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I’ve been acquainted with a girl a few years younger than me since she was a freshman in college, studying earth science of all things.
From the beginning, I told her it was not a great idea and she would have a hard time finding a job when she graduated.
This advice fell on deaf ears.
Fast-forward to four years later, she has graduated. In late July, three months after graduation, we sit down for a chat, which is dominated by her telling me about how she can’t get a job because all the decent jobs in her field require ten years of experience.
“I told you so” does not slip out, though it whispers to my lips from the back of my mind. Instead, I tell her to stop worrying about getting a job, and to take a trip to South America and study rain forests or something. An only child in an upper-middle class family, she does not have to worry about money; her parents have paid her entire way through a private college with their debit cards. Surely they’d be happy to loan some funds for a trip abroad for some cool, real world experience - the kind she needs to get the job she wants.
She says she’s thinking about becoming a nurse instead, because there is better job security. I’m shocked. I explain to her that job security is not useful unless you like your job, and nurses only like their jobs if they like caring for people. Even then, most nurses work long and strange shifts and can end up exhausted, frustrated, and underpaid.
But the fact that nurses are only in high demand because the job is difficult and energy draining seems to elude her.
So I attempt a different angle. I go on to tell her that, in general, it is stupid to think that more school is the solution to one’s career problems, and unless she has a good reason to switch careers without even trying her current career, she should not spend two more years in school only to discover that she has sold out for the sake of job security.
She is not very receptive to this argument, and it becomes clear to me that she does not care much about being happy or getting useful and interesting experience - right now she just wants a real adult job.
So I turn my efforts to her resume, and offer to connect her with Kristen Fischer, the author of Ramen Noodles, Rent and Resumes
Still, nothing. She does not want coaching and my patience is thinning. I grow irritated as the conversation wears on, because I work at a company that helps young professionals advance their careers and I write advice for aspiring twenty-setters. I think she should give my advice more consideration.
Finally, I conclude she is maybe not interested in a solution to her career woes, but instead just wants to complain to someone about her lack of job prospects. Then I decide I don’t have any more time to listen to complaints, so I leave her with one last piece of wisdom.
I tell her to read career advice on a daily basis. Any career advice - it doesn’t have to be mine (though I should be on the list).
Because, really, if you do not have a job and you want to get a job and nothing you’ve tried is working, you are in no position to refuse perfectly good and reasonable (and free) advice from someone whose only intention is to help you. The advice may not be what you need or want to hear, but just attempting to make progress might be good enough to propel you into motion.
I doubt she is reading right now. And that is why she still doesn’t have a job.
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