Career Workout

It's a jungle out there.
If you're out of work and hunting for a job, you don't need me to tell you that.
I've long held the belief that it's not a matter of the jungle itself, but how to cut the brush in your path.  With a machete, or a pocketknife?
Trying to find a job these days, especially if you've been 'involuntarily outplaced', is not an easy task.  It's not just isolated to my home base in the Pittsburgh area, but anywhere.
Companies that were well-established here for decades are packing up and moving elsewhere.  Or being absorbed into other companies altogether.
Over the past three decades, Pittsburgh has managed to transition itself from a smokestack-based economy that earned it a less than favorable reputation (who remembers those Pittsburgh jokes?) as the dirtiest city in America, to a corporate center attracting highly-educated professionals and high-tech companies that eventually led it to earn the title "America's Most Livable City".
More than once, I might add.
But Pittsburgh is seeing a new set of challenges now.
Crumbling infrastructure that only recently has gained attention, yet little funding to change its fortunes.  A tax base that continues to shrink.  Companies not properly incentivized to not just build here, but stay here as well.
We have people with graduate degrees who are having a hard time finding work here, never mind those with education levels at or below the four-year degreed level.
I had learned of one particular company where hundreds lined up for a small number of part-time jobs, and most of them were college graduates.
We have people willing to work.  We don't have enough jobs for them.
And that's wrong.
I learned of this firsthand when I visited the local Pennsylvania CareerLink office earlier this year.  Not as a visitor, but as a client.
I was surrounded by degreed professionals at a career education class.  Some of them willingly jumped at the chance of a $12 an hour overnight security job at several Marcellus shale drilling sites in the area.
Most employment recruiters tell job-seeking candidates not to settle for just any job out there, and that employers tend to look at those who stay within their fields.
Staying within one's own field should never stand in the way of feeding one's family or sustaining one's self, and why any HR person should feel otherwise, I'll never know.
I know a person who left the engineering field for a job with a car rental company.  Another who left ministry to work in retail.  One more who left the graphic design field to run his family's farm. I'm married to someone who left teaching for criminology.
Hey, child actors don't stay in the business for life.  They've gone on to be great successes outside of show business.
Mike Nesmith.  Ken Osmond.  David Doremus.  Jeremy Miller.  To name a few.
If companies are trying to be more family friendly by offering options like telecommuting or flex-hours, why can't they accept the fact that not everyone is content with sitting on his and her duff and willing to go the extra mile to get up in the morning and do something with their day?
To me, working hard and having a job is far more admirable than waiting for the phone to ring.


NEXT WEEK:  Boat Trip