How are people supposed to get jobs?

[Cutty Sark]

Around here they have associate positions that don't require advanced degrees, but that might not be universal. It also might be limited to larger libraries or bigger cities.

 

[ssampier]

All the best luck. I'm hardly an expert. I stumbled through this crazy game called life just recently.

All I can say is maybe you need to find new channels. I was getting so frustrated by those darn electronic applications, I could kick something. I started calling these companies after a week. Occasionally I would get a person who wondered why I called. More often, the person was desperate to find someone (often those things get sent to a black void).

Lastly, maybe it's time to call a few friends and family that you know. Tell them about you and kind of jobs you've had and what you did like. They might know of someone who can help you. Then those people can help you land a job, too. It might mean a move cross-country, but it could be fun!

By the way, labor markets vary considerably from area to area. Many areas it's assumed you work at low-pay, low skill job for at least a year. Other areas will ignore you if you have any low skills jobs (meaning you weren't focusing on your goals).

By the way, aren't most legal secretaries paralegals? If not, I'd look into it. According to Wikipedia, they make good money (the job would be grueling, however).

 

[wingsandsword]

Thanks all for your suggestions and input. I've got so much to say in response, here we go. . .

Oh, yeah. Everything you just said sounds a lot like the sort of things I've gone through, even if the details are different.

Thanks, it's good to know that other people go through this madness..

: You have two degrees: one in Arts and one in Poli Sci (close to finishing anyway). You now want a third degree in Law. You first need to take responsibility for your own bad planning. I wish I could be gentler but some companies will put you further down on the list since your background seems unfocused. If you want a Law degree you will have to work at a sh_t job to get it. No one will take you seriously in the fields you mentioned until you have a degree. The one exception is someone without a degree but a lot of experience and usually their own client base. I wouldn't hire a programmer without a CS degree. Would you (especially if you have a million dollar client on the line who'll sue you for getting something wrong)?

"Unfocused"? Maybe the legal profession works differently in Canada, but in the US a Juris Doctor to practice law requires a Bachelor's Degree first, and all the undergraduate level law-type classes at the university I attended were under the heading of the Political Science department. I've had classes in Moot Court & Legal Research, Constitutional Law, Civil Liberties, Judicial Process, and Legal Philosophy. The majority of attorneys I've met had their undergraduate work in either Political Science, History, English, or other "liberal arts" type fields, often ones only tangentially related to the practice of law at best (some law schools actually prefer that, the idea that a student is Tabula Rasa with regards to learning Law when they arrive, others like students that aren't totally clueless). The degree requirements of the History and PoliSci program had a lot of overlap so it was easy to meet both requirements at once and by luck of class scheduling I could graduate with History before Political Science. Oh, and I don't mention the programming on my resume normally, I was using it as an example that I do have a lot of general computer skills for things like applying to IT Help Desk-type positions (which want people with CS degrees to essentially sit around and provide basic tech support that any decently computer-literate person can perform). I don't see anything with my degrees or my career intentions as "bad planning", since it's not like I could just directly apply to Law School out of High School, and much of my college education was directly built around taking pre-law type classes.

Employment agencies should never critisize you for applying for a job without meeting the requirements. I assume that when you did apply you didn't lie about your qualifications. Its their job to screen people - if they can't then thats their problem. Keep applying.

Well, they honestly did, twice. The first time was someone calling me back a day or two after I applied, confused, asking if I forgot to mention a key job on my resume or something since the job required one year of experience as a Legal Secretary and my internship being essentially a Legal Secretary had lasted about three months. I noted that I had a Bachelor's Degree with extensive coursework related to the field of work, had at least several months of related job experience, a typing speed far above what they were asking for, and otherwise met or exceeded all their requirements. They told me that requirement was inflexible and I should never have applied to it and they hung up on me. The second time was me getting a callback only a few minutes after applying online for a job, only to have a worker at a local temp agency actually gripe at me for wasting her time reading my resume since I didn't have the two years of experience as a Legal Secretary it required. I pointed out all my other qualifications, and she actually cut me off rudely and told me that they are called requirements for a reason and to not bother applying to any jobs with that agency if I was going to have an attitude that they would make any special exceptions to job requirements for me.

Got any employed family? Make nepotism work in your favor!

My father has been working for the power company for over twenty years, but on the other end of the state and most of his contacts are more in the construction end of the company. While I'm no wimp, it's safe to say that my INT score is my highest ability score, not STR and I know working that kind of job would not be a good fit for me at all. My fiancee works as support staff at a drug & alcohol rehab center, and they are hiring and need people badly, but it's a women's only residential treatment center so they only hire women for the vast majority of their positions for obvious reasons. My mother hasn't worked since she found out she was pregnant with me, and that was well over 20 years ago. I don't have much contact with my extended family, if at all. I've got a few friends with decent jobs, but they tend to be places that require specific degrees (like a CS degree, or an Engineering degree, or a Master in Library Science degree, or a hard-sciences degree, or an education degree and a teaching certificate). One of my best friends is working as a seamstress because she can't find any jobs that use her education and experience (a decade of experience in human resources and another decade of experience of being a University-level instructor, a BA in Sociology & Psychology with a minor in Computer Science, MA in Sociology, and was "all but dissertation" towards her PhD in Sociology when she had to drop out of college because of family obligations), so she's in a similar boat of having extreme trouble finding work commiserate with her education and experience.

Join the military, see the world and get real experience.

I'm looking into that actually. I left out a lot of details from my post (it was way-long as was), but I've spoken to recruiters from several services and been seeing what kind of military options were available. Based on sky-high aptitude test scores, interviewing me, and the fact I have a degree, the Naval recruiter I spoke with is starting me on the application process for Officer Candidate School, but the application process will take at least six months he said, so I need a job for at least a half-year until then, and if I'm declined for that I'll look at other service options but one way or the other I need something at least for the short to mid-term. I'm not counting on it, but I'm hopeful. As a nice side benefit, this would also take care of paying for law school.

You're overqualified. I know its frustrating, but they don't want to spend the time and money training you only to see you leave when the next better job comes along. Lets face it, given your goals it doesn't take much for the next job to be better.

Catch 22, I'm overqualified for every job out there I can apply for, and unqualified for all the jobs I want. I can't find any jobs I'm actually at the proper level of qualification for.

Let me guess, insurance and investment sales

Yup, insurance sales with insurance companies you've never heard of before and their website looks more interested in recruiting salesmen than selling policies, and with what looks like more salesmen than clients. Or investment sales where right there in the recruiting pitch it sounds like they're telling you (in veiled, polite, make-a-sense-motive-check to see it terms) to trick elderly folks out of their retirements.

A cheap tip, if you just want 'a job' rather than something you want to stick with, is to be abso-blucking-lutely flexible with your hours. If you go to a grocery store kiosk to apply for a job, tell them you'll work ANY TIME DAY OR NIGHT. Later on you will loathe the lack of time to spend with your friends, and will dread having to stay 'til 1am to close up and clean up, but hey, you got a job. You don't have to panic quite so much anymore.

Actually, I tried that at one point. Right after I was hired on for the temp job at the warehouse last fall, a couple of days later I got a callback from an online application at a grocery store chain around here offering a job. I turned it down because I had just gotten a job elsewhere. I'm seriously considering reapplying, as I know a lot of people have worked at grocery stores, I just wonder if lightning will strike twice with actually getting a job offer. I need "a job" to at least have something to pay the bills in the short term while I work on something a little more substantial, the whole "waiting until a job just right for your education and career goals" thing has been a total wash for me and lead to me spending most of a year unemployed and living off my parents (much to my chagrin).

Colleges probably should, y'know, warn us liberal arts folks that we ain't gettin' a job in any career that we think matches our degree.

Oh, I'd been warned of that, unofficially, many times over. I know that a liberal arts/humanities degree has very limited direct usefulness outside academia. I never had any delusions that a history degree would mean I could get work as a historian or anything like that. However, I'd also been told many times over that there were lots of careers out there where they don't care what your degree is in, just that you have a Bachelor's Degree.

Every public library position I've seen requires a Masters in Library Science. I would like to work in a library I probably spent more hours in libraries growing up than everywhere else put together. But now for some reason it takes a specialized master's degree to be a librarian?

Yeah, it's pretty hard to get a library job without an MLS degree. A friend of my fiancee has a job as an assistant at a local library a few counties over, but he admits it's very hard for somebody to get any job in a library nowadays without a specialized degree. Another friend of mine is a law librarian for a big firm here in town (a JD and an MLS), but I've already tried and he can't get me a job there, they don't hire anybody for any clerical work with less than 3 years of related experience as a hard rule.

I was getting so frustrated by those darn electronic applications, I could kick something. I started calling these companies after a week. Occasionally I would get a person who wondered why I called. More often, the person was desperate to find someone (often those things get sent to a black void).

Yeah, I get the distinct feeling that many of those electronic applications go absolutely nowhere. The worst case of that I ever saw was about 5 years ago, when I was applying at a department store in town. Remember, this takes place in 2003. I find the office of the department store and ask to apply for a job. The office itself was dirty, smelly and grimy like it had been heavily smoked in for decades but never cleaned, it was covered in dot-matrix printer-paper banners that were faded and tattered. The calendar on the wall was from the year before, and memos on the desks refered to events that happened months ago. I was directed over to a glitchy Packard Bell (!) computer running Windows 3.1 and Netscape 1.0 (in other words, the computer was almost a decade old!), running on a dial-up connection to some company server on an unencrypted connection it was asking for all sorts of personal information like my SSN. As I was trying to ask if they had paper applications so I didn't have to send my SSN over an unsecure connection (and trying to explain why this was bad was an exercise in futility, the secretary was about as computer literate as a typical D&D character, she was still using a typewriter for all office correspondence!), the computer blue-screened on me out of nowhere and wouldn't boot up again, and the secretary said it might be a few weeks before corporate sent someone to repair it and they didn't have any non-electronic applications. In retrospect, I should probably be grateful I didn't have to work there, if that's how that company worked.

Other areas will ignore you if you have any low skills jobs (meaning you weren't focusing on your goals)

Which makes absolutely no sense. . ."Yes, I was willing to default on my credit cards, have my car repossessed, and get evicted and be homeless because I had no job and no money because I was 'focused on my goals' by turning down jobs that could have paid the bills but weren't in line with my ideal career direction, and those jobs were not available so I took no employment rather than look unfocused". If I heard that line from some HR drone as a reason for turning me down for a job, I'd have to restrain the urge to do something unpleasant.

By the way, aren't most legal secretaries paralegals? If not, I'd look into it. According to Wikipedia, they make good money (the job would be grueling, however).

There's a difference, a paralegal is a step up from legal secretary, and generally requires a specialized associates degree or postbaccalaureate certificate in Paralegal Studies (every single Paralegal job posting I've seen requires that, or several years of experience as a paralegal. There is one school in this state that offers that program, but that would be at least 10,000 dollars more and over a year more of classes for something I'd only use for a few years before going for a Juris Doctor degree that completely supplants it but doesn't transfer towards JD requirements at all (so not very practical for my long-term plans).

To everybody suggesting I move, that's not really that practical. Long and somewhat personal story and lots of complicated reasons, mostly involving family obligations, but the only ways I'll really be able to move are to go to law school or the military. I'm living in a city of 300,000, it really shouldn't be that hard to get a job somewhere in my own city.

To general suggestions of joining a church for networking, that's also not very practical. Trying to keep things non-religious for ENWorld purposes, but I'm wiccan and I'm not going to join a church I don't believe in just for social/economic purposes. (Call it a real-life alignment conflict, I can't bring myself to profess membership in a religion I don't really believe just for the possibility of making some money, feels all wrong to me).

The good news is that in the long term, I have high hopes for joining the military and using benefits from that to cover my legal education, but I still need a job in the here and now to pay the bills.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

The best piece of advice I ever saw is that you should sit down and write to everyone you can think of - family, friends, employers, local government, everyone - but NOT to ask for a job.

Simply ask for a meeting about the sorts of things you can be doing to improve your job prospects - this way, you don't come across as desperately searching for a job but you are in the building with them talking along lines that might help them to think of you when a job comes up.

Matching your CV to the job is another good move - being overqualified can discourage people because they assume you'll leave when something better comes along.

 

[RangerWickett]

Every public library position I've seen requires a Masters in Library Science. I would like to work in a library I probably spent more hours in libraries growing up than everywhere else put together. But now for some reason it takes a specialized master's degree to be a librarian?

Um, yeah.

At my library, the reference librarians manage vast databases of information, keep track of how they interact, keep abreast of what's going on in the information sciences field, provide detailed aid for research projects (some of which involve grants in the hundreds of thousands of dollars), stay on top of all the classes being taught at the college so they know what sorts of books will be needed and what online resources need to be renewed or let go, negotiate with the university so that our library gets enough funding, and also occasionally teach classes so that students know how to use all the dozens of different research databases, search protocols, and software aids out there.

Then there are the cataloging librarians, who have to make sure the umpteen million books the university owns are kept track of, replaced when necessary, and phased out when not, as well as ordering new books, managing massively expensive subscriptions to hundreds of journals both in print and electronically, binding the journals every year or six months or eight weeks, and interacting with the other libraries on campus to make sure that the university isn't wasting its money buying the same book multiple times, and that we're not sabotaging the book store by offering for free the textbooks they're trying to sell.

Me? I'm a library specialist. I sit at a desk, check books in and out, and tell people where the restroom is.

I got a Creative Writing degree.

 

[drothgery]

I wouldn't hire a programmer without a CS degree. Would you (especially if you have a million dollar client on the line who'll sue you for getting something wrong)?

FWIW, the last time I saw stats on this, less than a third of professional programmers in the US had a degree in computer science (or a closely related field). I do, but the other programmer in my office doesn't.

 

[Mighty Halfling]

Repeating a few tips here, just to highlight them, and adding some more:

• Volunteer! Volunteer with a group that helps folks with legal issues -- such as a battered women's shelter or a poverty center. Be specific how you can help them and they will likely put you in that spot. My wife's volunteer work counted as work experience when she first started out -- plus they gave her lots of free training.
• Move! For many people, this isn't an option. If it is, ship off to the nearest big city (which are admittedly hard to come by in Canada) and apply everywhere. If you don't have any money, try hooking up with a friend or family member. Use their address and telephone number until you get settled. Don't let the employer know that you're there only temporarily.
  Alternatively, just use that friend's address to base your resumes from there. Then you only come in town for the interview.
• Tailor your resume and cover letter! Don't send a generic resume or cover letter. You need to explain to every potential employer how you match up with them exactly. Mention anything that relates to that job or company.
• Military service! Yeah, that's a good option. Pay is OK, but you get three hots and a cot while you get great experience. The other downside is you could get pulled away from your fiance for a long time.
• Get Help! (Part 1 -- College) If your college's career center isn't helping you, give your former profs a call and ask for some assistance. This is especially good if you're willing to relocate. In all truth, you should be giving the career center hell for not better assisting you.
• Get Help! (Part 2 -- Family) Again, if you're willing to relocate, you're Dad's contacts might be a big help. If he's dealing with contracts, then lawyers are most certainly involved!
• Politics! Politics and law go hand-and-hand. Volunteer on a campaign, any campaign and push your expertise. You've got to be forceful about this. Offer to take election filings to the courthouse. Offer to double check all those signatures. Read up on election law and offer your input. That all counts as legal experience on a resume. (granted there are many, many types of law to practice, but hey, it's something!)

 

[bento]

Every public library position I've seen requires a Masters in Library Science. I would like to work in a library I probably spent more hours in libraries growing up than everywhere else put together. But now for some reason it takes a specialized master's degree to be a librarian?

Librarians are professionals, which like other professionals (lawyers, doctors, architects, etc.) require specialized degrees. An MLS (Master of Library Science) can be looked at as a "add-on" degree where you would take the knowledge acquired in your Bachelors, and then add to it this specialization. A law librarian would add their BA - Pre Law with their MLS, or a medical librarian their BS - biology with their MLS. Many liberal arts graduates getting an MLS go in the public arena.

There are public library positions available to non-MLSs, which are para-professionals. Clerk and page positions for those with high school diplomas, and library assistants for people with associate or bachelor degrees. These para-professional positions are in very high demand because you have both people who want to work in a library and those that are working on their MLS who need the work experience.

I myself was a para-professional at a public library (Library Assistant - Circulation) before I finished my MS - IS (Masters of Science in Information Science).

 

[jezter6]

Looking for a job is teh SUCK. I have a job that I got because I had friends who work here, and now I want to quit and have nowhere to go. Almost 10 years of IT experience (but no degree), and I can't get a hit on my resume to save my life. I get a lot of offers for entry level tech, but can't afford the salary drop.

I'd love to get out of IT, but it's impossible to find any entry level jobs that actually pay enough.

Good luck, be persistent. Send out hundreds of email resumes to anyone and everyone. SPAM the crap out of people with your resume, and you'll likely get a hit. For those rude placement agencies that can't bother to read your resume before they call you - you didn't want to work there anyways because they'll probably put the same diligence in your paycheck that they did in reading your resume.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

As someone who has been on the other side of this, I would recommend you have someone take a critical look at your resume and any cover letters you may be submitting. That is your first impression right there; not the suit and tie, firm handshake or enthusiastic smile.

If I get a resume with poor spelling, grammar and formatting, it is a safe bet that I won't be calling them back.

If I get a resume/cover letter that seems so generic that I don't get the impression the candidate has any real knowledge of the position, it will be trumped by ones that show some effort in focusing on the job and company's specific requirements.

If you are applying for a position that has higher experience/educational requirements than you have, find a way to convey why I should take a chance on you rather than someone who meets the requirements.

Good luck. It took me seven months after graduating to find a job. It wasn't a job I really wanted and I had to move to get it, but it got me in the door and eventually led to something upon which I have built a career.