For the past two years, I had been looking for a full-time job, particularly something I could apply my own education toward doing (so that the time spent in college felt ‘worth it’). Up until now, I worked two part-time jobs, both of which required a college degree, but both had the downside of leaving me feeling undervalued. I still needed a full-time job so that I could finally get insurance/sick time/vacation time. I tried finding better versions of what I was already doing, but I gradually learned that there weren’t that many options for someone where I live who has a BA in English but not a teaching credential, in regards to ‘education’ type jobs. So I branched out, and decided not to limit myself on simply education related jobs.
I ended up getting hired at a new job to do blue-collar work. It doesn’t require a degree, and the only real skill I have to apply is customer service. My girlfriend, however, was not happy. Neither were her parents, when they heard about it. Apparently the three of them think I’m taking a step down by doing this. Even some of my old co-workers did a double take when I explained what I was going to be doing. My best friend also thinks I’m selling myself short.
This isn’t going to stop me, but the criticism does sting a little. I had a college degree and yet in spite of that I made only $19,000 in 2006 :mad: working not one, but two part-time jobs six days a week. I felt like I worked way too hard for way too little in return. So why criticize a guy for wanting to take the opposite approach- working at a job making a lot of money for doing something much simpler? The new job means I’ll have more time to spend with my girlfriend, have time/money to afford to go on vacations with her, and be building up a pension fund and also really good health insurance. Personally I think the upsides far outweigh the downsides.
I guess I spent a lot of my life rather confused on what people respected job-wise. I always thought it was about how much money you made, and typically ‘important’ jobs made a lot of money so it went hand in hand. But apparently if you make a lot of money doing something mundane, people will often react the same way as if they found out you are making minimum wage!
I have no idea how old you are but I remember when I was in a grad program working check to check and I thought when that dissertation was through I’d be making the big bucks!
Heh!
I was paid under 40 grand for my first job out of grad-slave-school. It was ateaching positon at my alma mater.
In retrospect it was a good job to take because it lead me to where I am today, making a decent good wage doing a job I love.
The sluggy, muddy, mess I slogged through to get to where I am included being underpaid under employed and generally not taken seriously for the majority of my 20’s.
I’d not give that experience up for anything, it tought me the heavily clichéd value of a buck well earned.
My husband is a very smart man, he has a degree in English, he wanted to be a sports writer, and is now making very good money working as a Construction Safety Officer. Was it his first choice? Not in a million years. Is it a good job and a good career? You bet.
Anybody looking down on you for not working in a “professional” field needs to have their priorities adjusted. We can’t all be CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies. You made good choices for yourself, and you should be applauded for that.
I’m sorry they see a stigma attached to a blue-collar job, one that is steady and has salary and good benefits. Plus, there’s always room to move up into an adiministrative position in the future. It sounds like they want to be able to present you as a white collar person, that their worth somehow depends on having a partner or “son-in-law” equivalent who is doing something they think society looks up to.
Yes, ideally you’d be paid for something completely your dream but you are working to live and the benefits of this job help you have a better life. FWIW, I think you’re doing fine for yourself in getting full-time experience, full benefits, and a job record you can use later. It’s not like you can’t keep your eye for other positions along the way.
Maybe with time your family and friends will come around if they see that this job makes you happier than your old one. Isn’t that what we all want for our loved ones?
I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve heard that English wasn’t the thing to major in if you wanted your degree to get you a job related to your studies. Neither is Psychology, my undergrad major, so don’t feel bad. All across America, English and Psych BA/BS holders do tons of stuff, not related to their degree. In those fields, it’s almost a given that if you want to stay in the field, you need a graduate degree or a ton of hard work+luck+connections, sometimes all of that.
Learn your new job, and learn enough about yourself to see if a management job is for you. With your degree and hands-on experience, you will eventually become a good candidate for management. Or maybe savings or tuition reimbursement will make grad school an option.
While I was working in jobs that didn’t require a degree, I had to learn the hard way how to keep from getting bored. When my job got boring, I focused like crazy on either learning things outside my job, or finding challenging side projects at work. Until I learned to take ownership of my need to be challenged, I did find it frustrating to work in jobs where “I wasn’t paid to think.”
I somehow managed to be underpaid for a complex job through my 20’s, and then go to graduate school.
Now I’m doing grunt work, for the most part, for what I consider chump change considering my experience and education, and also feel very undervalued; I’m pretty sure that I’m in the same salary range as idiots straight out of college with half the qualifications.
That’s what I get for jumping on the first real job to come along after grad school and after I’d run out of money waiting on a better one.
I think that working in a blue collar field is vastly underrated if you are smart. They usually take the same types of skills that professional jobs do and they often pay more. The general contractor that organized the reconstruction of our house after a disaster was fantastic and the best project manager I have ever seen even though my profession is white collar and consists of multi-million dollar projects every day. He could whip subcontractors into place and meet deadlines like no tomorrow while ensuring the quality of the work himself. He also has the odd policy of only working within our town’s limits for the last 25 years and he does that so that he knows the local government types and subcontractors cold and he can’t handle any more business. I have it from several quality sources that he makes between 300k and 500k depending on the year and he certainly has one of the nicest true mansions and collection of sports cars I have seen in a well. That is a person that only graduated from the local high school.
My father in law started out as a small shop butcher in Quincy Market when he was 17 and now he is a multi-millionaire several times over just by growing that business and branching into cheeses over time. People always joke that he could have made something of himself if he went to college. Unfortunately that is true because he has as much talent and raw determination as anyone I have ever met but he struggles with the academic parts of business and that hurt him when his companies grew too big for him to manage personally and he had to turn the operations to someone else. He can’t understand things in that kind of management so that is one strike for decent education even within a blue collar environment.
I could go on. My younger brother has a solidly middle-class lifestyle as a maintenance supervisor on an assembly line and my other brother does well as a police officer at LSU. There is no hard break between white collar and blue collar work like many people think. There are consultants out on the floor of major warehouses that make 500K a year and they may be assisted by blue collar types that will do the same job in the future. The wealthiest person I know personally started out as a stock boy at a major Boston area supermarket chain and then pushed his way up through every level until he got to the top. He has over $100 million dollars now but doesn’t flaunt it because of his roots.
Lots of blue collar jobs pay much more than white collar ones especially if you own your own business and are constantly looking for additional opportunities.
I have done both. However, the blue collar job is going to not help your resume at all when you go for a “real career”.
I will point out that many Gov’t Professional level jobs require on a BA- in anything. I San Jose you can find quite a few of them: City, State or Feds. For example, you could go work for the IRS, which is what my Bro did with his mostly useless degree. Both the Tax Auditor and the Revenue Officer jobs have only a BA as a requirement. There’s also jobs like Customs,etc.
The thing is, do you want to do Blue collar jobs for the rest of your life?
I think it’s far too early to say that Incubus can’t have a “real career” associated with his blue-collar job. Bus drivers need trainers - he could move into that position. He could move into the safety field associated with professional driving. He could move into management. He could move into union positions. He could remain a bus driver for the rest of his life, if he enjoys it. He could work as a bus driver and write the Great American Novel in his off time.
It’s too bad that some people look down on blue-collar type work, because some of it really isn’t that bad. If your girlriend and her parents are against blue-collar work because it is more unstable than white-collar, then I would say they have a point. But, if they are against it because “only a dummy works with his hands”, then I would get a new girlfriend.
There is a higher chance of lay-off, but only slightly higher now than in the past. It’s not unusual to hear of corporations laying off huge numbers of white-collar workers these days.
However, it is easier for a laid-off white-collar person to find another job at least equal to his last, I’ll grant you that.
But, being a blue-collar guy has not meant the end of the world for me. I work as an aircraft mechanic, and while the airline industry is in trouble, that affects just as many white-collar people as well.
About one-third of my co-workers have college degrees. But even with the downturn in the industry, we still make 65k/year not including overtime. The benefits are decent. I can fly pretty much anywhere in the world for free (if I can get a seat, that is).
I don’t think my career is anything to be ashamed of, but I know some people look down on it. Somebody has to fix airplanes, and trust me, I had to work hard just to get this far.
That’s one of the messages in books like The Millionare Next Door. When I was in my early 20s, my friends and I had a shore house in Belmar, NJ. In town, there’s this pizza stand next to this popular club right on the beach. Well, of course all the drunk meatheads constantly make fun of the foreign owner and his employees as they are standing in the huge line at 2:00 am once the bars close. The owner’s Lamborghini, meanwhile, is parked out back. This guy’s shop is in a prime location with heavy traffic and hardly any competition. He probably has his cousins and sons and nephews working there so it all stays within his family.
The Millionare Next Door also talks about how a lawyer making $75,000 a year makes less than a housing contractor making the same amount. The lawyer needs to buy expensive work clothes. He often feels compelled to buy expensive cars and a house in an expensive neighborhood in order to project his status. Other than perhaps the house, all these purchases are expenses that can’t be written off or depreciating assets. The contractor, however, can get by with his beater pickup truck which he can write off as a business expense. He can and should live in the middle class neighborhood where his clients live.
There are all kinds of paths to wealth. If you are a brilliant mathamatician with awesome academic credentials, your best bet is probably working for an investment bank or hedge fund as a “quant” guy and collect those big bonuses. Even if you are just regular-smart with a college degree, on average a corporate job will pay more and provide you with more advancement opportunities than your typical blue collar job. Corporate life isn’t for everyone though. When I was a civil engineer, I met a guy who was an executive at a major airline who decided to become a carpenter. He could make his own hours and had less political bullshit to deal with. Plus he was working on something tangible. After struggling in college and in various corporate jobs, one of my fraternity brothers has enjoyed success as an electrician.
Ultimately, you want a job that highlights your strengths and provides opportunities for growth. Job prestige is nice, but sometimes it doesn’t pay that well or requires major lifestyle sacrifices.
There’s a general perception that blue collar jobs are less prestigious than white collar jobs because they involve less intellectualism and more brute physical labor. We can argue about whether that’s true (and I think that it may be true in general but not necessarily in specific), but there may be concern from GF and her family that you’re not working up to your potential, that you’ll get bored. As others have said, that just means that you need to find your intellectual stimulation elsewhere.
My father has always worked white collar jobs. In the last ten or fifteen years before he retired, he was consistently bored at work. But he was more interested in having a steady paycheck to put four kids through college than in doing something riskier that would have given him more enjoyment. So there’s a white collar job that was in his opinion overpaid at something simple.
One last thing – money is nice, no two ways about it. But if the job sucks, it doesn’t matter if the money’s good, you’ll be unhappy. But if you enjoy the job, and it provides you with satisfaction, go for it.
You may not get your dream job but you gotta eat. I agree, it’s hard to settle for something you think is less than what you deserve, but the fact that you excelled in your past education will eventually result in you growing beyond your current situation.
Not to say everything will eventually be roses. I’ve never got a job in my degree field, and have been let go a few times. Other jobs I’ve exceled at, and grew within my company; because, like most others, companies prefer to hire from within, even if it’s for an Admin job and the applicant previously drove the delivery van. They know they can rely on the employee and that he already knows the other workers and company environment.
If one of the accountants can drive a fork lift when an important delivery comes in and no one else is around to do it, nobody’s going to look down on him.
I can’t offer you advice on how to be a millionaire like the above cases, since I’m short by about $999,999.99, but I can tell you you’re not the only one in your situation.
I have no degree. When it comes down to it, I am basically an onsite computer tech, I have no formal education in computers, no certifications like A+ or the like, and here I am with a small biz grossing 6-7K/mo working alone. One of my subs is about to come on part time because I have been swamped, I will still be doing my stuff plus sending him out. I will be getting $20-$25/hr from what he does on top of what I do. Its freaky at first how well some of this stuff can work. Even though the vast majority of the money from additional work goes into expenses, when adding a body adds $1K-$2K/mo above expenses to your gross receipts you can end up making some serious money. Plan well and the next thing you know you have 5-7 employees running around working and you pocket $30-$40/hour in your sleep.
One of the negatives about blue collar jobs is that they are often very physical. That’s fine when you are young, but as you get older, it can be tougher to maintain the same level of physical ability.
Regarding the physicality and intellectualism, in my husband’s very large construction management company*, they try to get the smarter guys off the tools and into superintendent, paper-pushing jobs, but the guys won’t go. There is plenty of room for advancement in this company if you have a couple of brain cells to rub together - a guy can work tools for a couple of years/a decade and have a nice, office-ish job by the time his body is starting to wear down.
*That he works at, not that he owns. If he owned it, we would be bazillionaires.
Well, The Millionare Next Door is full of shit then. Unless you are buying top of th
e line suits, safety gear and work clothes are as expensive, if not more so that dress clothes. They don’t last as long, either. I used up many pairs of gloves, several jeans, and two sets safety boots in one year. And, my tools were hwaaaaay more expensive than a briefcase. True, the lawyer can’t write off his suit, while the contractor can write off his safety boots- but only if (and that is very very doubtful) his “misc itemized deductions” exceed 2% of his AGI. (According to my Bro the tax expert, they won’t). If the lawyer uses his car for business he gets to write off the same % of it as the contractor- when the contractor uses his truck for business. Clearly “The Millionare Next Door” has never taken a basic course in Income Taxes. :dubious: And, if you think a pick-up truck is cheaper than a sedan, you haven’t priced trucks recently.
Where they live is entirely a matter of personal choice. My lawyer lives in Downtown, in an older house. He drives an older family car.
Although you make a point, I believe you missed the point. msmith537 was pointing out that the lawyer types are pressured to fit in with a “status” as illistrated in TheMND. The racketball club, the Mercedes, 4 lattes a day, 3000 sq ft. house, etc… mainly to impress co-workers/bosses. Thus depleting $75,000 quicker then a blue collar worker making the same. This doesn’t mean that the contractor doesn’t have pressures either, but I don’t see blue collar types having these exact pressures. Maybe in a double income situation though.
I know of no $75k lawyers living like that, and I know about a dozen. Now, *the partners * of Big Firms do live like that, but they make more like 10X that.
Anyway, the tax facts are completely and utterly wrong, and anyone writing a book about money should know at least the basics about taxes.
