The Fruitless Job Search: as Easy as Writing (or Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks)

It’s been very quiet lately.

I have a regular routine -- it's become my "work" -- of searching for jobs and job leads in many, many different places and ways.  I apply for a few jobs, network with people in my field and connect with former business colleagues.  Once I submit applications, I follow up to see if I can learn the status of each of them.

If a few weeks go by and I haven’t heard anything, I tell myself (because it’s true) that I’ve sometimes been contacted for interviews more than a month after applying for jobs.  I tell myself to just give the companies a little more time.

I can tell myself lots of things to explain away the silence, but the fact is that my last job interview was about eight weeks ago.  In my nearly two years of job hunting, that’s an unusually long dry spell for me.

I decided to do a little search to see if what I’m experiencing is usual or unusual and what I might be able to do to change things.  I found this article, “Skills Deficit Holds Back Job Seekers in New Jersey,” at the website of a South Jersey newspaper, The Daily Journal (Skills deficit holds back job seekers in New Jersey | The Daily Journal | thedailyjournal.com, January 22, 2011).

The article tells the story of a South Jersey man in his 50s who took a severance package and has been out of work for five years.  These sentences jumped out at me: “‘After two years, I never got phone calls (from employers),’ he said.  “‘…I got tired of that...I needed a fresh start doing something else.’”

So this man, a former computer programmer, went back to school to learn electronic medical records technology, which he hopes will help him find work in this new field.

Have I considered doing something else?  Someone did just ask me this question a couple of days ago.  The answer is no, not really.

I started a “second career” once before, in communications and public relations, about a dozen years ago.  I already know what it’s like to start over at the bottom in a new field.  And just this year, I earned a Master’s degree in a specialized communications area, health communication, because I wanted to focus in an area of particular interest to me.  I also hoped it might help me find work in the expanding health field.  (So far, it hasn’t.)

Still, I don’t see how starting over in a new (to me) profession would help me get a job any sooner.  First I’d have to go back to school (again) to learn some new, in-demand skill.  Then I’d have to find a job for someone with no experience.  In this market, one of the problems is that there are too many candidates for each job who already have all the knowledge and experience employers want.  Why should they hire someone who doesn’t?

I guess it’s possible that I could find an entry-level job at a low starting salary in my third career.  But damn, I don’t want to be 55 and trying to launch a new career in competition with the “kids” my son’s age.  Besides, and maybe I’m being stubborn, but I love to write, and I want to write, so I’m going to write. 

I don’t know why, but this reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about writing, from Ernest Hemingway:

There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Sounds a lot like applying for jobs for two years.