Job Prospects in the Recession
Mon 21 Dec 2009 – 9.33
The very excellent BBC Business Daily podcast has tackled the sensitive subject of job-hunting during the recession. While clearly it sucks, there are some subtitles in play. According to the program, workers who are hired during a recession are often hired in lesser roles, for lesser pay, and then have a harder time throughout the length of their careers. A scary sentence indeed.
Yale economist Lisa Kahn remarks on one point with which I strongly disagree: that a graduate degree strongly improves your likelihood of finding a job. While the theory has been sound for generations, the practice observed by peers and colleagues (and by myself) is that the extra degree doesn’t matter for shit. In many cases a graduate degree is viewed simply as another line on a resume — easily skipped.
I write this now from behind the desk of an office where I am consulting. In many ways, I have found a job, but as the podcast reiterates, most of the hires in the last 18 months have been temporary, conditional, freelance, or otherwise non-permanent.
This all comes through the lens of my bourgeois middle-class existence. There are folks out there who literally can’t afford to look for work. The transportation, dry cleaning, printing, etc. are too expensive. And what about those factory and farm workers who are out of work. Unless there’s another factory or farm, their prospects look bleak.
So as I sit here on Madison Ave., dressed in a crisp shirt and tie, I wonder, how has your job-hunt been going? Are you out of the woods yet? I’m getting there.
•• Check out the episode entitled “Your future job prospects? 21 Dec 09″ »
posted by Scott in careers, education, personal finance.
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