I have experience and a college degree and nothing
Is your experience relevant to your degree? What field are you in? Plenty of people have experience and degrees, they just end up being in a saturated market sometimes.
What’s a job system?
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Degree?
Experience?
Has anyone vetted your resume?
Do you network?
Have you tried your college job board?
Lol, that was my initial thougth too.
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Simply a diluted pool, so many more folks from this generation than past generations have a college education that it doesn’t separate you from other candidates like it used to, pair that with being told that we can be anything we want and to “become educated in something you love”, it creates a work force with random areas of expertise rarely relating to anything not directly in the field they studied and then throw on top of it that we (myself included) feel we should be getting a premium wage just because we went to college and it’s a recipe for shitty employees and a “lack of jobs” because we narrow our search thinking we are more important than we are. There is a statistic somewhere that we talked about in one of my classes and it is that most folks don’t work in their degree fields for 7-10 years.
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Agreed, so many people aren’t willing to take the job that opens the door to the job they want. It’s “beneath” them, which is total non-sense.
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Yep, we (my generation/age cohort) are definitely snowflakes when it comes to jobs, “I want to make a six figure salary doing what I LOVE, damnit!”
Edit: usmc- I’m fairly certain we’ve talked about this in other threads and I literally don’t think we could agree more haha
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There are doctors, engineers and lawyers with experience who can’t “find” work because of their specialty or their location.
But often it’s pride. We’re all guilty of it. If you have a job making X and get laid off, nobody wants to take the job making .75×X. They’ve come to think that X is what they are worth per year as a human, not what the job is worth.
People even get hung up on silly titles. I’m a Controller and interviewed for an Accounting Manager position. It had more reaponsibility, more direct reports, more salary and more visibility. The interviewer goes "are you sure you’re okay moving “down” to an Accounting Manager role?
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Two anecdotes here:
- I went to graduate school in public health. Some of the early classes are a mixture of Master’s students and PhD students. In one of our group-project classes, several Master’s students referred somewhat disdainfully to some of the administrative tasks of research (filling out consent forms, making follow-up phone calls to patients) and said things like “We’ll have staff to do that.”
Oh, honey. You are the staff.
- A buddy of mine went to Columbia for his MBA. He had some pretty tremendous stories about a few of his classmates who thought they should just be hired for fairly high-level executive positions without working their way up through the ranks or actually possessing any skills; basically, they assumed that holding an MBA would just get them the job because they would know how to “manage” things. Really great stuff.
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I freakin love the MBA crowd, lol… They’re some of the worst.
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Yup. People like me broke it when we decided we don’t have the collective responsibility to cater to the whims and fancies of an entitled population because little things like profit and loss exist.
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It is unfortunate if you are looking for a certain job in a certain field and can’t score one. I would say keep trying keep trying keep trying and it will happen one day. In the meantime you don’t have a job in a different field because you are choosing not to have one. Zero chance you have a college degree and experience (in what?) and can’t find a job. It might not be the job you want but you can find one.
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Hey now, some of us actually get something out of it. Or at least I better, I could’ve bought myself a nice car instead…
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Oh my God yes. There are some really great ones too but man are a lot of them complete loonies on stuff like this. Some of them still don’t spell correctly on their resumes.
This is a favorite too. It seems to happen more on the public health area than the hard research studies (physics, biochem, etc) because I think most grad students in those areas know they’re in for at least a decade as grunts–masters/PhD/post doc. Also they realize that a lot of professors don’t have more than a couple students as “staff”.
As an aside it bothers the shit out of me because I see public health and dietetics people stepping waaaay out of their lane on matters they don’t really fundamentally understand. I’ve seen a lot of them try to speak with authority on topics definitely deeper than they can swim in.
Naturally as someone who has many deep interests I don’t consider it bad when a person expands to new lanes or fields. I do really dislike it when they try to be experts on it right away though.
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One of the benefits of our modern society is increased access to education which means an overall more educated population at least compared to the past. Lets say at 10% of jobs are good that means before if 10% of people went to college then going to college means you get a good job, now its much more competing for the same. College is slowly becoming years 5-8 of high school. This means as a whole we are more educated (not a bad thing) but the side effect is the number of people with a “minimum education level” stays the same even though they went to school longer.
I think this is not as much of a sure thing as you make it sound. College is like years 5-8 of high school for some jobs, in the sense that it is required. Paying for 4 years of additional school to work a job that does not require a college degree is a waste of time and money. I this is even more compounded by the fact that certain college degrees don’t prepare you for any real jobs, so your prospects aren’t any better than they were before you went into debt and wasted 4 years.
Like most things, it depends.
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Thanks for the replies when I say the job system I mean like the requirements to get a job for instance a useless college degree when in reality all they want is experience
Your mistake was thinking a degree comes anywhere near experience in terms of importance. The education system lied to you when they oversold the value of a piece of paper (I know it sucks).
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I think medical, engineering, and law degrees hold significant value and carry weight with employers, but overall agree with your point
A lot of people asked, what is your degree in?
Imo only to the extent you have one. But yes, the fields that require a significant amount of “book knowledge” are pretty good exceptions.
Calling it. It’s gonna be business.
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