Must read: former anthropologist Karen Kelsky's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (To Professors; Re: Your Advisees). Kelsky chucked her career in anthropology to start a consulting business for graduate students on the job market. By her account, she's doing a brisk trade giving students the advise that their advisors can't be bothered to give:
That kind of career derives far less from a thick wad of dissertation pages than from the quantity of one's publications, the impressiveness of one's grant record, the fame of one's reference-writers, and the clarity of one's ambition. I don't find it problematic to say any of that openly. But apparently you do. You reject it as "vulgar" and "careerist"—as if wanting to have health insurance is vulgar and wanting to not go on food stamps is careerist.
That is pure intellectual snobbery. To acknowledge your graduate students as people in a workforce requires you to acknowledge yourselves as workers, and to do that you must finally abandon the self-delusion of the ivory tower—that scholarly work is "above" capitalist exchange and anything as gauche as money. And that you will not do. The irony of faculty "work" ("I'm working on a project on death and the abject") is its scrupulous denial of any acknowledged kinship to the actual wage-work for which you do, indeed, draw a salary.
The comments are interesting, too, with some of her current clients chiming in. A pretty big fraction of professors working today actually wouldn't have the least clue how to start a job search as a new Ph.D. That's a good reason for prospective Ph.D. students looking at an institution to poll current graduate students and find out about the quality of their advising.