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A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job

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Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job

#61
post #4

If you were my little brother, and you told me that you had applied to 100 jobs you were strongly qualified for and got zero offers, I would put on my big brother pants and make some fairly pointed observations about your skills, beginning with lead qualification. I would then advise working on skills like lead qualification over sending out 100 more resumes into a process which, as your big brother who loves you has…

"At the age of 29, I've likely forever lost the following opportunities due to cost and probable inability to make up for lost wages and career potential:

- Getting married. - Having children. - Studying any more, whether that means grad school, law school, or even just night classes at a random community college."

So let's go through this step by step:

1) Getting married doesn't require money if you find the right wife, the kind you REALLY want. My wife and I were married by a justice of the peace in a living room with nobody watching. Why? Because we didn't have money, and post 2008, our families didn't either. We "eloped" so that we could be the bad guys, and eliminate the guilt from our families about not being able to pay for a wedding. It worked great. Her parents and mine felt zero guilt, although there was temporary anger towards us. Having zero guests made sure there was no envy between relatives, and all is well now.

2) Having children: Interesting how white, middle class people think having kids is the most expensive thing ever. It's not. My wife was considered to be so infertile that the Dr. wouldn't even prescribe her birth control. She wasn't even having periods. She got pregnant through some crazy and awesome quirk, and we became parents when we hadn't planned on it at all. At first we freaked, but then when I met neighborhood kids (El Salvadoran) in the barrio (very safe by the way) we were living in, and realized how well they were doing in school, life, and health, I realized you don't have to be rich to have kids. You just have to be smart enough to realize that kids need love, patience, shelter, and food. They DON'T need $800 strollers, $400 cribs, a nursery, NEW clothes. NEW anything. You can get all of it at the thrift shop. I make decent money now, but I didn't then. LEARN from immigrants. You live in fucking Canada, and like the U.S. your nation is filled with people who know how to stretch a buck and be happy. Your parents didn't know how to do either thing nearly as well, IMHO. (I'm speaking generically about the baby boomer generation, who I think as a whole were shitty savers and rather shitty parents. I exclude my Dad from this, because he taught me to live on the cheap my whole life.)

3)Studying any more: If you think that law school, or grad school are what it takes to get ahead from your situation, you are a fucking fool. Both are rip offs even IF you HAVE the money and time. You are much better served by going to night classes at community college (provided you have access to one that works with the private sector business community to train in valuable, marketable skills). Or you can go online and educate yourself in the arcane technological arts which are guaranteed to get "your foot in the door" of a business. I got into my field as a lowly programmer. Now I do IT strategy, data governance, business analysis, as well as the fun techy stuff that I choose to focus on. Point is this: if i wanted to, I could just be the business guy that most people want to be. But I got my foot in the door on a weird skill that universities suck at teaching in a time and cost efficient manner. Where did I learn said skills? Online classes that cost me $300 a pop. A total of 4 over the course of a year. I attended a major university. I loved it, but compared to the new generation of online education, it was a fucking rip off.

Stop whining, and start learning from others who have made a life for themselves. We are not the baby boomers. The house in the suburbs doesn't really make sense. Kids don't need their own yard if they can go to a park that's the size of a 100 yards and filled with 100 kids for them to play with, instead of 1 yard where they play by themselves.

Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job

#62
I suggest that anyone who feels like the guy in this article does get a copy of Think & Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and read it cover to cover or listen to the audio book.

I've never gone to university and I was much worse off than that guy was success wise, but I managed to pull myself up and I make a living contract programming now.

Don't give up. Also, don't assume that the only correct path is through the front door.

Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job

#63
post #33

> these places assume I'll leave as soon as something "corporate" pops up. This sentence struck me as a little odd. Is the USA at a point where McDonald's expect a burger flipper to commit to a career with them? Maybe I'm biased because all the non-skilled jobs I worked were before/during university, but I never got the feeling that anyone believed I'd retire from there. Yes, we had the whole rigmarole at the intervi…

They want people who at least aren't actively looking to leave before they've even started.

Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job

#64
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good advice. My question: is he strongly qualified for the positions he applies to? He doesn't mention having any particular skill. He says he could get a job worth $36,000. But he thinks he's worth more. Maybe, but it's not clear why, from the article. I think our current system creates a mismatch between skills and expectations for new liberal arts grads.

I read the $36,000 job as the one he was now aiming for, but hasn't found yet. I.e. that, failing in his attempt to find an entry-level position in a finance or business type setting (the sort of high-stress, high-pay, 70 hr/wk "ambitious" route), he's now turning his sights towards a "lifestyle job", a 40 hr/wk, $36k job at a ski resort or that kind of place.

You're right, I misread that section.

Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job

#65
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the same thing. If you send out 100 resumes a week, how great a quality can any of them be? If only because of how exhausted and frustrated you get after sending out 100 resumes. Take your time, research some companies where you'd be a good fit and REALLY do your best to write an excellent cover letter and a tailored resume.

I'm so totally with you on this part: Take your time, research some companies where you'd be a good fit and REALLY do your best to and then it needs to get followed with "convince the person with hiring authority in the company to hire you." The resume is designed to be rejected .

In my experience, the resume is so thoroughly designed to be rejected that you basically can't rely on it. I don't know how ordinary people would actually get jobs in this market by simply submitting a resume for an open requisition; there will always be someone out there whose resume has less HR red flags on it (probably because they falsified it) so you never even get an email back from hiring.

100% of my job opportunities have been from networking (or nepotism) and most of the people I know have the same experience.

Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job

#66
post #19

Why am I not surprised he's not finding someone willing to hire a 29 year old with zero work experience. Others have a CV reaching back 5+ years at that age. Don't put that much time exclusively into uni unless you intend to stay in science or aim for a cushy cubicle job that hires on the premise of paper-planes.

The article I read said that he had short term contracts. That may mean one month, that may mean 6 months to a year. Those are still jobs.

Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job

#68
Please tell me when it was ever easy. Rumors of the job market being easy in the past are vastly overstated. Before the Internet, before entry to IT was as easy as it later became, I graduated high school as valedictorian and took the highest paying job I could find based on my skills: factory labor in a box factory. I got married a year after high school, we had a son, and THEN I started junior college. Before I got my associate degree in IT 3.5 years later, we had two more children. I worked the factory job for 5.5 years. When laid off, I worked in convenience stores, chem labs, other factories, whatever I could find (and finding short-term work was not easy--sometimes spent weeks finding a job, only to be called back to the factory.) In my last semester, I worked an unpaid internship in a bank IT department while still working the factory job at night. The bank hired me. I have worked on the same software, following it from owner to owner, ever since. I have done extremely well. But I was in no way prosperous until I hit my mid-30's. We lived in apartments for years, then a mobile home, and finally a house when I was 31. So from age 19 through about 35, you might say it was a struggle. It's not that I don't sympathize with 20-somethings who think they have it rough, but I would like to tell you that for most people, getting along is NOT easy and NOT guaranteed. This whole business of getting the right degree and then networking your way to fun and glory--if you can pull it off, cool. If not, perhaps you ought to start grinding at whatever you can, save up some money, and keep grinding for the chance you want. Oh, and get off my lawn (kidding--I know I sound like that guy.) Good luck, but more than that I wish you the benefits of every second of your own efforts--eventually.

Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job

#69

I feel his pain. We just got done interviewing someone who had studied "web page" design. It's sad because whatever he was taught for those 4 years (while getting a 3.96 GPA) amounted to a very limited skill set. His designs were half there but his ability to actually apply or use them to a problem weren't. This is a recurring theme in many applicants that walk through our doors. There's tons of degrees I've never he…

So he's an excellent learner and has a background in the field, and you're not willing to train him or let him learn on the job? "his ability to actually apply or use them to a problem weren't" probably describes 95% of college graduates.

Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job

#70
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think there are plenty of people going through what this 29-yo is going through, and part of that might be because they have degrees in things like English, Art history, Philosophy This. I have friends who majored in the humanities and are now working retail and restaurants. I feel bad for my friend with an English degree stuck working at Barnes and Noble but I also understand the flipside, which is if you're a Ph…

"I have friends who majored in the humanities and are now working retail and restaurants." The problem is that this isn't just the case in a bad economy, it's the case always. People that major in the humanities generally don't have a lot of job prospects..they never did.

I think in many ways it's easier for people like me who have non-vocational degrees. I have a theater degree and I knew I'd have to build a career in a non-traditional way. I was never under the delusion that the thing that I enjoyed studying was going to pay my bills.

My "career" started in a Dell call center (although I had many service industry and manual labor jobs before it) and through various vertical and lateral moves has led me to be a senior software developer.

My degree in theater has been extremely useful and a strong selling point in pretty much every job I've applied for. I can talk about my acting classes as being useful when talking to customers. I can talk about classes in design and construction that show a proven track record in taking abstract ideas and translating them into full products.

There's zero use for a vocational degree in a global economy. There's only value in having an education.

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