Career Squatting and Y Dis Economy Sux
Sunday, March 1st, 2009“they laid off my entire marketing department!”
“I’ve been looking for a job for months”
“I just lost my job, and by the sight of things here, I’m going to have a LOT of competition. Maybe I’ll go work abroad, Peace Corps or something”
I represented my organization at a job fair on Friday at the Wash, DC convention center. I have never seen a bigger mob scene at a job fair in all my years (since 1999) of recruiting and hiring for jobs/internships.
I can’t put a number on the amount of people who were there, but our table is usually not the popular because people don’t recognize the cause (pulmonary hypertension IS a rare illness)
On Friday, I felt like we were that National Organization for Women at a feminist career fair–I couldn’t leave the table for the five hours I was there, it would have felt like leaving my coworker to the wolves (the fair was only 3 hours long and people showed up en masse an hour before and were still pouring in an hour afterwards.) Between the two of us, we collected about 150 resumes from people age 25-40, all interested in the 3 entry level positions we had available.
It was discouraging to see the people with 20-30 years of experience express sincere (and great) interest in entry-level positions.
“I’ll take anything” One woman said as she threw her resume in my face and ran to the next table.
I WAS considering nursing school down the road, but I especially LOVE LOVE LOVE my current job and now I LOVE it even more considering the fact that jobs are far and few in between.
Especially now that I see the throngs of desperate job seekers swarming around entry-level jobs…
I’m going to be career-squatting and hanging on to this great job that I love!!!
