Now What? (Life Post Grad): The Vicious Cycle of Experience

Welcome to “Now What?” a weekly feature for figuring out what to do after you graduate college.

It is the best time of times to be young. It is the worst of times to be young. This is the worst economy for recent college graduates in almost a century. All the promises of wealth you’ve been told a college degree can deliver have never seemed more false. Nationwide, young adults can’t find jobs and are having to compete with baby boomers—never shy about taking with a stubborn refusal to relinquish the spotlight—laid off in the “The Great Recession” for jobs. How can a recent college grad with no experience compete with some guy in his 50’s that has thirty years of accomplishments?

All job postings contain the same vicious cycle: They won’t hire you without two to five years experience but if no one hires you, you can’t get experience. Pretty soon some terrible options emerge, often told to you by baby boomers discussing jobs they would never take:

1. “You know, the Army is a great place to gain experience, skills, and pay for a graduate degree.” Right, it is also a great place to get killed. A cheap graduate degree on the one hand…murdered by Middle Eastern rednecks on the other…it’s a real coin toss. Plus, if the Army is showering you with incentives to join—and that isn’t the case for everyone—it’s probably because you have a really hot, in demand degree that any company would want like any engineering or technology degree. I don’t see the Air Force lining up outside of Berkeley to sign poetry majors. The bottom line is that if you have a liberal arts degree that is struggling to locate you a job, the armed forces are probably going to offer you a job that benefits them (communications sergeant in Afghanistan or radio tower operator in Alaska, for example), not you.

2. “Have you tried the internet?” This is the all time stupidest thing somebody has told me about how to locate a job. “The internet, really? I hadn’t even thought about using that!” Internet job sites DO help people get jobs but you might starve before that happens. Job agencies have shown that only 15 percent of the U.S. work force found their job on the internet. Mostly because for every job posted you would actually want to do, there are a thousand other people thinking the same thing. The competition is fierce and you’re just a cover sheet to any online posting where they don’t know you from Adam, a physical network beats a wireless one any day of the week.

3. “Go to grad school.” So wait…you have a bachelor’s degree that cost you a small fortune to get, student loans that will kick in any minute, and you can’t find a job to save your life with the degree you just got…so the answer is an advanced degree in Bullshit Studies? Obviously this won’t work unless you get a graduate degree in a different field but that might mean an extra year of undergrad courses to take any classes you didn’t take for, say, sociology, that you would need for a graduate degree in software engineering. So you could be looking at three extra years of school for a degree that might land you a job that can pay for seven years of school…in twenty years. And even then the best companies won’t hire you without…oh fuck me…experience.

The best choice to get around the lack of experience problem is just to know someone. What to do if you don’t know anyone? Hopefully, we’ll attempt to make sense of that next week.