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

I have some, but not a huge amount of empathy because I came out of school right during a similarly depressed time for finding work. I pounded the pavement looking for jobs with similar results.

Clearly this guy feels that he is entitled to be at an executive level even though he hasn't built up much real experience. He doesnt want to pay any dues and scoffs at a $36k/year job. I lived in Chicago working for $18k/year making photocopies with an evening job cleaning offices, barely able to pay my bills. I did that for 4 years and was able to use that experience to get a decent job. (probably could have moved up sooner had I been looking during those years) A few more years at the new gig and I made a more significant bump.

I would have killed for a $36k first job . (even with inflation it's much better than my 18k gig - I'm not that old!)

I'm doing very well now but it was a lot of work to build up the career that I now have. I probably could have moved up faster, but even still I needed that first crappy job to start the ball rolling. Ironically I'm starting to think about being unemployable due too being old, since tech can tend to be a young persons field. Maybe I'm just too old to relate, but things were not any easier back then.

I think the thing that concerns me most about the authors post is the implicit assumption that selling ones labor to a company and being managed, coddled and generally told what to do and how to do it is the only way to make money.

It seems like the author has never thought of creating their own job. It's pretty humbling to walk around the neighborhood offering to cut lawns or paint fences and building up business that way but sometimes it needs to be done. The author must have _some_ skill worth selling after all those years of schooling. Even if they make less than minimum wage initially they can do something.

The fact that the author isn't running their own business isn't what concerns me, it's that it's something that doesn't seem to have even been considered. To me, this seems like a societal problem as well as one for the author.

In terms of advice, I can only offer my own experience: I quit my first job at 18 (worked full time through college) to work for less than minimum wage at an ISP because I valued experience.

I moved. Twice. First to London, then to the US. If you are in a town where you have seriously gone after all the jobs you can and still can't get anywhere, it's time to look at places that ARE hiring and move there.

I was willing to make atrociously bad amounts of money (I was living in a country with no minimum wage law) for five years in order to get the experience and proof of ability to execute that I needed to move and get a "real" job.

In my mind, the 29 year old author's only real hope is to create their own job - they have nothing to show an employer that they have any kind of tenacity or desire to work in a specific industry and so they will need to get their experience elsewhere.

This sucks for the author. I get that but I see no other feasible way for them to explain why they are 29 with no relevant work experience in their field. More generally, this sucks for society - we seem to have convinced a large amount of the population that the only way to make money is to sell ones labor to someone else and have that person tell you what to do and how to do it. In short: there is a dearth of autonomy in the world.

I whole-heartedly agree! What people don't see past the 100 resumes a week is the underlying desperation that has engulfed this person. He's nearly 30, isn't married, doesn't own a reasonably sized home, doesn't have a family of his own and doesn't command the wage that he had expected to earn by that age. He has lived a majority of his life with (what he thought were reasonable) expectations. However, he has hit the cold, stark nature of reality.

People do strange things when times get desperate. I'm saddened that some people here can't seem understand this.

Anecdote time:

I was in the Army before I went to college, so I didn't graduate until I was 27. I got a 3.8 GPA in electrical engineering, but I was still unemployed for over a year before I got hired as an engineer. It was a pretty disheartening year, and I doubted whether I was worth anything to anybody. I finally got a job through a friend. All the cold calls, resumes and interviews were for naught, I got hired through cronyism.

I have a friend who got a degree in sociology, at the age of 28, by working at a hotel and paying out of pocket for a class or two per semester for a decade. She still works at that hotel, two years later, making just above minimum wage. I thought I had it bad being unemployed for a year, but I had military experience and technical skills that were at least somewhat in demand. She's was looking in the social work field, but now she's just looking for any job with benefits and growth, paycheck or industry be damned.

You could argue that sociology is not a degree you should get if you actually want to work. But this woman was written off as "not college material" by teachers and family alike, mostly because she was socially awkward in high school. She worked her ass off for a decade to put herself through school and I'm proud of her. She's shown more grit and determination than I have, certainly. And yet she's unemployable. Hell, she probably couldn't get that hotel job if she started now, because she's got a degree.

"My anecdotal observations are that the longer people I know waited to get their first job, the longer they've remained unemployed or stuck in dead end jobs."

Who is waiting?? We're talking about people who've been trying to get decent jobs for a long time, and have come up empty. So saying "They should have gotten jobs before" is begging the question. They've been trying all along.

politics, speechwriter or civil service fast track if you can get on it (better have a first)