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I wonder if we're going to see a MASSIVE turn-around in hiring to the point where people will finally once again be approached in colleges and universities by these companies desperate to fill the vacant void left by those currently 45 to 60.
But, knowing the way the world has been going lately, we'd just be beaten by the developing world...
Nah, far more likely is that in ten years when the shit hits the fan they'll start grabbing people right out of collage and universities again. By that point people like us will have been out of education for 15-20 years with nothing but shelf stacking experience under our belts. In other words, no matter what the future holds it won't be good for you or me.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
*shrug*. You don't have to agree with me, that's fine, obviously you are entitled to your opinion, although the personal attacks I find sad given you know nothing about me.
Start ups can sometimes provide potential opportunities for Millenials to get paid employment in their field, relatively soon after graduating. I've seen it happening and for many people that's a better option than an unpaid internship.
Haha yes I made a spelling error. What fun.
Both of you did! I only pointed it out cause it's funny in a post about the value of education.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
I don't really know how else to say, "Your advice is awful and the fact that you professionally dispense your bad advice terrifies me." It does come across personally, because it's very personal. I don't mean to impugn your likeability as a bloke with whom beers could be had. You should probably stop giving young people very bad advice about job seeking when your job is giving good advice, though.
No. God, that would be awful. Do you have any idea how many resumes I've seen that have absolutely no bearing on the individuals skillset?
#FreeScheck#FreeSKFM
Then you end up with something like the federal hiring process, which most people will tell you is also not a particularly useful way to do things.
As an Employment Counsellor one of the things i do is to provide clients with options, along with getting clients to look at the pros and cons that they see of each option. In the end as a constructivist counsellor it's up to each client I see to chart their own course.
Unpaid internship? pro: gain new skills with a recognized firm and possible paid employment down the road. Con: unpaid free labour with no guarantee of employment
Work at a Startup? Pro: gain new skills, easier to land after graduating, get paid employment right away. Con: company may fold, possibility of long hours, company not known/recognized, lack of benefits, etc,
Life is about choices and recognizing that different choices leads down different paths. I personally think the pro's of looking at a start up outweighs the negatives but that's just me. Others in this thread have given serious reasons why they feel opposite.
If you'd like to debate, let's debate, not resort to YOU ARE WRONG AND ADVICE STUPID responses.
Government hiring processes are usually considered "not good" only because they aren't the traditional format. Except the traditional format sucks ass, provably and government hiring processes generally work pretty well from my experience.
Well, you can get that at just about any corporation, too. I applied somewhere about 9 months ago, and only just got a notice that my resume was sent on to phase two HR for that position.
And talking to people that work there, it can take 1.5 years from application to interview..
My dad is facing this right now. What he does is nothing incredibly special, I would think; just applied logic. Yet he is soon to retire and most of his colleagues either have or are also about to retire. He is not training anyone, and neither has any of his colleagues. Considering what he does, I imagine his company all-but collapsing when he does, as he's busy putting out fires as it is due to the no replacements thing.
And doesn't a large chunk of the population learn from others teaching them how to do things? I mean, that's why we have teachers, right?
One other thing that I guess I've noticed, comparing myself and my father, is that he is a company man, and has been for 25+ years. I don't know if anyone around my age that has stuck with a place for more than five, to be honest. As someone said, we're a generation of mercenaries or whores. We go where the money and needs are. We get poached and passed around, and have no real loyalty to anyone but ourselves. I wonder how this came to be.
I don't want to go with personal attacks, but your advice and insight regarding start ups is terrible. Getting involved in a start up is a terrible idea for someone with no work experience if they can get literally ANYTHING else. The type of start up that would even hire someone without demonstrated results is not long for this world.
Anecdote time: A buddy of mine left his cushy boring dev job at a major bank to do the start up thing. It failed (Surprise!) and set him back about 5 years careerwise.
I'd rather freelance than work for a start up, and imo freelancing sssssuuuuuuccccccckkkkkksssss.
#FreeScheck#FreeSKFM
Well, the way you phrased it just now is definitely much more reasonable an examination of the potential options available to someone. What you were saying earlier seemed to suggest that you were advocating working at a start-up as the absolute best way to have a career. I vehemently disagree with that. I've done quite a bit of work at smaller companies, and I'd say most people aren't suited to it. Most people are much more comfortable in a job where the path to success is more understandable and available to them, without all the inherent risk and likely high costs associated with breaking your back at a start-up.
What I'm saying is that it's not the employees who have gotten more mercenary; it's the employers. And there's no reason for anyone to show loyalty to anyone who isn't going to show loyalty to them.
That's a fair assessment. I suppose my earlier comments did focus on the positives without addressing the negatives. "gravy train" may have been a little optimistic
You are correct that a start up may not be the best way to start a career. What I'm trying to point out is that in this economy, and with so few opportunities available to new grads, working at a start up is one option to consider .... Typically start ups will take new grads in part because they don't have the money to pay somebody with more experience.
I had an interview a few weeks ago at a start up ... They were hiring for a pr position .... Thing is they said straight up they were looking for a grad as they were looking to pay in the low 30s for a position that would normally pay in the 40s (or more) at a corporate company. I turned it down, but if I was a new grad it might be something I would have considered to gain work experience.
Gravy train was definitely one of the phrases I latched onto.
I think your advice that I'm reading now boils down to, "Go somewhere where you can get experience, period. Don't be too picky and consider all options." That's good advice.
I guess I didn't even think of that.
But what about those of us who were employed, and still are, before the crash? I guess it's been almost five years since that happened. I wonder if my friends will still be able to stick around.
I used to work as a physicist and we were in a position where only 2 people in the US still made the targets we needed since they hadn't trained anyone and back in the 80s review boards had decided we wouldn't need this skillset any more and had not replaced any retirees. So, literally there are these 2 70 year olds making every target used (and it turned out that making targets this way was a really useful technique) and they had realized there was no incentive for them to work too much. So they would make one or two interesting targets a week from their list of jobs and then just go home.
Modern industry and academia has been destroying itself with short sightedness for a long time now!
I agree to some extent that things will turn around ... The question though is when exactly and if at that point it will be "too late" to help our generations (Late X and early Millenials in particular).
The first wave of boomers born in 46 just hit 65 last year. We have 20 more years to go until the last of them hit 65. In the meantime many boomers are choosing not to retire (they can't afford to) which is holding things up even longer.
I assume it will be at least another 10 years before boomers exiting the workforce really starts to make an impact in terms of opening up opportunities for the rest of us ... At which point I'll be in my mid 40s ... That's a long time with many years of lost opportunities (which I'm assuming is where the lost generation phrase comes from).
Combine that with outsourcing, new technologies cutting own the number of workers needed in certain industries .... It's scary really.
I've long held that it's late Millenials and the gen after that will really benefit in terms of job opportunities once the boomers are gone.
It's all about voter share, ladies and gentlemen, and if properly motivated we've got the most.
You could definately change the law so that if you are still at work at a company which offers health insurance, you don't get medicare. That would save plenty of money and give a nice 'free' incentive for boomers to retire.
The way I've had it explained to me was that Companies stopped showing loyalty to their employees. The vulture capital firms and outsourcing and union busting, led to people getting layed off in the 90's and 2000's and 2008 to keep shareholder dividends high. Most Gen X'ers saw their parents work most of their lives at one company, only to be laid off as soon as things got tough for the company. Very few of us saw our parents kept on the payroll even when things were tight at Corp HQ. That instilled in us a work ethic that is more of a work to live where we work/earn enough to survive comfortably, as opposed to the live to work of some of our parents, where they poured their entire productive lives to the detriment of their personal lives into their paymasters.
I refuse to just stand by, bend over, and ask the Boomers to please not use the spiked condom this time.
Fuck that. We stand together sure, we shoulder the burden, sure. But we take what we want at the same time, while keeping in mind our children when they show up.
Basically, we'll be doing what our grandparents had to do (assuming your grandparents were from the WWII generation).
We vote enough people in, starting in the next 5 to 10 years, we start actually showing up to vote and filling out the rolls the way our numbers say we should, and this country will be a lot better off.
It isn't good enough to just bite the bullet and sigh on the things that could have been. That's how the boomers win.
The problem is nobody under 50 can get elected in our system, because they can't get bankrolled, and they don't have the connections that they need to get the endorsements and free media coverage that they need to even be heard of. Our system is so fucking broken at this point, and it pretty much all lands at the feet of the Baby Boomers and their elders.
We need to, as a group, agree to stop voting for people over 50, and start voting, period.
To put it in simple terms, right now we're going through a huge skills shortage AND massive youth unemployment. At the same time. Simultaneously. In unison.
To quote Will Ferrell, "DOES NO ONE ELSE SEE THIS? I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS HERE!"
There's an obvious solution, but it means employing people who aren't boomers and paying them wages that aren't peanuts. And that's something they're just not willing to do.
This does seem like the sort of problem that would solve itself, if the job market was even remotely rational. How often do you see a job posting that doesn't require prior experience these days?
It would also be good if we could perhaps persuade them to do what is best for the long term, not just for us. Doing what is best for the long term is good for us too, and means we can be like the greatest generation rather than the boomers. "Here children, here is all the cool stuff we set up that helps you that you can take for granted and ruin"
Boomers have proven they are going to take care of their own (gen). In Canada our federal budget was just announced. They are raising the age you can get old age security (500 a month) to 67 from 65. They aren't implementing this though to anyone over 54. A very clear message that boomers will be taken care of and fuck everyone else.
It's beyond frustrating ... So selfish especially when many boomers don't even need OAS, caking it off capital gains on their investments.
The skills shortage is only going to get worse. In the old days you started at a company and that company would train from within over the course of your career. Now it's cheaper to outsource entry level positions overseas ... Boomers have always been about what is most profitable for them ..l and down the road? Thy don't care they'll be dead and it's going to be our problem. I think that Xers and Millenials recognize what's happening so I really do hope we get active politically. Over the next 15 years our numbers will start to be heard ...
You're right, the country will be better off, but these things take time and, speaking financially, Millennials are out of time--we already will make less than the last and next generation. That country that will be better off? Yes, we need to make that happen, but we won't be the prime benefactors of those changes, the youth will. And I'm okay with this. The future will be theirs, but it's up to us to make it happen.
I don't think we necessarily disagree.