Job market in the United States.

I'm so sick of my generation being continuously f*cked by the job market. I'm a college student about to wrap up the semester and I'm trying to get a summer job. Working is a must because I have expenses such as car maintenance and car insurance, to name the essentials. I also have to pay $700 for summer school class I'm taking. Only financial aid isn't covering it because I'm only taking 5 credits.

It seems there aren't any decent summer jobs available to anyone under 25 years old. Or jobs period. Almost everything now you to know someone, have a college degree, and have 5 years previous experience. All for a f*cking entry level, part time, temporary position. Now it seems you have to be the best of the best of the best just to sweep up # these days. How bull$hit is that? How is a young guy supposed to get by?

Don't get me wrong, I have no problems with working at McDonald's, but thanks to Obamacare large corporations are cutting hours of associates down to

Oh dear. So what expertise have you developed? What skill set can you offer a prospective employer that would make that person hire you because you are so valuable? This is not rocket science these days. If you are about to graduate in chemical engineering, you'll find a good job. If you are about to graduate with an English degree, you won't. This has been true for fifty years. It didn't just pop up because of Obamacare, and this is not the first recession we've gone through. When I graduated with a useless degree there was a billboard on the freeway that said, "Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights?" Boeing had gone from 120,000 employees to 35,000 in 18 months. All the guys I went to high school with who jumped on board the "Lazy-B" were now laid off. People were abandoning their houses and moving south. It happens.

If you are skilled, you'll get a job, even just for the summer. Are you an electrician? A plumber? Can you work commercial construction? They're just ramping up for the summer season and I'll tell you what: Commercial construction for just plain common sense labor jobs pays really well.

Nobody owes you a job. You made your choices. Nobody forced you. Now leverage those choices into making a living.

a reply to: UziXxX

Have you considered working for another country? With an education...the doors are wide open to some of the poorer countries...

Itll be a great experience..and give you some ties to a foreign entity so if America ever does hit the fan you will actually have a nice out.

But I hear where you are coming from. I got my degree and was struggling to find the work I wanted...so I took the work I didnt want..making great money but I wasnt happy with it...now about everything I do or plan involves living abroad.

a reply to: UziXxX

Okay.

It's apparent you express yourself in a professional manner. If your wardrobe is consistent with your vocabulary to me it's a mystery as to why you are unable to obtain employment.

LMAO.

The unemployment roles are filled with college grads who are still looking for employment AFTER wards. Many have to take jobs...any job..outside of their chosen careers...if they can find one.

Sadly...being in college and graduating from...although perhaps better positioned...is no guarantee for employment. Im watching 20-something right now as we speak coming here to a major auto company saying "Im here to start work"...most I cant figure out how they got a job to begin with, education and personal appearance wise. But they do...

Even my wife with 2 degrees...gets passed over by others. I think you should remain hopeful...but steel your nerves for the reality of how it is out there.*

*PS Im in an Emergency Office near Human Resources and Ive recently over heard this conversation..."Im available mostly any day of the week for work. I go the class on..." And the reply went like this..."Oh! Youre in SCHOOL?" In other words...that kind of "availablity" isnt necessarily a positive for the employer to deal with.

Good luck to you....Best MS

Its the same in the uk!
What makes it worse is when a vacancy does become available the employers break it down into three seperate 15 hour per week jobs!!
A 15 hour per week job is of no use to anyone!
So why do they do it?
Because in the uk the employer can avoid paying their portion of the NI stamp! That leaves the guvs purse short of money, and also the poor guy on 15 hours per week has to claim top up benefits just to be able to survive.

So, by allowing them to break a job up into three jobs, the government loses NI stamp money, it has to pay out benefit money, and it misses out on the tax that it could have claimed had someone been given a full time job!

Is it the same in the US?

I'm not sure why the board decided to cut off my post (the irony did dawn on me rofl)...

What it cut off was basically that I'm doing my bachelors of mechanical and aerospace engineering. My rant isn't so much that I feel I am owed anything. I am a conservative and all about the boot straps. No one owes me a damn thing in life. The rant is more about how, even the plumbing and electrical jobs, for example, require certain amount of years of professional experience. (At least the ones hiring in my area).

The whole thing about Obamacare before it got cut off was this: Working minimum wage is fine, but if I'm only working part time, (which a lot of big companies are in fact cutting associate hours to avoid the entire healthcare thing) that won't be enough to get by.

As for the comment about my wardrobe...

You'd be surprised how mild mannered I am in real life, and how professional I am in a work setting. If you were in my situation, you'd be just as frustrated, I assure you. So feel free to climb off of your high horse.

I have MS office skills, technical skills, customer service skills, AutoCAD skills, and leadership skills to name a few. But because a lot of these skills didn't come from professional work experience, I guess a lot of employers are deciding to pass me over as "inexperienced"? Which I guess isn't all that unfair, I am only a young man.

a reply to: UziXxX

It's long hours and hot and hard, but have you considered trying to hire on with a custom cutting harvest crew? They work from the south all the way up to Canada through the summer doing the wheat harvest. You'll work dawn til dusk, seven days a week if you get on, but it will pay your bills and you'll be busy.

www.uschi.com...

Yeah, it means not taking that class this summer, but you might be able to set aside the money to carry you through.

Also, you might be able to parley your skills that you earn into convincing someone that you have the experience they're looking for. Half of experience is BSing your prospective employer into believing that what you did before is similar to what you will be doing for them.

Also, the problem is that just having a degree is no guarantee that you've developed basic professional skills like the ability to show up on time.

a reply to: UziXxX

You didn't just go to the jobs tree?

originally posted by: schuyler
Oh dear. So what expertise have you developed? What skill set can you offer a prospective employer that would make that person hire you because you are so valuable? This is not rocket science these days. If you are about to graduate in chemical engineering, you'll find a good job. If you are about to graduate with an English degree, you won't.

Funny how this topic keeps arising here and the "boots straps" folks com out of the woodwork preaching the usual 19th & 20th century job search/mobility strategies, that don't currently work and will NEVER work again.

I've posted the below comment many times on ATS before and I will CONTINUE to post it, so people can finally understand and accept that the "boots straps" strategy died at LEAST 10 years ago in the USA and is NEVER going to function as it did in previous centuries:

Keeping up with the basics in terms of education and on-the-job work skills won’t be enough for jobs requiring future tech, labor market, skill-sets. The poor and even the middle class (not the upper middle class) will simply NOT be able to keep up with the skill demands for future employment, REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS, STATE LICENSING, etc, while earning wages AND keeping a roof over their heads. In the future these very high costs skills needed to stay “relevant” in ALL labor markets will only be affordable to the rich, or to VERY far forward thinking middle class families, willing to sacrifice everything financially to keep their offspring competitive in the larger job market.

I will begin with the usual assertion I hear in regards to the impact of these soon to be real “future-tech jobs”, which contrary to beliefs of some, includes the traditional trades and "soon to exist" related proprietary tech that will not be repairable, only "replaceable by a certified/licensed tech" with "approved" formal education.

People seem to always say this rebuttal, “Someone has to get paid to fix the robots!”

I often hear this above noted rebuttal to mass automation in the modern workplace, with big business is hell bent on replacing living workers with machines, BUT it misses a subtle point that ONLY the children of the wealthy will have the opportunity to become TRUE experts in such fields. Let me clarify, through the prior 20th century, a poor kid who studied hard could become a lawyer, accountant, even a doctor sometimes, with the right combination of hard work, savings, scholarships, family support, etc. OR, like most lower class folks, went straight into the trades and learned on the job with pay. HOWEVER, in engineering and technician curriculum’s today, times are changing to favor kids whom have access to expensive software and hardware to “experiment with" and “practice on" before entering college or a particular training program. So when they finally get to college or to their "entry-level job", those whom have had lots of "free time" spent “playing” with robotics and programming outside of class WILL CERTAINLY outpace their less privileged peer whom fliped burgers part-time to pay rent and school expenses.

Many people generally do not bother to ask themselves, would future robotics consulting companies prefer to hire graduates with little work experience, whom have demonstrated HANDS-ON, non-professional, robotics experience in the form of a “hobby portfolio”; OR graduates with no “hobby portfolio” experience, BUT at the same time worked hard to graduate with a difficult major, however didn’t have as much free time to develop skills specifically related to their major and have a long list of work experience unrelated to their major, i.e. flipping burgers, etc? I’m seeing this already happening in many different engineering fields where the young workers being hired today are from wealthy families and great colleges and are ironically being trained by older folks whom were not necessarily as privileged in their youth, but got through school the hard, 20th century way and were trained on the job, while paid, over VERY long periods of time.

All the above is certainly is no longer an option in 2014 and beyond because companies would prefer to churn experienced staff rather than train fresh graduates in-house.

Now for the next part of my observations. Before 1990, 40% of teenagers had part-time jobs while in school. This is a relevant statistic because today only 20% of teenagers in school have part-time jobs. Teens at one time did make up a sizable portion of the workforce and such changes in employment practices.

Although not my primary point, I do think there is plenty of evidence that teens today do not have the opportunity to get part-time jobs, BUT the non-working, wealthy ones are beginning to develop advanced skill-sets that COULD be MORE helpful in their future adult careers than say “working at a taco stand after school”. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are very good EARLY examples of people who made use of their free time and access to money, without having to labor for pay at a "taco stand", where they BOTH developed specialized skills that could not be learned at a MINDLESS part-time job or even in formal schooling. In the end they leveraged that free time learning into long term LUCRATIVE careers.

In the link below this paragraph, I have posted an example of what I believe to be a young person from a well off family who majored in robotics at USC, whom doesn’t appear to have had an unrelated part-time job to her major. While in college, she possibly had lots time to “experiment” with the technology in her spare time. Got a masters degree back-to-back to her bachelors degree AND at the end of the day, got a job offer at a University sponsored dinner party for robotics majors. NOBODY I went to college with EVER got a job offer at a university sponsored dinner party, I’m sure many Ivy league and top 10 school graduates do however. My point being, these future “robot repair jobs” are going to require smart kids with desire to advance, that also went to good schools, had lots of spare time and money to play with the tech outside of school AND got their jobs offered at exclusive dinner parties, with some of the initial job offerings being non-paying internships at first. Further causing a skills gulf between the rich whom can work for free indefinitely and the less privileged who need a paycheck the day before they graduate. These jobs will not be gotten through sending out blind jobs applications on web job boards, as was done in the 20th century. Basically what this girl is doing for Disney, will in the near future, be more like what a plumber or electrician of today does, EXCEPT you won’t get trained on the job in a low-pay apprenticeship when at “entry level”. In fact to even be considered for these “future-tech jobs” in the first place you’ll need to have good academic pedigree, lots of unpaid hobby time and 1+ years of unpaid internships.

Readers can decide for themselves, its my opinion is that this is what a career for a plumber is going to look like in 15+ years, here is her story,:

onedublin.org...

a reply to: boohoo

And if you consistently take that attitude, you'll never succeed whether it's possible or not. You've already convinced yourself that you can't because you don't belong to that privileged crowd, so you need not even bother trying. Self-defeating is as self-defeating does.

originally posted by: ketsuko
And if you consistently take that attitude, you'll never succeed whether it's possible or not. You've already convinced yourself that you can't because you don't belong to that privileged crowd, so you need not even bother trying. Self-defeating is as self-defeating does.

Actually you would be wrong, as I am old enough to not be in that cohort. Just because I don't blatantly say "I am" the older person training nothing but "rich kids" these days, doesn't make it less true. I am describing what I see in the overall job market as a hiring manager in a high tech sector (that contracts to companies like Disney). If you're not in the thick of it, none of these types of details would be obvious on the surface. Also if you were correct, there would not be as large a wage gap as there is in the USA, nor would there be such a huge decline in full-time job openings across the board, in all sectors. The NUMBERS are proving my more contemporary position correct and "dating your positions as CLEARLY 20th century

I'll recap some further details because you seem to be late to this party.

Those whom are going to be rendered jobless by automation/robotics/tech are going to be the least likely to be able to pick up these pieces in the coming era of traditional jobs destruction. Its going to IMPOSSIBLE for the poor to go back to school, get a masters degree in robotics, in full-time only engineering programs, that also strongly discourage their admitted students from taking part-time jobs, while favoring students who have both money and free time and don’t EVER work at job unrelated to their majors, who then buy expensive robotics hardware/software to experiment with outside of class, on someone else's dime.

Mark my words this future labor market in the pursuit of “maintaining robots” or anything else for that matter is going to be the sole domain of rich kids with advanced degrees from good schools because NO ONE is going to train anybody perceived as lesser, in that kind of job, WITH PAY.

To continue my above point, I believe “rich kid” job mobility is going to be a bigger problem for regular folks beyond what the previous "rich kid" pedigree typically brought in the 20th century & before. This unfettered access to endless money, time to “explore” academics and hands-on work without pay and no economic consequences, is going to END job mobility of any kind, for the lower and middle classes. Even those whom have met the typical required higher education and work experience standards will FOREVER be at a disadvantage when competing against these "highly motivated, rich kids" for jobs. Its a superstar only job market from here out, with no room for middle of road folks. This is a much larger looming economic disaster than ANYONE is currently willing to admit.

This sounds really serious, you might not be able to get that tint and those snap on spinners you've been wanting. Go apply in high drug activity areas. People can't hold on to their jobs for long in an area that's been hit hard by the pharmaceuticals or H so they're always hiring.

Its hard for people who have been in long term employment to understand quite how much the jobs market has changed over the last 5 years.

Its my experience that older folks have the most difficulty comprehending the vast differences in the employment opportunities of today compared to their experiences of a couple of decades ago. There is a glut of highly educated people desperate to get even the lowest paid manual labor jobs but these positions are disappearing fast due to mechanization, automation, off-shoring, immigration etc etc.

Factories and warehouses are becoming highly automated many entry level desk based jobs are being replaced with computerized systems even the lower level retail jobs are being replaced by self service tills and online shopping.

I read an article in the last few days that stated studies project up to 30% of current jobs will be replaced by automated systems within the next 10 years and logically unemployment will have to rise 30% too if that is the case. 100s of job titles are at risk due to software advances and as this accelerates millions of jobs become redundant too.

So when you older folks condemn the younger generation as whining layabouts who need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get on the employment ladder with any old entry level job just remember their bootstraps are getting longer every day and entry level jobs are becoming an endangered species.

I got pissed when I had trouble finding a job. But..... I dropped out of high school. And I am glad that I did.

Why?

I would not have met my room mate who has a masters degree in teaching math and science from k to 12.... who was out of work for 6 years.... got some positions as a substitute teacher here and there but it wasn't enough. Ended up becoming a cab driver after I put in myself as a reference to the cab company I worked for. Now he makes more money than I did.

My sister has her bachelors degree for history teaching.... she hasn't taught a single class.... works for TSA. I got into TSA myself for one year... hated every day, but I had the best eyes. She is still there.

My friend J just got out of college. He is an adamant lyricist.... I got him a job with aramark that helped him through it all after he came back from the springs. Met him when I worked for target. Still works at the blue sky grill.

My friend corey. Blondie girl. Stopped her from going to college. Now she is a supervisor in the escalated subscriber disputes for Sprint. Happily married. Her husband patrick I met before they got serious at the movie theater I worked at in parker co. He went to college but later dropped out. I had no influence here, but helped him out when I could.

My friend TJ.... felon.... stopped him from a bad marriage, but couldn't save him from spreading his seeds.... but at least he finally found someone to be with that I approve of as a friend. Even after his break up with his babies momma, and the divorce of his first wife.

Rita... social services and now sherif in Denver. Met her when I was driving my cab. Gave her my step fathers number who is a retired sheriff himself. Got her the position.

Inetta. Stoner I worked with at aramark. She now has two kids. Moved to kansas. Happiky married after I helped her out when I could. Now I get free bread. Her mom works for Rainbow.

James... electronic dance music artist. Has the ability to think of a basic melody, but lacks in creativity when it comes to harmonies. I showed him how to operate fl studio, and i help him out with his tunes. Now he wants to go pro.

There are so many people I have met and helped.... all because I dropped out, and never thought about college. I have done more for the people right here, than I ever could at a college. I saw college as nothing more than a 20,000 dollar and a above loan. In exchange for a fancy piece of paper with a signature of some nobody. And after all of my experiences in life and what i witnessed... it brought me to this conclusion.....


More people, more issues.