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Topic: Nice to meet old friend  (Read 21524 times)

Moriarty

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Nice to meet old friend #15
My degree positions me for a career in the IT field, which is fine and all, that's what I wanted, etc. However, having a degree is no longer enough to get even an entry-level job. I've seen jobs with "Junior" even "Entry Level" titles requiring three years of experience. Lots of them. Some say three to five years! Where are we supposed to get this magical, mythical first three years of experience everybody wants but nobody is willing to give? Unless you're an unpaid intern all of your college years you don't even rate a shot? It's maddening.
Isfahan, October 02, 2013, 06:06:07 pm

This has been true in pretty much all fields for several years now. Back before I'd resigned myself to self-employment, I saw an ad for a $9 an hour filing job that required a master's degree + 3 years of experience. It wasn't even a law or medicine related job or anything, just... filing.

Of course, IT has the added phenomenon of sometimes requiring 5 or 10+ years of experience in technologies that have only existed for maybe 2-3 years.

count_actuala

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Nice to meet old friend #16
One of us, one of us!

Goose Goose Honk At Me Now

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Nice to meet old friend #17
It's weird, but I find myself having more and more conversations with people about how the gatekeepers of traditional creative media (mostly films and books) are being demolished by the internet, even as I watch the criteria for a job that provides anything like a living wage get more and more exclusive.

When God opens a window, he closes a door, I guess.

montrith

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Nice to meet old friend #18
Hear hear! After all that time spend studying and getting my degree, I now find myself ridiculously overqualified for some jobs, but everything I can do requires at least 5 years of experience that I have no way of getting, because nobody will hire me without experience. I can't even get a temporary job doing as a waiter or something, as nobody will hire me because they assume I'd just leave after I got a better job.

chai tea latte

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Nice to meet old friend #19
re: jobchat

There was an editorial published earlier this week in the Globe and Mail's Report on Business that got shared around a bunch on my facebook; my (still in-progress) degree is in economics, but I currently do about two or three different things each month to bring home money. If I look for positions 'in my field', I learn that I need two or three years' experience for explicitly "entry-level" positions.

Self-employment is a fucking minefield, but at least I don't have to try to deal with a world where "entry-level" is explicitly not entry-level.

Yossarian

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Nice to meet old friend #20
Its the same deal with Museum Sciences. The head of the department has us all working as volunteers and we spent a good two weeks talking about how to make a resume really polished and then about internships and other volunteer work. The goal is for us to have our minimum 2 years of experience when we graduate. Its still a lot of 2-5 year requirements though. For anyone looking, if you volunteer or intern with the government in some fashion (specifically the parks service is what we were discussing) that counts on a job application as if it were paid. A year of volunteering will put you even with someone competing with you who worked that same year and you can beat them out.

Runic

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Nice to meet old friend #21
It's still pretty bullshit. It basically means that anyone who does not already have the means to take a year or two off of work to do an unpaid internship is barred from any sort of job that might grant financial security. One more way that class divisions in America are becoming more rigid, even as we sink deeper into denial about widening income inequality.

Yossarian

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Nice to meet old friend #22
It's still pretty bullshit. It basically means that anyone who does not already have the means to take a year or two off of work to do an unpaid internship is barred from any sort of job that might grant financial security. One more way that class divisions in America are becoming more rigid, even as we sink deeper into denial about widening income inequality.
Runic, October 03, 2013, 11:13:39 am
One of the classes we are required to take (and pay for) is my internship. Most of the ones are unpaid, some offer stipends or gas money but I only know of a few that guarantee a free place to live and a good weekly stipend that is more than what I make now 8 hours a week on minimum wage.

chai tea latte

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Nice to meet old friend #23
Up here it's largely illegal to have unpaid internships.

Of course, this doesn't mean they don't happen.

Bobalay

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Nice to meet old friend #24
There's an easy solution to the experience problem:

Lie through your teeth and regret nothing.

KingKalamari

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Nice to meet old friend #25
Up here it's largely illegal to have unpaid internships.

Of course, this doesn't mean they don't happen.
kal-elk, October 03, 2013, 05:07:01 pm

Damn straight they still happen. When I was looking for a job about a year ago one of the listings that came up most frequently was for "Bell Canada's Award Winning Unpaid Internships" which really pissed me right the fuck off: Bell is a goddamn juggernaut of a corporation, they can more than afford to actually pay people to work for them and the fact that they were advertising these positions through online job boards (Which is, correct me if I'm wrong, not the place most students go when looking for internships) really just makes it how transparent a ploy for free labour the entire thing was.

That said there is some room for unpaid internships in this world: Back during my co-op program a friend of mine was a mature student whose education was being provided by his former employer as part of worker's compensation after he was injured on the job and unable to work at his former position. Unfortunately, as part of his workers comp agreement, he wasn't able to be gainfully employed in any capacity during his schooling period or his benefits would be void, which meant he couldn't be paid for any of the work he did during the co-op term. He got around this by doing his internship at a nonprofit organization (The one type of organization that shouldn't have to pay their interns) and all was well.

Bobalay

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Nice to meet old friend #26
An apology, by the way, on behalf of society. We are sorry if we led you to believe that attending university would land you a good job. That’s not actually true. A polytechnic college will do this – and the job opportunities available right now are fantastic. A good option for you might be to continue post-university studies at a polytechnic.

"College doesn't guarantee you a job, silly!  I have no idea what gave you that idea.  Anyway, more college might get you a good job!"

But your university education, at least at the bachelor of arts level, was never intended to land you a job. It was intended to make you a more complete thinker. It was intended to teach you how to absorb complex information and make reasoned arguments. It was, quite simply, intended to teach you how to learn. Those are skills that you’ll use in any field of work.

Would've been a good thing to know two-hundred-thousand dollars ago, teach.

Open your mind to all sorts of job possibilities. Don’t be too proud to start out in the service industry, or where you might get your fingernails dirty. Talk to as many people as you can about their career paths. Go live overseas for a year or two. But never, ever, allow yourself to think you’ve wasted your time in university if you don’t land a job as an economist.

hahaha every sentence of this.  Apparently your only solutions to not being able to pay debt are 1. get a dirty and dangerous entry-level industrial job or 2. go deeper into debt by living abroad, silently praying that the US will have unfucked itself by the time you return.

Apparently the crux of his argument is that college doesn't guarantee you a good job, it guarantees you a shitty job.

Goose Goose Honk At Me Now

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Nice to meet old friend #27
Don’t be too proud to start out in the service industry, or where you might get your fingernails dirty. Talk to as many people as you can about their career paths. Go live overseas for a year or two. But never, ever, allow yourself to think you’ve wasted your time in university if you don’t land a job as an economist.
Bobalay, October 06, 2013, 08:07:54 pm

Admittedly, if someone had told me "you should forget this college shit and go into baking" five years ago, I would be a happier and probably more financially stable person.

Bobalay

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Nice to meet old friend #28
Admittedly, if someone had told me "you should forget this college shit and go into baking" five years ago, I would be a happier and probably more financially stable person.
Cuddlegoose, October 06, 2013, 08:19:54 pm

That's true, I was a little overeager to kick an old person for telling young people what to do.  College has been so hyped over the past few decades, and I think that's a shame because of all the people who would love and excel in a technical field, but tech schools are more a punchline than they are an educational facility to a lot of people. It's like how back in the seventies most high schools used to have classes for stuff like woodcarving or screen-printing, but they all disappeared because we're a big hoity-toity post-industrial society and China's taking our job, don'cha know.  And now, all of the sudden, we have a dearth of welders and engineers and machinists.

Never trust anyone who tells you what your job should be, I guess, is my point.

EDIT: you mean this thread ISN'T called "talk about how to find a job"?