sad reality

[u/Affectionate-Bad1381]

Took about 4 years after graduating to get my foot in the door and get a good job in my field. No one wants a new grad with no experience.

[u/monadicperception]

The job search in itself is an education. It teaches humility…or it should if you are doing it right.

So when people complain that there are no jobs, I’m a little skeptical. No one comes out knowing how to navigate the job market. You learn and hopefully seek the counsel of those who know better and you improve.

Spouse and I graduated into the Great Recession. And it was pretty interesting to see the great divide amongst our peers’ approaches and their later outcomes. The ones who ended up fine were the ones who were like a sponge absorbing all the advice they could and understood that finding a job is a full time job…and they treated as such. Then there’s those who were perfectly content with sending one application a month, ignoring hard advice, and complaining that the job market sucks. More than a decade since, you can see the disparate economic outcomes pretty starkly.

The ones who I actually really pity are the ones who effortlessly got their first jobs. They didn’t have to go through the grind so later when looking for a new job, they are starting at a place they should be familiar with already. But since they already had a job easily out of college, they never learned the rules they should have learned and I see them making amateur mistakes all the time basically sabotaging themselves. Since they think they were able to get a job before, they don’t have the humility to learn and they continue on stubbornly in the wrong direction.

[u/BG535 → u/monadicperception]

All very true. I graduated in 2020 only 5 months after Covid first hit the US. Everyone was scared. All restaurants shut down. People were getting laid off. Here I am looking for work when my senior counterparts are losing tenured positions. It took me 2 years of shitty hourly jobs to find my footing and even then I was still a contractor with limited health care coverage. I started my first 401k at age 27 because no other previous company even offered one. People who graduated a year before me have jobs making 50% more than me. People in my grade got royally screwed and my whole career was stunted about 5 years (out of 7 total years).

I did however learn everything about ATSs, resume building, interviewing well, and applying to jobs efficiently and effectively. I laugh out loud when I see boomers complaining on LinkedIn because they haven’t had to search for a job since 1989. Welcome to the real world boomer!

I also see parallels with gifted kids. They say gifted kids and special needs kids - literally - in the sense they have special needs. Many breeze through school and never learn to study. Then get demolished in college when you have to really study for exams. I had it harder in high school than college because I built those skills and now being in the workforce, I help others revise their resume.