So I’m back in Chicago now. Ohio was good. Mostly good with only one notable downer that I’ll not go into here. Got some good ideas while I was on the road, had fun with the PoPE guys and others, and managed to escape with only a minimal hangover.
And now I’m back here and I’m looking at online job listings. What I want to know is this – where the fuck are the entry-level positions? They’ve disappeared. They just don’t exist. There’s manual labor jobs and other blue-collar things out there, but now that I’ve got a degree I can’t get any of those because I’mm overqualified (I won’t start bitching about that concept again…not today, anyway). Everything else out there is looking for people with a minimum of 2-4 years of experience if not looking for senior-level people with at least twice that. Regardless of how skilled people in my demographic are, nobody wants to hire most of us because we apparently lack experience.
We lack experience, eh? Last time I checked I’ve been involved in photography for the last decade and have been at least interested in design if not involved in it for the last five. Oh wait, you mean professional experience? Ah yes, I forgot – nothing you do is worth shit in the working world unless you were getting paid to do it. All the photo experience in the world is fucking worthless if it was unpaid.
So not only are there not entry-level positions out there, everything I’ve done is apaprently worthless. Aggravating? Quite. Justified? Oh, to laugh.
So what’s the problem? Well, nobody wants to make an actual investment. Everybody wants instant satisfaction, instantaneous return on every investment that is made. If they hire you, they want you to walk on water and shit Chanel No 5 from day one. It’s here that we run into that bullshit catch-22 of people requiring you to have lots of experience to start with, and the complete lack of people willing to actually give you a chance to get that experience. Nobody seems to realize that perhaps the best way to get the best people working in the industry in the long run is to take a chance with young people and form them into hard-working, creative, and very flexible individuals who have the will and ability to raise the bar.
You’re too young. You don’t have enough experience. You don’t have enough skills. You’re expecting too much. You’re charging too much. On and on it goes – this is the kind of shit I hear all the time in looking for work, regardless of whether it’s full time, part time, or freelance. There are no entry-level positions and even getting your foot in the door to talk to some of the people you want to learn from is so hard it would be absurdly to give up before you take three steps foreward.
More later tonight when I’ve found something else to think about or after I’ve chewed on this a while longer. It’s a huge honkin’ problem, if you ask me, and worth some attention.
