Tuesday, 22 October 2013

Five things I have learnt whilst job hunting

1) No matter how much you brace yourself for it, that first rejection is hard. Especially when it's a job you really, really wanted. Bah.

2) Despite how optimistic and upbeat I feel on a Monday morning, the weekly trip to the job centre is guaranteed to leave me feeling deflated and slightly grubby.

3) When trying to explain the sort of job you are looking for proves difficult when you are explaining it to adults, it is ten time worse trying to explain it to children. In fact, my children have given up trying to work out what I want to do and instead have come up with their own suggestions for me. According to them, I should try to be:
 - a hairdresser; because I'm "good at cutting fringes"
- a chef; because I'm a "great cook".
- a postal delivery person; because I could "get to see inside a post box", and I could finish at 2 to do the school run.

4) There are actually plenty of jobs out there, however, most of them appear to want such specialist experience that I wonder how some of them ever get filled at all. (Kids, my advice to you - learn a programming language.)
Contrary to popular belief, being a "generalist" is actually making it fairly tricky to find the right things to apply for. I'd always assumed that I had quite a few skills that were transferable between roles and between industries. Yet, no matter how hard I try to broaden my horizons, people will try very hard to pigeon-hole me into a very specific niche.

5) As I'm sure any stay at home parent will attest, school hours are really not long enough to get anything sensible done. As job hunting is also permanent job in itself it appears my dreams of doing anything particularly productive outside this activity were probably a tad optimistic...

Onwards and upwards...


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