Category: Jobs and Employment
The economy is really messed up these days and the unemployment rate is really high. I’m sure everyone is having difficulty finding a job or getting into a better paying job. I read a couple of articles and talked with several people and from what I gathered; a college bachelor’s degree can’t get you that far. Do you agree or disagree with this? Most of the jobs these days require at least a high school diploma but those jobs don’t pay enough to get you by. If you were given a chance, would you go for graduate school or find a job after you get a bachelor’s degree?
Most people graduate with a double major or go to graduate school but sometimes, when you put financial aid into the equation, it becomes impossible to decide. In addition, most of the employers that hire are looking for administrative positions. Sometimes what ends up happening is that you graduate in one field and you end up working in another field.
ok so i am going through this right now, and I am here to tell you that a bachelors isn't going to cut it, unless u start your own company which i am working to do now. Graduated in 07 and haven't landed that good job yet!!!
I want to start my own home-based business so that I can stay home with my kids when they come along. College wasn't for me, anyway
We're dealing with this now with the daughter being a sophmore in high school. Academia is first expensive and second not as competitive as it used to be.
It is really hard to justify the incredible expense for a college education that you probably won't be able to directly apply to getting yourself employed. That being said, there are a lot of Community college and vocational options for a lot of people, but I don't know what the best options are for someone that's blind. That's where NGOs like the NFB and ACB, if their research institutes were institutes and conducted actual research we can all measure, should come out with perhaps several models that work.
The population at large is struggling with this: With increasingly defunded education, (more of that to come with the new kiddies just elected into Congress), a college education is quickly becoming the luxury of the elite. Either you have to pay for it, or pay with student loans that now have interest rates like credit cards.
Home based business is a great way to do this if you have a product or service that the market will bear. In other words, don't start a business just to start a business, start one that meets a need you can supply better or cheaper thanthe next guy. Conservatives will tell you home-based businesses are on the rise. What they don't tell you is 97% don't make it for the first two years, which is why it's very difficult to get loans from banks. I can tell you why I lost mine, it's very simple: There are a billion to one software consultants out there, and while I had a niche - long-term corporate projects in a niche market, basically in many cases the need, want and desire were there, but the finances were not.
All of that is necessary or it won't fly. Plus, if you have to spend all your time fishing for clients you spend precious little delivering. Honestly I am much better at product delivery than I am at fishing.
All of these concepts hold true if you're basically going to try and be a distributor or internet marketer for some online company. You need to be a sales and marketing guru, there are just hordes of internet marketing consultants out there. There are even more sites out there that will "train you" and give you less than Google Add Cents does.
I'm not down on starting a home-based business, but just make sure it started on something, not the idea of something. And make sure that something has a market who will pay what you need to be making.
Also understand between federal, state and local taxes as a small business you will pay around 25% of your income in taxes, another percentage of your time on well-disciplined bookkeeping and another percentage of your income to an accountant.
And FWIW, if you go get the book Inc and Grow Rich, telling you how to self-incorporate, not a bad idea. However, it costs a lot of money and time to start and upkeep your corporation. Every time you take a family member out to dinner you will have to figure is tis your expense or the company's. A lot of putzing around with figures very quickly comes into the equation if you self-incorporate. If you don't putz with the numbers, yyou don't get the corporation tax relief.
This is moot if you have successfully fulfilled what I first said: a product or service people just can't do without, and one you uniquely provide, they easily understand, and at a price you can live on and they are willing to pay.
Lots of people try and do it on the cheap because they didn't cost everything out first, so they put themselves in the hole based on how they priced things.
Hope some of this helps someone.
I don't know. a BS degree in two fields has gotten and kept me in jobs for 10 years now (hey, if I am just lucky then, knock on wood, and I hope it continues).
I was strategic about it though and chose finance and computer science, solely with the aim of landing a job. It is all idealistic and makes you warm and fuzzy and starving inside if you really want to go for a double major in gender studies and music, but the fact is that it may amount to very little success when it comes to job opportunities and money.
Science is definitely the way to go, but it is also a very hard subject to major in and is not for everyone.
Very often, though, if you are academically inclined and get past undergrad, then grad school and/or PHD not only is free, if you play your cards well and manage to score reasonably on the national evaluation exams like the GRE, but actually pay you between 15 and 25K a year for studying, not great, but better than many jobs out there, given the necessary time, commitment and interest.
There is a lot of research projects out there and money for research, e.g. into accessibility, so computer people often can find something tht goes.
The key is to try everything and keep pushing it, email people, look for opportunities and try things out.
Of course I may come back in a year and bitch about how I ultimately lost all the jobs and how I was just too cocky a year ago, but, well, if at first I don't succeed, I just got to pick myself up and try again, as some famous song once stated.
Don't stay idle, that's the key, work towards something, be it college degree, certification, online course in something, or whatever you wish.
Yeah, I'd love to be a guitar playr in a band, play the occasional gig and sell thousands of copies of an album and live on it but, fact of the matter, we've been recording this bastard for 5 years now and are nowhere near ready to release anything, but at least we have day jobs and can turn recording sessions into a beer and fun fest and enjoy the process, even if it were never to yield an album.
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I graduated college in 2006 with a BA in sociology and minors in history and anthropology. Thankfully, I went mostly on scholarships, so the money that we put out was very little. To be honest, I went for the love of learning, not so much so that I could get a job. My view was that it would be something extra to add to my paper that would allow me to get a higher paying job but that was about it. I also had bad advisors. The closest thing to advice that I got was that I'd eventually want to get an MA or a PHD because entry level work in sociology didn't pay much. They doesn't tell me that entry level work in this field for one with just a BA is almost impossible to find or that it probably wouldn't interest me. This was already my junior or senior year so I couldn't really change majors to something radically different. My goal was to be an interviewer, since I'm very much interested in preserving history, but even that requires an MA or PHD for some reason. But as has been stated in other posts here, a BA really isn't much these days. It's basically what a high school diploma used to be.
I chose not to go to graduate school because, by the end of my senior year in college, I was burnt out. The work was becoming boring and I dreaded the thought of writing huge papers. I don't think I need to expand on how, as blind students, we need to spend hours scanning a book, when we may only need a page or two from it, how said page number might not be recognised, how we can't simply skim a book for what we need as the sighted can etc. So I avoided the headache, though I did get a certificate to teach English as a Second Language through a course over a few weekends. Even if I were to go to graduate school, it would be for Hellenic Studies, from ancient to modern times, with special concentration in modern Greek history. That might get me somewhere, perhaps as a professor, but I'm not sure in this economy. The only school that I know of in NJ that offers these courses is Prinston University, which is quite far from me, and the only program they offer is a PHD one with six years of study! At any rate, I could get a job teaching English, since I have the certificate, but it's only for private, parochial and charter schools and for private tutoring. I can't use it in public schools. So I'd need to go for my alternate teacher certification, which now requires 45 hours of teaching math, which in itself has accessibility challenges. If I can't do the work myself, or even comprehend it, how am I supposed to be able to teach it? I also can't understand why an English, reading, history etc. teacher would need to have skills in mathematics but that's another story.
I wish that I would've gone to a trade school, but it would have been difficult because I'd need to figure out which trade I could do as a blind person. The same holds true for apprenticeship programs, though I'm ploughing through the hundreds of recognised fields there to see if any are doable. In any case, most trade schools today focus mainly on technology or the medical industries, neither of which interest me, since I would want to learn a skilled manual trade. One of my greatest dreams has always been to get into the food business. But after talking with a chef who taught the blind, I realised that it's almost impossible for me to find a job, even a relatively simple one, in that industry.
So now I'd like to start my own business making things like soaps, candles, baskets and perhaps brooms. I might even learn chair caning along the way. But as LeoGuardian pointed out, this can only work if the market is interested in my products. It seems that there are alot of artisans out there making soaps and candles. Baskets take more work, particularly if you want to be creative, but even those are now being imported from China. I personally don't know anyone who uses a real broom. All the ones I've seen have smooth wooden handles and plastic or nylon bristles. So that just might work as a unique item and so would pitching these products as made by a blind person.
In the meantime, I'm looking for a job while I teach myself how to make these things. Another excellent point made here is that there's no model for the blind. They used to teach these sorts of trades to the blind but no longer do this. Instead, they push everyone into college or try to stick them on the phone. But even these latter jobs can be quite inaccessible if the software that the company uses doesn't work with our screen readers. So what are we to do? My answer, should my business work out, is to start my own factory where things will still be made by hand but on an assembly line. If nothing else, I can help other blind people find work. This is another reason why I wish to gain some experience working in a factory, so that I can decide the best way of running mine.
I have a B.A. in Sociology. While I'm not concerned with upward mobility, I think any amount of education is better than none. I think a combination of work experience and education is crucial. Also, a Master's degree is great, but only if there's some relevant experience to back it up. There is such a thing as being overqualified for a position. Two degrees with no experience, to me, seems worthless. I'd rather have a stable job at this point than anything else. Grad school makes me wanna puke! The thought of spending countless hours studying and writing papers, when I could be bringing home a paycheck just doesn't appeal to me. There's no guarantee that I'd have a job even with a Master's degree. While a B.A. might not seem like much, it all depends on what a person's career goals are. I've only been out of school for 2 years though, maybe in a couple years I may feel differently.
I concur with a bit of both Wildebrew and BLW ... I didn't mean to downplay education: Not in the least.
I started for an International business degree, nad to switch partway through on account of having a major seizure that caused short tem memory loss which sorted itself out in a couple years. Yeah I know ... excuses excuses ... however I got out with at least a B.A. even though it wasn't where I was heading. Had I it to do again I would have gone to a vocational school and got technical training instead.
Some of the schools really turn out good graduates, and I've had the privilege of working with some top-notch interns but many turn out kids with a lot of theories and no practical experience preparing them for the production environment. I agree it's all in what you make of yourself. Nobody's gonna make you for ya.
All I meant earlier is the educational options are greater now, it's not just the four-year degree it once was. I'd hate to be my age and know I hadn't tried. I mean I may wish I'd gone on a different track, say studied Comp Sci in school, but at least I kept movin'. That's what it really comes down to: keep at something, not the idea of something, but something for real. The day I stop doin' that I think I'll find me a bridge and the quick way off it ...
Best of luck to those starting businesses of their own. I admire anyone who takes the risk on any small business venture, but keep in mind it's probably best to have at least a permanent part time job in addition to your small business in case the latter fails. I know an Army reservist who made the mistake of starting a small business with no backup, and he wound up going back to the reserves for lack of any other opportunities, plus school.
I think there's another side to the recession that isn't much talked about. Some people are unemployed, sure, but a man who wrote to the letter of the local fishwrap talked about being underemployed & looking for more work, yet encountering many people in the unemployment office who were turning down opportunities they perceived as 'beneath them'. The man went on to say entitlement mindset ruined Europe and would continue to ruin the U S and I agree with him to some extent.
I myself have know people who confined the job search to online work, one sat at my computer to 'check her emails and apply for stuff'. Well all that time she could have walked thru our small town & seen HELP WANTED signs to apply. It's no one's dream job to serve coffee & muffins or sweep hair clippings from a salon floor, but it's a way to avoid the 'Explain any gaps in employment' part of an application for a job you want. It's a chance to learn something you may not know how to do. We are officially on hiring freeze where i work yet we've had people start to quit within a few days or weeks, one guy quit without lining up something first. And there's always the class of people, and I empathize, who get so discouraged looking they quit.
I personally have a B A but it's not in a related field to what I do, and I do think there should be more vo-tech programs in the high schools and more possibilities that involve strictly a two year degree. For example one of our med techs who got laid off once told me, "Now sponge I see obviously what I needed out of general chemistry in the med tech program (this lady tested for simple elements like glucose & cholesterol), but trigonometry? Physics? What did I need with that?" Med techs run blood/urine/fluid tests, and release results, but much of the work is now automated, so I personally think a two year degree in one of the sciences or medical technology should suffice. Some of the best techs I knew learned the trade in the Army, but the business is more regulated & requires more 'education' than it once did.
Well at least for many blind people I suspect with us it's not that, it's just we don't have an option to go down the street and grab a job at a store or drive a cab. Trust me, there are times in my life when if I could have, I would have for sure. My wife has back issues which prevents her from taking on a retail job that requires lifting and stuff, so while she's done those before, she can't now, not that it's beneath or anything.
Probably in many cases there's more to the story than what meets the eye. Definitely there's a problem here which, if I had millions, I'd make it my mission to solve: those of us that can't take advantage of local help wanted signs in stores, so when between jobs we could grab something and go.
I think one thing that really worked for me is, when creating your resume, research the company you want to work for. Make sure to customize your entire resume specifically to fit each company that you’re applying for. Also, I did volunteer work while I'm in college. It helps when you write your resume. You look more marketable than the student who just graduated but never had any job experience. You can also ask the people in the volunteer work or from your previous jobs to be your reference so that when you're applying for a job, your future employers can call the people in your reference list and ask them about your previous volunteer or job performance. Another thing that I might try is to major or get a certificate into an area that offers a variety of skills that are transferrable to another area. Having a double major is a good idea but not everyone is fortunate to spend so much time in college. As one of the posters said, college loans do pile up and as soon as you graduate, they immediately charge you. The interests increase really quickly when you don’t pay on time. I found a couple of opportunities for other professions especially for computer science majors, there were several companies that will pay for you to go to graduate school but you have to work for them first. For education majors, I found an undergraduate program, there is an organization called Golden Apple where you apply for their scholarship program and if you get in, they will pay for the rest of your education but as soon as you graduate, you have to teach for five years. I think the most important thing to do is to be marketable, to network with lots of professional organizations that associate with your area and keep an ongoing research on the companies you want to work for. I was planning on investing my money in some stocks but I don’t know if that will help me in the long run. I think, it depends on the company you try to invest in.
I would agree with Miss Gorgeous. Having gone the volunteer route myself in college. It really helped when it came to writing that post-graduation resume. My next door neighbor is majoring in Human Services like I did. But, she has little if any work experience in that field. I keep telling her to do some type of volunteer work, just to get her foot in the door. I will say though, that while I think volunteerism is great, I'd hate to end up as a perpetual volunteer. I'm discussing further career options with my Outreach Specialist at Voc Rehab. It helps to stay in the loop. I too would love to apply and get a job that's "beneath me" Especially in this economy.
I agree with some of what Leo said. But really, any sort of field you want to get in to needs to be researched heavily before going anywhere with it. I have a BA, in psychology which is enough to get me a job in rehab teaching with shit pay. Sorry, I like to make better pay for what I'm doing, so I went and got my master's since it would make me more hirable in the field. I also took summers off and worked voluntarily for an agency, which has now hired me. Basically, whether you like it or not, you will need to get more education and work harder for free in order to compete with your sighted counterparts. Not an opinion, not something that's up for debate, that's the bottom line. SO if you want a job in your desired field, you'll most likely have to be more educated and have more experience than people without disabilities who are applying for the same job. IN most cases, an employer will look for any creative way not to hire you if they need to spend extra money on accomocdations. Yes, it's not legal, but they will find justifiable reasons for doing this if they can. SO the strategy is to eliminate as many of those justifiable reasons as possible. This seems even more true in our poor economy. Again, I'm not being synical here, just sharing with you the experiences I've had, of those I've talked to in various employers and people with disabilities over the past few years, and so on. That's not to say there are not exceptions to the rule, but they're just that... Exceptions. I wish you the best of luck in whatever choice you make and your desired career path!