephone record archives that can reveal information regarding the company principles.