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How can I get a job that doesn't suck?
Pi-r8
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I know, a very common problem and not one that's easy to solve. But any advice you can give me would be appreciated.
So, I'm 26, and I've basically never had a real job before. I've worked part time jobs in fast food, dishwashing, and tutoring, but never for many hours and I'm currently unemployed (being supported by my family, so luckily there's no immediate financial pressure). I've also been a graduate research assistant, which is sort of like a job I guess except that I never really did anything.
I got my undergraduate degree in physics in 2008 with a minor in math. I thought having a STEM degree would be practical, and open up all kinds of job options in science and engineering. Unfortunately it seems that, A, no one is hiring scientists anymore, and B, companies want people with actual engineering degrees for engineering jobs. So far I have had no luck at all finding a job related to my major.
I've been to grad school twice for physics, and dropped out both times because it seemed like more of the same- really hard, really boring, and completely unpractical. In retrospect I probably should have at least stuck it out long enough to get a Master's degree, but I didn't.
I've had some success getting interviews for programming jobs (6 interviews in the past 6 months). But they've all asked me questions that are waaaay beyond the limited programming knowledge that I've been able to teach myself. I've also been denied many times because I just don't have enough programming related experience. I'm thinking about going back to grad school for a master's in CS, even though I really don't want to go back to grad school a third time. To be honest I don't even really like programming, it just seems like the best hope I have for finding a good job (by which I mean, somewhat interesting, some work-related freedom, liveable salary and benefits). I've been focusing on learning how to program for mobile devices since that seems like a really hot area these days, and one with less competition from middle-aged programmers with decades of experience.
So what should I do? Go to grad school again and hope that third time's the charm? Continue teaching myself programming and applying for jobs? Apply for minimum wage retail jobs just to get experience and try to work myself up? Or is there some other category of jobs that I'd be better qualified for that I'm missing. I feel like I need to do something, fast, or else I'll just be forever unemployable with a huge blank spot on my resume.
So, I'm 26, and I've basically never had a real job before. I've worked part time jobs in fast food, dishwashing, and tutoring, but never for many hours and I'm currently unemployed (being supported by my family, so luckily there's no immediate financial pressure). I've also been a graduate research assistant, which is sort of like a job I guess except that I never really did anything.
I got my undergraduate degree in physics in 2008 with a minor in math. I thought having a STEM degree would be practical, and open up all kinds of job options in science and engineering. Unfortunately it seems that, A, no one is hiring scientists anymore, and B, companies want people with actual engineering degrees for engineering jobs. So far I have had no luck at all finding a job related to my major.
I've been to grad school twice for physics, and dropped out both times because it seemed like more of the same- really hard, really boring, and completely unpractical. In retrospect I probably should have at least stuck it out long enough to get a Master's degree, but I didn't.
I've had some success getting interviews for programming jobs (6 interviews in the past 6 months). But they've all asked me questions that are waaaay beyond the limited programming knowledge that I've been able to teach myself. I've also been denied many times because I just don't have enough programming related experience. I'm thinking about going back to grad school for a master's in CS, even though I really don't want to go back to grad school a third time. To be honest I don't even really like programming, it just seems like the best hope I have for finding a good job (by which I mean, somewhat interesting, some work-related freedom, liveable salary and benefits). I've been focusing on learning how to program for mobile devices since that seems like a really hot area these days, and one with less competition from middle-aged programmers with decades of experience.
So what should I do? Go to grad school again and hope that third time's the charm? Continue teaching myself programming and applying for jobs? Apply for minimum wage retail jobs just to get experience and try to work myself up? Or is there some other category of jobs that I'd be better qualified for that I'm missing. I feel like I need to do something, fast, or else I'll just be forever unemployable with a huge blank spot on my resume.
Pi-r8 on
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I don't think minimum-wage anything will let you work your way up in any way that'll be more useful to you than your degree. If you don't care about physics at all, then sure, otherwise I'd say that's your main asset.
You mentioned you were a research assistant, did you network at all in college? Could you call your supervisor or co-assistants, or just anyone else from your class? Even if nobody can help you outright, hearing where other people with the same kind of backgrounds have gotten work might help you out, plus it would probably be helpful with making your call on going back to school.
As for getting a job as a programmer, I'm sure someone else has better advice than me. The general consensus (I think) is to just work on something, anything: get certifications or do a project in your spare time, something that you can show to an employer to prove you actually know what you're doing.
Anyway, good luck.
Honestly I don't really care about physics anymore. If it can get me a job, great, but I'm happy to do whatever. Another problem is that most jobs that would make use of a physics background are kind of... evil. Finance, oil/gas, and weapons design are the big three (seriously). They usually want a PhD, too.
As a research assistant, my supervisor was just a professor. I'm pretty sure he's never had a job outside of academia, so he's not super helpful with finding jobs. Also he's moved to Europe, and I don't know how to reach him anymore.
I have talked to a lot of other people that I went to school with. Most of them are still in grad school, and have no idea what kind of job they'll get afterwards. I do know one person who got a job as a nuclear reactor operator, which is kinda cool, but I haven't had any luck finding jobs like that.
I do know that I'm supposed to work on my own code. I've been taking online classes, building my own stuff, putting my code on a blog, and working on a coding project with a friend. Everyone says that open-source projects are great resume builders, but unfortunately I feel like I'm not really advanced enough to work on any of those yet.
1. Science - grad degree required, or you'll be stuck being a research assistant forever.
2. Programming - definitely a possibility, and for the open source stuff, you won't necessarily contribute a ton, but you can do the boring, crappy work and learn a lot.
3. Math related jobs - how mathy do you want to be? There's a lot of openings for quants in the world, such as actuaries, financial analysts and whatnot.
What do you like to do? That's really the underlying question.
I always wanted to be a scientist. But the way it works in physics, at least, is that a research assistant is a grad student. You can't get that job without being a grad student (or at least not usually), and once you graduate they kick you out. Even with a PhD the odds of actually getting a career position in science are quite low, and they're going to get worse next year if congress cuts basic science funding by 8% like they're planning.
What kind of boring, crappy work can a relative beginner do on an open-source project that would build my resume enough for someone to hire me?
Math jobs would be OK, although there aren't all that many of those either, and a lot of those are in finance which I woudl really like to avoid if at all possible. I've actually heard that the job market for entry-level actuaries is pretty bad these days. And unfortunately my knowledge of statistics is fairly limited, which seems like the most employable part of math.
Honestly there's nothing that I have any particular burning passion for. I think I wouldn't mind too much having a job that I don't like, I just don't want to be poor and unemployed for the rest of my life.
You can get an accounting diploma, get an entry level accounting job and work towards a CGA or CMA. There's the stigma that being an accountant is boring but its stable and I've heard accounting skills are pretty transferable, meaning you could work in a lot of different countries so that's kind of exciting.
You could work as an Marketing researcher en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_research Companies like Nielsen, Oracle Value Added, or Millward Brown are big marketing research firms. I actually think this is a good field because every company needs this service so it's suppose to be a growing field (bls.gov/ooh/business-and-financial/market-research-analysts.htm).
or you could be a teacher, you can never have too many good math/science teachers.
Just some suggestions that I've thought because, like you, I am also a recent grad and unemployed.
I, for example, like solving problems. I don't care what type of problems, I just feel a compelling need to solve them and make things better. I am a Business Systems Analyst, which are fancy words for "guy who gets shit done that needs doing".
Some days I look at human issues and process, some days I run stats for management, some days I do UI design. What do you feel a compelling need to do, if anything?
I've never quite understood why we don't use schools linked up with universities to get some of the grunt work down in research (though largely speaking from an ecology point of view). Universities get a ton of free bodies to point at a problem, whilst the pupils get to have their work written up in papers and actually have some real meaning beyond just getting a grade. The guys at Cern probably won't be interested, but there's got to be a ton of community college professors just desperate for whatever manpower or coding they can get (especially in an age where half their workforce is carting around smartphones and the like with all the various ridiculous bits of kit like GPS, light monitors, cameras, compasses and spirit levels those things contain by default).
You could even give tutoring a go, that might be a decent way to put your foot in the water and see if it's something you'd like or something you can't stand. You'd also have a bit more freedom to do above crazy things, or at least get them started so you can present your idea to a headmaster, once you've completed teacher training, with some valid evidence and a few research contracts. And if it works but you hate it, hello consulting...just do the fun bits setting them up. Either way, lots of short, varied projects that are directly applicable to someone.
You'd only need to start with enough programming skills to troubleshoot children (which it sounds like you might have) and perhaps a contact who can fill in the gaps should a student come up with something really special, and over time you'd probably find it easier to learn with a specific goal in mind. You'd be using your physics knowledge to define engineering problems, rather than having to give that up to be the engineer or be terribly specialised.
Marketing researcher might be interesting. I'll look into that. Thanks!
Becoming a teacher just sounds horrible... I know it's an important job, but the idea of spending the rest of my life in high school just sounds like hell.
Anyway, good luck with your job search!
I know that for me, I graduated with a science degree (cell and molecular bio), and I wasn't really sure where I wanted to go from there once I graduated except that I love lab work and take pride in a steady hand. The job search itself really helped me narrow down where I want to go from here, and it turns out it requires an additional certification (HLT), which will take me a while to get because money. I personally don't think that getting a degree is enough to be happy, and in the job market in most fields and parts of the country it's certainly not enough to guarantee anyone a job. I really think the best thing to do is find the job you want to do, find out what it takes, and then do what you need to do to get good at that job, and be able to demonstrate that you are good at it.
It's a lot harder than it looks to wander around a field and find the right in to a job that you love. You need to do a lot of networking for that; it won't fall out of the sky. Sometimes graduate professors have contacts in the industry of your choice and can help you find something entry-level. You're right that you probably shouldn't have quit before walking out of there with some piece of paper or other; one of my husband's favorite sayings is that the most direct route to making something into a waste of time and money is to quit halfway through. Maybe you could salvage some of the credits you got and work your way through it?
Man I don't even know. I guess to be honest, it's because when I was 18 I really liked science fiction and wanted to prove how smart I was? Not a great motivation, I know, but that's how I was.
I still l'm still drawn to the idea of a job where I could have intellectual freedom to work on big, important problems that affect the entire world. But then maybe I'm still being unrealistic.
Actually your job sounds kind of cool. How did you get into it?
That would be good. I always do really well on standardized tests. From what I've seen most usajobs require specific backgrounds though, like military experience + security clearance, but I'll look into it more.
Yeah. I know, network network network. Honestly I don't think having the Master's would help me all that much, and I was only there for one semester so i didn't waste too much time on it (and no money luckily).
Hahaha I'm not passionate about it at all anymore. I actually think a lot of modern science research is a complete waste of time. So uh... I probably wouldn't be a good choice as a teacher.
Well at least in physics there really isn't a lot of grunt work that needs to be done in research. When I was a research assistant, they pretty much just gave me a big stack of papers to read and told me to read them and then think of my own project idea to work on. You don't really need a bunch of teenagers washing bottles or whatever, you need experts.
I actually have done some tutoring, and it's OK but I would really want something more permanent and stable as a career.
Maybe you should stop looking at it as a search to find the 'perfect job' and just try to find one you know? I been in the position to hire people, and I gotta tell you, a 26 year old with no work experience would seem really odd to me.
Coding is probably your best bet, but if you don't like it you are screwed. You might want to consider that you are even more screwed by working in retail the rest of your life. You can get better at coding by doing it. There's no secret to this apart from knuckling down. You have success in getting interviews in this field, so work with this. Buy some big scary books on code and just learn all the latest techniques and languages, as if you were studying for another degree. Every time you fail an interview because of a question you can't answer, make sure you learn it for the next time. Make a new app every day until it is easy.
Yeah, unless you have a BS in engineering or 5-10 years of experience you're probably not going to get an engineering job. That said, if you did well in your Physics BS it would be really easy for you to go back and get an MS in engineering, there's a lot of material overlap
The thing is having a STEM degree is as useful as you make it, just like everything else--if you don't make the effort to network and gain career experience through internships/co-ops/research while you're getting the degree, you're not going to be an attractive prospect at graduation.
But this:
has me a bit worried, if you don't a goal or at least a vague idea of what you want to do you're just going to end up doing nothing. Pick something, anything, and go do it.
Since being long-term unemployed is absolutely toxic for your chances in any career, this is the best advice. The OP seems to have a problem in "sticking it out" with anything, and he needs to fix this more than anything else. Pick something and stick with it. You can always change it later on if it is not "you", but if you spend any longer unemployed, employers in any field will start to assume that you are uselessly work shy or have some serious problem.
After I do ____________, I feel really good. (please note that sex and drugs are not valid answers for this instance)
Ok, if the OP were a recent grad (like 21 or 22), I would totally agree with you that it's not worrying
But at 26, most employers are going to expect you to have your shit worked out
I'm 31, have a good job that pays well and I still don't have that "one thing" that I want to do. I like doing everything. The key is to find the underlying motivator, as my motivator of "solving problems" means I'm well-positioned for being a business and systems analyst with an eye towards project management and systems development. That said, I don't have a real specialty.
I think too many people fall into the trap of wanting to find the perfect, magic, happy inducing, job. And I'm sure they're out there, and can even be achieved. But at the same time, I think it's healthy and important to realize that a job doesn't necessarily have to define you.
OP- You might seriously want to consider the fact that your family's support is hindering you as much as helping you.
Right now my default option is programming jobs. I already know something about it, I have several friends in the industry who an help me, I sometimes enjoy it, and it seems like I'm reasonably good at it. So basically that's what I'm working on now, and hopefully one of these days I'll get an interview that pans out. But I'm not married to it- If there's any other type of job that I could get without going back to school I would definitely try for that, too.
I would say... pretty much anything that makes me feel like I'm useful and helpful to someone else.
That said, BA's are the infantry of the corporate world, so there is a level of soul-crushing involved, and make sure to bring your "tolerant of political BS" hat if you go fortune 500. Honestly, if you put your head down and put out good work, you'll get far, as there's a lot of dead weight out there.
One thing I will say though: LEARN DATA MANIPULATION. Make sure to know SQL (it's easy) and how data is used in the modern world. Everything that's done in the business world is backed up by metrics and dashboards these days, so if you can speak the language and get up to speed really fast, you'll have a leg up on everyone else.
Especially the bit about SQL is correct- put Ubuntu on your home box, put Apache/MySQL/PHP on it (sudo apt-get lamp or something similar), and make a basic little database and then make a basic little webpage that lets you query the database, and suddenly you will have the skills be hirable in some sort of junior analyst role.
I say this because management do not look at data dumps (mostly), they look at dashboards produced by BI tools.
You can also do some interesting algorithm play by playing with the twitter datasets or other similar things. Also, understand how databases work and what the modal forms are and how SQL optimization works. If you have all this together (which is honestly only a few months of learning if you have some time available), you're going to be a really strong candidate for a lot of positions where there isn't much supply. Data scientists in general are in incredibly short supply and basically any company worth their salt are either already metrics driven to transitioning to it.
It doesn't have to be a life sentence. Right now you need a decent job, or very soon you will have too long a stretch of unemployment right after your degree to be employable. So you need to pick something you can basically already do, without retraining.
Worked for me...
If you can get a finance job as a physics major, take it. Insofar as finance is evil, they're going to be evil whether you work for them or not, and it's great money and your best shot at making f-you money that would allow you to pursue a passion. I wouldn't feel evil about oil & gas, either - people's resistance to more costly alternative energy will only wane when gas gets expensive, and unfortunately the shale oil/fracking boom is going to derail that for the next few decades. Operating a nuke reactor would be long periods of boredom punctuated by brief periods of terror, doesn't sound that fun to me.
I firstly want you to know that I actually signed up specifically to answer you, because I'm in kind of the same boat. I'm 26, I've never had a perm job, except a 6 month stint as a researcher (and a long temp job or two), which like you said, sucked balls as a) you don't do anything and b) (in my case) you don't get paid.
What I've found is that it really is experience that people are looking for these days. I graduated in 2008 with BSc Mol Genetics (poor grade to be fair), and when I first started was very eager to work in science, applied for a f**k tonne of jobs, finding out through a couple of interviews and generally being ignored that it really is the experience that they were looking for. So much so that I had one Team Leader for a great company come right out and say 'You fit in, you had the right qual but you just don't have any real world experience', the underlying point he explained was that a uni degree is now no longer considered an adequate judge of work responsibility.
So I have to agree with what other people here have said, in that you need a *job* right now. Skills are transferable, unemployment gaps are difficult to explain/justify. I've got a few gaps that I've managed to get around, learning languages in my spare time (really quite a geeky past time), means that I can say I've spent time studying, and also helps on the CV. Have you done much at all during your breaks that you could swing around, skills that you've gained? I don't know how your uni systems works - will you have gained credits from Grad school that you can rely upon? Did you go on holiday ('went travelling') etc?
I see that employers would hope that you would have a direction by now, but I think it's a common situation to be in. Maybe a better question to ask of yourself, would be not what do you want to be, but what do you want to be able to do? What skills do you want to have, anything you've not finished that you really wish you'd stuck at that you can go back to? I know that minimum wage jobs aren't great, but if you're not working right now, surely any money is good money? As well as the experience being worth it. And again, if you're being looked after financially, have you considered writing to places to ask for a voluntary position/work experience? You might be surrounded by kids who are doing it earlier, but at the end of it, you'll have a degree and experience and they'll still have 3/4 years of Katy Perry songs to circumnavigate.
What I'm mostly concerned about here is you say you're looking into programming but you don't really like it? That's the easy way to end up in a bad place.
What about self employment, could you see yourself running your own business? Maybe if you can't find the job you want, you can build a workable position while you keep looking?
/end rambly post
A- Engineering is probably one of the best things to get into (the other being medical) so if your family is providing for you and you find it interesting, IMO going back to school for could be an amazing and eventually rewarding idea.
As far as your questions about whether you should just get a job and try to work up, that's up to you. My mother went to jail, had no college degree of any kind, and while in rehab was put into some work program that landed her an easy job at Sears. Eventually she got put into appliance sales, won a lot of awards for best yearly sales, then Home Depot came knocking and poached her for their then-new appliance section, giving her a nice salary. She excelled again, got to be a department head, then assistant manager, then continuing to excel was upped to a store manager making well over $200k a year. All that from about as low as you can start, all in around 15 years... But 15 years is a long time, and you need that combination of drive, skill, intelligence and luck to even have a shot of pulling something like that off.
Myself I went another route - Since I had to provide for myself in every way from 18 years old on, and could barely pay my rent, at 20 years old I looked into an emergency 911 dispatch job that quadrupled my pay right off the bat. I end up being one of four people hired out of 1200+ tested over an 8 month period - pretty bad odds, but if you're confident in yourself it's always possible. The job market might not be incredible, but people get great jobs. You just have to prove that you're the one worth giving them to.
So it's up to you. If I were you, I'd get an engineering degree - but it's perfectly possible to find a high paying job now, or to work your way up through a large corporation if that is your ambition. Depends how long you're willing to wait.
It's definitely not for everyone, and I personally wouldn't work up on a med/surg floor no matter how much you paid me (I did work as down in the ER for 3 years though), but it can open up a lot of doors and it has a pretty low bar for entry.