Nobody reads this site but I’m going rant anyway. I’ve been seeking work since August of 2008. As the economy has crashed I have watched job opportunities dwindle from 60 to 90 a week to a dozen on a good week. I sit here doing odd jobs for people to make spending money. I read job web sites and career blogs every day. I have been to Los Angeles a half a dozen times (an expensive trip, it’s 250 mile round trip) to look for work.
I’m not losing faith, I will find a job. I just don’t know where or when yet. What is frustrating is knowing that I have 18 years of experience in my field but since I don’t have a degree, I get passed over for jobs. It bothers me because I know I could do most of the jobs I am applying for in my sleep. I have tried to go back to school. It was going well until I had some major life changing events happen that resulted in me moving 3500 miles back to the west coast. I also had to put school on hold till I can get my life settled.
I had an experience today which really made me angry at the way the system works. I logged onto a new site for career path analysis and advice Path101 Alpha. I used the site’s resume analysis tool thinking would give me some usable advice, HA! after loading my info it tells me that my carreer experience and expertise are reasonably high in value. But since I don’t have a big network of contacts or a degree I rated half of what I should have when all four categories were averaged out.
My beef with this is, it’s just a straight average of the categories. This doesn’t seem scientific or helpful at all. If I were a company hiring people, I would want good people with tons of expertise and experience over a PIECE OF PAPER any day.
Don’t get me wrong education is important and I kick myself for not pursuing it earlier in my life. I was lucky I got a great job at 22 working for a military contractor. I started off as a data entry operator and by the time I left two years later I was cataloging flight test films in a huge database that I helped design and construct. I moved to Seattle and got an even better job with a Fortune 300 company managing their Human Resources Information Systems, a fancy name for another huge database that I helped design and implement. I did all of this without a PIECE OF PAPER saying that I went to college. These are just 2 of a number of great jobs I have had.
It is my belief that if you are going to build a social site to look at and compare the areas of expertise, education, experience, and networking, these things are not all equal in value. Expertise and experience in my opinion count for lot more than education. Networking is a useful thing to have and in my work life it also given me access to many of the job opportunities I have had.
You may not agree with me, that’s okay. But think about this, our tax dollars are being used to give billions of dollars in bailout money to financial institutions. This money is theoretically to jump start the U.S. economy. But while the citizens in this country struggle with job loss, foreclosures, and just being able to put groceries on the table, companies like AIG give millions of our tax payer bailout money as bonuses to incompetent executives who manipulated the system for greed and caused this country to fall into a major economic crisis. Some of these executives are no longer employed by AIG. I’m certain, although I haven’t found proof, that every one of these executives had a PIECE OF PAPER that says they went to scool. Meanwhile, John Doe on the street is literally “on the street” because he’s losing his home. Companies need to start looking for and rewarding experience and stop giving fortunes to incompetent boobs.