That mirrors the experiences of a lot of people I know. As far as they could tell, they did everything right: worked hard enough to get decent A-levels, then went to good universities and got good degrees, and most of them worked at least part-time throughout their degrees too, so they all have qualifications and work experience.
There just aren’t enough jobs.
And that goes for all sorts of jobs.
Lots of my friends, and lots of my adult students, all in the age group this thread is about, have applied for the most basic entry-level jobs (cleaning, telesales, McD’s imitators) repeatedly and never got anywhere.
The ones with good professional experience tend to wait about three-to-six months before applying for such jobs; lower-level jobs can look (really) bad on the CV and working them can leave you less time for those professional job applications, which often take several hours to write with multiple interviews during working hours, and six months is short enough to not look too bad or even to half-lie about (studying, travelling). But then they go for anything. Supermarkets, cleaning, telesales.
They have tailored CVs focusing on their work experience rather than their qualifications; they have evidence of good customer service skills, often in the very sectors they’re applying to (basically applying for the retail jobs they did while at uni), but they get nowhere.
Temping seems to have died a death, too. Not exactly sure why, but temping used to be a way into the employment market and some people even did it for years, but now there’s very little of it around.
Oh, and as for moving out of home? Well, unless you live somewhere like Detroit - where there are no jobs anyway - house prices have got ridiculous.
For someone to rent a small room in London - pretty much anywhere in London - would require a £1000 outlay for a month’s rent in advance plus a month’s rent as deposit, and that’s a lowball for shared housing.
30 years ago, people were paying that much as a downpayment on their mortgage in many houses in zones 2 and above. That’s more than a month’s salary on minimum wage or even a pound or two above it, and could many people really save over a 12th of their income when they were already living on minimum wage?
I would just like to point out that due to the economy, this has become an employer’s market. Meaning that almost every job which I am qualified for experience wise, I will not get because I do not have a BA or Masters. The companies that are still hiring are requiring degrees of some sort now. No, I don’t think I will get an “awesome job” once I graduate. But I do expect to at least be able to get my foot in the door.
Of course that’s not the point. I don`t know how you could possibly come away thinking that. The point is that there’s thousands of people in their 40-50s who are NOT trying or willing to find the same work. So why single out young people?
For every 25 year old with a poli sci degree who thinks he’s too good to work in a warehouse, there’s an unemployed 55 year old dad with 25 years experience as a professional engineer who thinks he’s too good to work in the same warehouse.
And that’s if you want to be judgmental about it.
I don’t, so I would say that there are lots of 25 and 55 year olds who have been looking for work for a long time and are very downtrodden that, even for work they used to consider beneath them, there’s 900 applicants for 40 positions.
seems to me a lot of kids today think music is free to copy. And by kids I mean the 30 and under crowd in question.
Of course you can’t label everybody under 30 as over-pampered, self-indulgent, spoiled brat babies but it may certainly apply to some of the basement dwelling WOW addicts who get up at noon and say “job hunting is hard” before blazing a doobie for breakfast.
It’s hardly a condemnation of the entire age bracket but there are certainly enough of Generation “WTF” to qualify as a demographic group worthy of the thread title.
And people 30 years older than me thought my generation was a bunch of hippie draft dodgers who spent all day smoking our LSD. And my mother rebelliously went to the Paramount Theater to hear Benny Goodman.
I think it’s safe to say that each generation is more spoiled and over-pampered than the next. It’s sort of the flip side of the expectation to do better than their parent’s generation. Working a factory shift is generally easier than farming and working an office cubicle job is easier than that. Most of the complaints about not finding a job aren’t “I’m going to starve to death in some Obamatown in Central Park.” They are more along the lines of wanting to find a job they find meaningful and fullfilling.
I mean let’s face it. People who grow up in a typical middle class American suburban community typically are spoiled. They are used to being part of institutions like schools and work and having those institutions take care of them in some way. Most don’t have the wherewithall to “hustle” for work as if their life depended on it because more often than not it doesn’t.
I think thisapplies to kids just as much as to many others. The idea of tying hard work and achievement together seems foreign to those with a sense of entitlement, whether it’s because mommy and daddy gave you everything or you think your seniority in the organization gives you the right to slack off. Personally, I’d hate to have to work retail or food service, but if it was the only way to pay my bills, I’d slap on a plastic smile and go at it.
There’s that. There is also the fact that we ingrain into people since birth that “hard work” means studying hard in school so you can “succeed” by becomming another interchangable carbon blob in some large well-known corporation while “failures” are people who end up with jobs in construction or low-level services. As if being a middle manager at Proctor & Gamble or a pharma sales rep at Pfizer is the height of achievement. So it’s not surprising that any kid whose parents have enough money to send them to college looks down on working and sort of blue collar working class job. It does back to the who being spoiled thing. We’ve gone beyond the point where most people think about work as a means of survival and instead view it as an extension of their identity and a source of fullfillment.
I think a lack of practical ambition is the issue. A person needs a place to live, and a job to pay for it. My wifes family are very ambitious, and dont have the privleges many others have. Yet none of them have ever been unemployed, and frequently juggle two jobs as a hedge against layoffs. But they achieve this by working harder than their peers, and living frugally. A lot of people arent motivated enough or willing to make sacrifices. Hard work is relative, and often someones version of hard work is relatively lazy in comparison. What i’ve learned in this day and age is you need to push yourself very hard and exhaust every resource, because there are no free lunches.
There are jobs out there, but the problem I see is people dont want to do them or dont know how to sell themselves. If the only job out there is picking strawberries, how many privleged white 20 year olds are gonna sign up? And of those that do, how many are gonna look like they will bounce the second something better comes along?
You think there is something wrong with that? Would you rather work in a job where you put in the hours and split as soon as possible, or in a job where you love what you do, think about it happily at home, and are often eager to go to work? And I’m not talking about artsy-fartsy jobs here either. Most of the really good engineers I know love their work.
Not everyone can do this, but it is a good goal. It distinguishes those who work from those who go to the office and thoroughly enjoy themselves while contributing.
I think there is when it’s so ingrained in the culture that people feel like complete failures if they have to take a job to survive because jobs in their field are scarce.
It’s putting their self-worth in the hands of something they don’t really have that much control over.
God, that sounds like a shitty existence. I’m all for working hard, but there has to be balance. If you have to kill yourself to live, what’s the fucking point?
Well, I agree that there is something wrong when kids who work hard and play by the rules get screwed, and are then told it is all their fault because they are lazy bums who shouldn’t have reached so high. But I don’t agree that there is anything wrong with kids having a dream. Maybe you can adjust to a horrible job, but if my only dream of the future was spending 1/3 of my waking hours doing something I hated I’d have blown my brains out.
BTW this dream can be of any kind of job. The guy who painted our house used to work in IT but then started a handyman service, and appears to love it, and is really good at it.
This is just the circle of life. My generation is a Hero generation. We’re supposed to “come of age as team-oriented young optimists during a Crisis.” That matches perfectly with what the Millenials are doing these days. I’ll be interested to see if the Generation 9/11 kids, the Homelanders, fit the mold of the Artists. They certainly are “grow[ing] up overprotected by adults preoccupied with the Crisis.”
See the connection? It’s amazing how many people think supply and demand don’t apply to things like education.