So, so true. I’m lucky to have been able to keep my house after draining my retirement accounts dry. I used to work in graphic design, but now I’m designing accounting courses, something I never thought I’d do. Financial stuff is way over my head, but at least I know from previous jobs how a good course design should look.
I’m not planning on retiring. I wouldn’t last two years under my current retirement fund. I’m going to keep working till I drop dead.
So OP, we baby boomers are just as fucked as you. The best thing you can do is clean up your act, adopt a professional attitude, go to the Unemployment agency and find as much free training as you can, and keep looking.
I mean, no, you don’t. You may need these things for the jobs you’re looking for now, but there’s lots of jobs you could do that don’t require all that shit. With three weeks of training you could be a truck driver and make decent money rather easily. You need a clean(er) driving record but that’s not hard.
Maybe you don’t wanna drive trucks, and that’s cool; it’s your life. Fifty years ago the Boomers you’re complaining about would likely have just sucked it up and driven the truck, though, ebcause back then the idea you could do the job of your choice was not a reality for most people. They did shit jobs and barely made ends meet and scraped by. They weren’t happy all their lives, life sucked back then, too. The idea that people in the 1960s and 1970s lived incredible and wonderful lives is ridiculous, and in defiance of the most obvious evidence. Unemployment was just as high if not higher, and they struggled just like you do.
Whenever people talk about how good it was “back in the day” I always say “Yeah, when the only people who had power were straight, white, Christian men.”
They held all the really top jobs. The rest of us took what we could get.
Toward the end of the baby boom wasn’t all that great even if you were a white guy. The post WW2 boom in hiring didn’t extend into the 1980’s based on my experience.
As kunilou pointed out above, the great recession screwed over an awful lot of experienced folks in their 50’s and 60’s that would have been on easy street a decade or two previous to that. I dodged that bullet but about 8 years after that my “lay-off class” from a global 100 company was about 80% white males over 50, 10% white females over 50, and 2 whippersnappers under 30. Being a boomer sure looks like a liability in the current corporate lay-off environment.
I’m on the tail end of the boomer generation, but have changed jobs a couple times in the last decade and in my opinion things are worse these days. I do remember when I graduated from college having to deal with the “you need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get experience” catch-22. It existed back then (early 1990’s). But it’s worse now. Way worse. Now all professional career jobs are posting “entry level” job ads that require 3-5 years experience, and our kids are being coached to work as many internship jobs as they can during college in order to meet those requirements. Anybody who can’t afford to do take unpaid internships or simply didn’t learn that they had to do it, and graduate with no experience are looking at barista careers.
We’ve also seen an increase in ridiculously long lists of skill requirement for mid-level positions. They call that “looking for purple squirrels”. Companies still post job ads with “must have” and “nice to have” requirements, but the market is so cut-throat now that if you don’t have 90% or more of the entire list of requirements, you’re out of luck. It’s very common now for even highly qualified professionals to take 6 months to two years to get a new job. Heck, I was employed when I did my job search last year, in a major metro area with a great job market and it took me 1.5 years.
Oh yeah, another new thing: more and more companies are doing video interviews and personality tests. Basically they’re making candidates spend a lot of time justifying their candidacy before they even get a phone call, so that the hiring managers and HR departments spend as little time as possible evaluating candidates.
Right. I remember a Dear Abby letter from a young person complaining that the older people in her workplace would not retire so young people could get their better jobs.
Well, yes. The best jobs require that sort of thing. I suspect, though, that your definition of “professional career jobs” doesn’t include a lot of perfectly good jobs a person could in fact build a career out of.
Well, hell, even a lot of “professional career jobs” are near-automatic with the right education, but they’re hard educations.
There’s some merit in that; people seem to be working past the “traditional” retirement age of 65, well into their 70s in many cases.
I know I’d be pissed if I worked in a company and my upwards mobility in terms of promotions was clogged up by some old geezer who should have retired at 65, but who at 73 is occupying a higher-level position in the corporate hierarchy.
I’ve decided to not come to a traditional determination of whether or not you are mocking me here. Let me just say that I personally had to deal with a bad case of scoliosis, something that probably took 20 years to develop and which ended up causing a host of related problems, plus great suffering and expense. Chiropractic was only a part of the solution.
Not that I have a heightened awareness of this kind of problem, I can tell just by looking at people that it is a fairly common thing, though one that I don’t think is very commonly nipped in the bud. So I recommend back x-rays to young people. If they have the beginnings of this kind of issue it can be detected and dealt with early, and take it from me, it would be worth it. Plus, the before/after x-rays don’t lie, if it is back cracking quackery you are concerned about.
I don’t think the bulk of that is true today, at least in the IT world. We are having problems filling nearly all our IT related positions, from lower-level IT techs up through higher level sysadmins, particularly Linux admins. “Cloud administrators” are hard to get as well as anything related to HPCC. This is higher ed not located in a major city or metro area.
When I entered the job market in 1974 it was awful. Not having a degree was just a minor problem, it was the lack of jobs and the low pay for the jobs there were that was a problem.
I was competing with all the boomers before me, the large majority of the boomer population, including more women in the job market than ever before, former soldiers entering the private sector after Vietnam, and a large number of middle age and older workers who had been laid off from traditional jobs as the market changed.
The pay was ridiculously low, inflation was heading out of control and wages were still emerging from Nixon’s wage and price controls. Minimum wage was about $1.60 an hour, and there was no earned income credit.
So Millennials can stop complaining, it wasn’t any easier for us.
There are varying situations out there. Some companies are having a hard time filling positions, but they’d prefer someone recently out of school, trained for the specific job that didn’t even exist a few years ago, and at the low end of the pay scale (a pretty inflated pay scale though). So experienced competent people who may need an initial learning curve for the specific job can be skipped over even though they could be more effective in 6 months to a year than the recent grads.
At the same time there are a lot of traditional IT jobs that the kids coming out of school aren’t interested in at all because it’s not cool leading edge stuff.
So, what are you qualified for? What is your education? I was born 60 years ago (more) and we went through some bad times also. The current job market is not as sucky as it was some times. I went through plenty of lay offs at my companies, but I never got laid off through working my ass off, making myself valuable in ways that management would suffer if I got fired, and sometimes switching jobs when I saw trouble ahead.
I did pretty well, and my kids are doing even better than I was. Of course they and their husbands all have graduate degrees and good posture. And they are not in minimum wage jobs.
And none of them whine.