It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp

You’re sending out resumes left and right and right and left. Your full-time job is to search Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs and the like many hours a day, several hours a week for job postings to send your resume. It’s months later and not one phone call for an interview.

You’re thinking it didn’t use to take this long to find a job, a few months - tops. However, it’s not just a few of you searching for jobs, its lots. The unemployment job pool has widened.

As of August 2008, the U.S Department of Labor reported the national unemployment rate to be 6.1%, a .4% increase from the prior 5.7%. The September 2008 Employment Situation is scheduled for release in early October 2008. I’m no employment strategist, but I can’t image that the unemployment rate will decrease, rather more likely to increase some more.

So what does this all mean to you? Well you need to look within to understand some obstacles you may have and don’t even realize.

Are you re-entering the job market?
How long have you been out of the industry you are looking in?
How old is that degree?
Are your skills, knowledge or experience obsolete?

If you’ve been out of the job market due to previous layoff, starting a family or taking care of a parent, your barrier to entry is harder than most. If you had no time for continuous skill improvement your skills, along with the huge gap in employment, may no longer qualify you for the types of jobs you would have been qualified for had you found a job while still employed.
Rather your degree is in education, accounting or engineering, so many improvement have been made in the past few years that even if you have a 5, 10 or 20-year-old degree and thought that was enough, you may not be skilled in the latest and greatest.

A friend of mine, a teacher, said her school is looking for seasoned teachers with experience or knowledge in this new style of teaching. Unfortunately, they keep receiving resumes from teachers with experience (5-10 years), but not with the teaching techniques they’re looking for. So they turn them down and will more likely select a candidate straight out of college.

It is no longer enough to have that five plus year degree. It is increasingly harder to re-enter the job market. With all the changes and improvements, it is mandatory that you become a continuous learner of the cutting-edge skills that your industry is embracing. Look at trade journals, read industry magazines, seek continuous education to learn and understand the necessary skills you will need to acquire to make yourself more marketable.