I went to have dinner with a friend last night and during that dinner the talk turned to jobs. My friends and family for the past year and a half have been trying to help me find a better job. I am one of the millions of American that is currently under employed. I have a four year college degree with a major in English and a minor in Political Science and I spent the first five years of my life in the job market enhancing various computer skills. I can program a CNC router using Alpha-Cam or MicroVellum and I am also certified in AutoCadd. These skills as well as my ability to read, understand, and translate construction plans are valuable skills, but I never want to work in the construction industry again.
As the talk turned to jobs and what I could do or where I could find jobs I shied away from it. I, like most people, don't like talking about my failings, and I've found the current job market impossible to navigate. Eventually my friend told me that if he had my writing skills he would put them to better use. That a first person account of what it is like to be under employed in post-recession America would be something people would be interested in reading. For lack of a better term it would be real.
I do not want to re-enter the construction industry because it is broken and full of bullies. The owners of a project and the general contractors are given all the power. There are clauses in the contract that make it so. They will fully list a detailed scope for the sub-contractor but they always lead into it with the phrase, "Including but not limited to." That phrase alone was used against us as justification for more than a few screwings. Contractors would wait until they had the signed contract and then start adding and adding items to your job load and then when you would send a change order they would refuse it with the justification being that, "Including but not limited to," phrase. We had one contractor tell us that they bid all their jobs at 98% of cost meaning they made up their money by not paying the subcontractors. They can get away with this because there are also provisions in the contract that if they are sued and win the sub-contractor has to pay all their lawyer fees but no such benefit is given the sub-contractor if they should win. A contractor can just wait out the sub-contractor in any sort of court dealing because the sub-contractor will always run out of money first and no matter how strong their case is they will be the ones paying the lawyer fees.
I left that profession behind me, and will not go back. Those skills are useless in any other profession and they are the skills I have, but I cannot deal with that level of humanity again in my lifetime. To me happiness is far more important than money, but I do say this as someone with not a lot of money and what I consider to be a life full of good friends. I am not unhappy which is another issue with my job search. It would be nice to have things I do not, like a house, but I do not need much more than I already have and that makes it hard to be motivated to improve my lot in life.
After I left the construction industry I got my real estate license and attempted to become a Realtor. Of businesses an individual can start it has a low start up cost, but it still has a large cost for someone that wasn't starting out with much. I had a good amount of savings when I started my venture into real estate but as I needed that to live off of I was afraid to invest it into the real estate. I bought my signs and paid for my insurance and a lot of other fees with credit cards. This was a gigantic mistake. I quickly took what was just over $2000.00 in credit card debt that I could pay off relatively easily and turned it into over $10,000.00 in credit card debit that will be paid off eventually but will take a much harder road to do so. After bringing the company my father's listing of one of the commercial buildings he owned and walking the real estate agent that had presented herself to me like a mentor to meet the eventual buyer I ended up being screwed in those dealings as well. She had agreed to split the commission by giving me a third as she was going to show me the ropes of commercial real estate. She neither showed me the ropes or gave me a third of the commission and my manager kowtowed to her managing broker. I knew there would be snakes in any industry but I couldn't stick it out with a manager that didn't have my back.
Around Memorial Day of 2012 my wife needed help with her part time job of pet sitting, and I offered to give her the help. All I was doing was sitting at home, being miserable, and looking for anything else to do. I saw that she made good money for fifteen minutes of her time whereas in the real estate business you get paid in promises for the offering of your time. I decided that I was going to join the pet sitting company she worked for full time. For the last year and a half it has gone well. I don't make a lot of money, but I make enough and my wife and I combined are making around what we made when I had my job designing cabinets, but I have looked for jobs while doing this and it hasn't gone well.
Every now and then I get inspired to find something better and I hop onto CareerBuilder.com or Monster.com and go through the job listings. Mostly it is scams and commission based jobs or in other words a lot of crap, and the few real jobs on there are so vague in their descriptions it is impossible to know what the actual job requirements are. I was a Project Manager at my previous full time job and when I look for managing jobs in a site like CareerBuilder.com this is typical of the descriptions one will find:
Provide exceptional release management support and ensure SDLC compliant implementation of all approved projects. Partner with Change Management teams to ensure the successful execution of release migrations. Manage overall implementation and ownership for implementation plan for release execution including communication and coordination with internal teams.
In my opinion that might as well be in Sanskrit. It is like someone threw a bunch of words together in an effort to sound fancy and they just make this job sound like the most vague nonsensical job on the planet. Most people in offices during the day answer e-mails, go to meetings, and play Angry Birds on their smartphone, but every job description on these job board sites includes certain key words. Communication is a big one. It is important to be able to communicate for every job. The teller at the bank, the receptionist at a hotel, the server in a restaurant, all of them have to be able to communicate. Communication is part of our daily lives. It isn't a requirement for a job. It is a requirement for being a species on the planet Earth.
What I get out of that job description is that they are looking for a person that can plan and communicate so in other words they are looking for a person who is breathing. As a breathing person with a college education I figure I could do a job like this and I apply. I also find 20 to 30 other jobs like this and apply. This takes about three to four hours of my day to do, but when I am in a mood to find a job I'll do this for a week or two, and then my e-mail is flooded with automated responses telling my they've received my application, and that is the last I hear from any of the hundred jobs I apply for that week. No one tells me my resume could use some tightening up in certain areas or that I need to provide more detail on what my job duties were in my previous jobs or that I should provide a salary demand. Nothing like that. No feedback so then when I send out the next round of applications they are my best guess at what went wrong. Applying for a job is like playing Monopoly without an instruction manual and only the vaguest idea of the rules.
So after sending out two weeks worth of applications and spending hours of my week doing this I find it a fruitless effort and always give up. I am certain there are things I've done wrong, but no one is letting me know what they are. There is a chance my resume isn't even making it past a computer to human eyes, but I don't know that. All I know is that I put in hours of work in a week to find a job and the response is silence unless I should happen to accidentally apply to one of the many scams out there and then I am invited to an interview in a temporary office with a paper sign on the door. Looking for a job is depressing. There is a disconnect between the job seeker and the job producer and it cannot be fixed on the seekers end and the producer will find someone, even if it isn't the best someone, so they don't have much motivation to fix it.
There are a lot of people like me in the world who go to lunch and see a guy wearing sunglasses indoors talking about paradigms into his Bluetooth and go to get lunch to be seated next to double finger gun bingo guy and know that while we didn't get passed over for a job by these people they still have good full time jobs and we do not. I pick up dog shit for a living. This fact doesn't depress me because in order to pick up the dog shit I get to spend a lot of time with some very friendly and lovable dogs, but at the end of the day I am still wasting a college education and wasting all the skills I picked up thus far in the job market. My knowledge of QuickBooks or the Microsoft Office Suit means nothing when the requirements for my current job are to have two legs and be able to walk.
I am certain there is an employer out there that would be very interested in someone with my background and education, but in order to find them I have to wade through a depressing swamp of scams and crap. I have to spend hours a week sending off application after application that will be rejected by a computer. There is a disconnect and I am powerless to fix it. I am one of the millions of Americans that is currently under employed, and while happy with what I currently do I still want more and frankly I deserve more.
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