Employment. The great equalizer. You can have all the chicken balls in China but if you’re out there looking for a job it can be either sweet or sour.
Okay – I’ve got a job right now, but it only pays ten bucks an hour and I figured it would just get me through until I get on that “career path.” I’ve found what I love to do, what makes me happy and allows me to have fun while I do it. And so I’ve been an intern for the last nine weeks. Full-time, 40 hours or more a week for nothing but the thrill of doing something along the lines of what I think I want to do for the rest of my life. A friend (also interning) said to me the other day: “It’s funny, we work at what we love for no pay, all day, and then go in the evenings to jobs we hate, so we can afford to do what we love.” It’s true, except that I don’t hate my part-time job, in fact I like it a lot, it’s just that I don’t want to do it forever, and I’ve got bills to pay.
The Job Hunt
There are a million ways to find a job these days, and I think I’ve developed a good system. Newspapers never have any important postings anymore for a guy like me, but sometimes I still look. The thing is all they offer are jobs like: “Director of Protoplasmic Engineering, Dubai” and things like that. You’re best bet is the net, and using sites like LinkedIn, Workopolis, and then finding out if there are any sites tailored to your occupation with job boards, and/or scanning job boards at company websites. In my case, I’m always headed to the Quill & Quire and Masthead.ca to see if there’s anything new and within my experience level.
In the last three weeks, I’ve applied to about eight jobs where hopefully one incredibly insightful person will consider me worthy. You can be the giggity-giggitiest-go-getter, the biggest brown-noser, or the terminator of technology, but you’ve got to get through that first stage of acquiring an interview before you’ve even got a chance in my experience. As of yet, I’ve got nothing. But once you’ve applied you really just have to play the waiting game. I scan the job boards pretty much every day, and when something pops up, I apply. Obviously some are better than others, and then there are those right up my alley, but if you apply right away, you always have to wait for the application deadline to close before you’re going to hear anything. That could, be a week, two weeks, maybe a month, which is followed by the scouring of all received applications by the HR people, tacking on possibly another week or two.
And so I wait. And I apply for more. And I’ll let you know how it goes.
Filed under: From The Roost
