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The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

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Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there's always some holdovers commenting from the era of easy jobs and easy money. Underemployment should be mentioned in any discussion of job difficulty; in the US, getting a job as a barista or fast food is possible, but a horrendous waste of a college education. It's really a shame that the US has decided to let its most educated generation ever suffer for its biggest strength.

>It's really a shame that the US has decided to let its most educated generation ever suffer for its biggest strength. This is by design, of course. The more "educated" the society is, the more "menial" jobs they have to take. Wide-swath prescription of college degrees can't solve that problem (in fact, it creates it).

Plumbers and electricians make as much if not more than 'educated' jobs and are impossible to outsource. Education is great and today you can learn virtually anything with an internet connection but family expectations mean you are expected to go the college. 'The government is oppressing me with student loans' is pretty weak sauce and is par for the course lack of personal responsibility. Don't run up debt to major in art history.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a recent college grad who went to a community college and then a run-of-the-mill state school, my experience and general impression from my peers was that unless you shotgun as many job applications as possible, you're probably not going to hear back from anyone. My own hypothesis is that most companies are so obsessed with a potential "false positive" hire that they're perfectly okay with not investing in a new g…

What you're seeing is actually the opposite problem. That candidates aren't obsessed enough with a potential "false positive" hire where they end up working somewhere they don't actually want to work. You can't tell me that someone applying for 40 positions a week truly wants to work at all 40 of those places. Primarily, the candidate just wants any job he/she can get because of the fear of unemployment.

Right, but a real problem is that the HR "match the keywords" whack-a-mole filter is totally random! 10 years of experience for a framework that's only been around for 8 years means that only the liars qualify and the honest folks don't. You don't know how people are going to evaluate your resume but statistically a bunch of companies aren't going to grade people holistically.

But since you can't know a priori which company hires which way, the solution that people have settled on is to blast out a million resumes and hope that some make it past the keyword matchers and to actual human beings making hiring decisions. That's where the actual match-making takes place. But if you don't send out enough resumes to make it through the arbitrary, unpredictable filtering stage you don't make it to the matchmaking stage which means you're unemployed.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#134
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that student loan debt seems like an asset bubble -- in that the price of an education greatly exceeds the valuation justified by the fundamentals. But I can't think of a way that the bubble could actually pop. Or what it would look like if it did. Unlike housing, you can't walk away from your education; student loans are designed to prevent debtors from ever escaping their obligations. They're also guarantee…

Back around 2000, when I saw education costs rising (and was a big believer in market forces), I figured more educators would enter the market, and things would stabilize. It's been 15 years, and I haven't seen any new colleges or universities formed. What happened?

Udemy etc and the tutorial market are booming.

Universities in countries with inflated fees and tuition loans are about to fall off a cliff. I'll be surprised if they're still around a generation from now.

The Ivy League will survive because of social and political momentum. But colleges outside the prestige circuit are going to have real problems getting students for high-cost low-return education.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#135
post #17

Disclaimer: This is purely anecdotal, and not backed by any data. I'm in my mid-twenties and just recently started interviewing people for the team I work on. It's amazing how little effort many seemingly qualified people put in to secure an entry-level job. Whether it be hustle to learn more about a business, the specifics about the company you might work at, or finding someone to give a second set of eyes on a cove…

its because when unemployed it is hard to deal with things, it seems like stress makes you dumb or inactive

This is a factor as well. I remember reading an article on the Guardian a few months back about how unemployment is a significant mental health hazard, very frequently resulting in chronic anxiety/depression. It's easy to get stuck in a new rut when you're still stuck in the old rut.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#136
post #81
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiter and resume-writer-on-the-side here, and it's become so easy to apply for jobs that most people put zero effort into anything but pressing send and shotgunning a resume to hundreds of companies. If there was even a small cost (time or money) to applying, you can be sure that resumes and cover letters would be much more common and of higher quality. I'm not suggesting that we charge applicants, but years ago…

To add to this: Applicant's who do spend time authoring a well formatted application are seemingly under served by the website-submission process that completely garbles and incorrectly re-formats their applicant documents. Very frustrating and demotivating for the next submitted app. Moreover, they may not even discover that the website ruins their document. I think there's a disruption opportunity here to provide a…

Yup, I got more than once extremely mad with crap HR recruiting websites. When you have to waste 15 minutes by filling out a lot of useless fields, having to reenter everthing again because autologout and/or using the back button in the browser, internal server errors, creating a user account and so on. And the worst is that you know that nobody ever will look at most the fields you entered because you can upload your PDFs at the end of the process. And everyone I talked with in the interviews had only my CV and cover letter printed out or opened.

Somebody please make a sane recruiting service and sell it to every Bigco.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#138
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiter and resume-writer-on-the-side here, and it's become so easy to apply for jobs that most people put zero effort into anything but pressing send and shotgunning a resume to hundreds of companies. If there was even a small cost (time or money) to applying, you can be sure that resumes and cover letters would be much more common and of higher quality. I'm not suggesting that we charge applicants, but years ago…

> Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications. Let's assume that you have a 1 in 20 chance on the focused applications, and a 1 in 200 chance on the sanitized ones. Then the odds that you are offered at least one job, is 40.13% for the focused ones, and 39.42% for the sanitized ones. I'm not sure the emotional inve…

You're doing a cost-benefit analysis on a completely arbitrary guess and then using that as the basis for your conclusion? That doesn't work, sorry.

For example, what if in actuality, all other things being equal, they had a 1 in 10 chance focused vs. 1 in 300 chance sanitized, then the results would be 100% chance for the focused versus 33% chance of a response with the sanitized ones. I just used the same thing you did to make the numbers work the other direction.

For the record, based on what I've seen and read, I do think there might be a case for the shotgunned approach, and I personally have had poor luck with the focused approach. But your numbers don't help prove it, sorry.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#139
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the problems with the this process is that the information that would drive behavior-driven feedback is not usually correlated with the behaviors you use to interact with the environment. You apply for a bunch of jobs, maybe you'll hear nothing back, or when you do, it feels random and disjointed. I have a nice job, but I can't tell you that it's a result of hard work more than it is luck. I can tell you that…

Or you could accept what most people learn in their first month of dating experience - that just because you're not right for each other doesn't mean there's something wrong with either of you.

If "just get over it" were a solution, don't you think it would have worked by now? I don't think being flippant about people's lives is all that productive.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're seeing is actually the opposite problem. That candidates aren't obsessed enough with a potential "false positive" hire where they end up working somewhere they don't actually want to work. You can't tell me that someone applying for 40 positions a week truly wants to work at all 40 of those places. Primarily, the candidate just wants any job he/she can get because of the fear of unemployment.

"Fear of unemployment" is a necessary abstraction, but consider what unemployment actually means. Let's say you are unemployed, and living with your parents-- a very common situation for this generation. You're getting bled each month by your student loans, even if you no other bills, which you probably do. The candidate wants to work at any one of those 40 places, because otherwise they go into default and ruin thei…

I'm not saying that people aren't justified in fearing unemployment. I'm just saying that fear pressures them into making suboptimal decisions. It's even worse because 99% of those people immediately stop looking for work, often with a huge sigh of relief, after they've found a stable job.
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