Summary List Placement
If I could change one thing about my career, it would be my
timing. I graduated from college in 2009 and entered the
workforce at the height of the 2008-2009 recession, the largest
economic upheaval since the Great Depression. That year
there were 35% fewer
jobs for new college graduates like me,
and the
unemployment rate hit 10%. The recession lasted 18 months,
and during that time, millennials did our best to find work in a
market that simply wasn’t hiring.
It took me over a year to find my first full-time job, and in the
11 years since, I have held 10 full-time gigs at seven different
companies across multiple industries. To date, I have worked in
offices, at agencies, in newsrooms, and on television shows. I
have seen what a post-recession workforce looks like, and it is
bleak. Mad Max has enjoyed more relaxing rides.
Those early post-grad years were a grind, but I didn’t leave
empty-handed — and neither will you, Gen Z, as you navigate the
coronavirus pandemic and the economic downturn that’s come with
it. The 2008 crisis forced me to become creative and agile and
I’m still grateful for the work habits I formed and realizations
I came to during that period. My generation survived, and I
believe yours is even better equipped than ours was. You have
already proven yourselves resilient,
and you’ll need that grit to muddle through the next few years.
“I feel like sometimes these tragedies occur, but then once we’re
on the other side of it, we don’t keep talking,” said Jess
Hopkins, a certified life and career coach who works
primarily with millennials. “We don’t continue the conversation
to help the next generation prepare for something like this.”
So let’s talk about it. As our gift to you, born from years of
suffering and successes, here are some millennial suggestions for
how you folks in Gen Z can survive this recession, thrive in your
careers, and maybe have a little more fun in the process.
1. Embrace odd jobs and part-time work while you look for your
first “real” job
Four years of college didn’t prepare me for job searching in a
recession. I was scared of not being able to afford my student
loans, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to lock down
something full-time and stable. I was so focused on finding a
“real” job, I wasn’t able to see the value in the part-time and
temporary jobs I had.
Ali Breen,
career coach for millennials, thinks people underestimate the
benefits of part-time gigs. If your employment search is as
arduous as mine was, she recommends embracing odd jobs. It’s
better “to do something temporary, instead of taking something
permanent that you feel guilty leaving because they’ve invested
in your onboarding.” My friend, writer and comic Lynn Molly
agrees. Her chief post-grad regret is that “I went after the job
that was immediately going to pay me money, rather than put me on
the path I actually wanted.”
The temporary jobs I worked in my early twenties were weird (most
notably, the job that required me to affect a fake British
accent) but they were also fun and flexible. Free yourself from
the idea you need to find something permanent fast, and devote
the time and mental energy you save to figuring out what you want
to do in the long term and how to get there, even if it takes a
little longer.
2. Go ahead, break up with your toxic job
Of course, not every temporary gig was a winner. My first
post-college job was at a daycare center inside a Chicago gym. It
was a toxic work environment, but it was the only work
environment that would have me, so I stuck it out for over a
year. By the end, I was convinced that if I held one more sick
baby or interrupted one more yoga class to ask an overdue parent
to come collect their kid, they would have to scrape my exploded
head off the medicine balls. I needed to know I wouldn’t always
feel this miserable, so I picked a random date three months in
the future, and scheduled a time to quit.
When that day arrived, I still had student debt, minimal savings,
and no back-up plan. I had no idea what to do next, but I owed it
to myself not to do this anymore. I resigned, then went straight
to my temp job where, for the next eight hours, I panicked that I
would never make rent again.
“The only recession-proof career,” Breen said, “is one that is
resilient and ever-changing.” And the best way to build
resilience is to exercise your tolerance for risk. Making an
active decision to leave that job in a horrible economy was
terrifying. But it also allowed me to set a personal boundary for
what I was willing to tolerate from an employer and showed me I
could recover from bad situations.
If you’re still in the beginning of your career, give yourself
some freedom to take risks, especially in the name of your mental
and emotional well-being. The stakes are lower early on, and
surviving will give you confidence in yourself and your judgment,
which will ultimately help you spot warning signs of toxic
situations before you accept a job and find the kind of company
that will treat you the way you deserve.
3. Tear up your mental timeline (if you haven’t already)
At multiple points in my career, I was primed for a promotion
that never came. It’s not because I didn’t work hard, perform
well, or have the right qualifications — it’s because there is a
generational bottleneck plaguing the American workforce.
As older generations wait longer to retire, younger ones stagnate
beneath them. This is the first time in history there have been
five different generations navigating the same workforce at once,
and 41% of
millennials say they’re finding it difficult to advance.
And
if we’re stuck, you’re likely
to end up jammed somewhere behind us. The pandemic is
exacerbating the problem and increasing reluctance to walk away
from a steady paycheck, so traffic is basically bumper-to-Boomer
out here.
All that’s to say that your career might not proceed on the exact
timeline you imagined, so try not to tie your expectations and
feelings of self-worth to strict milestones. It’s an unfair
situation, and it’s easy to stew in the burnout and bitterness — come on in, the water’s
warm! But there is an upside to the mental and emotional stresses
you’re experiencing. Research published
in 2013 from Emory University suggests that people who graduate
into difficult economies tend to be happier in their jobs long
term and more grateful for their careers.
4. Invest in yourself (not just with money, but with time and
effort)
When you’re unemployed (or underemployed) in a recession, time is the one
resource you won’t run out of. How you choose to spend that time
matters.
“If you’re not in a position to improve on the experience on your
resume because you can’t get a job,” Hopkins said, “that would
leave one option, which is to acquire as many skills as you can.”
The pandemic has limited the ways in which you can acquire these
skills, but you still have choices. You can sign up
for online classes, many of which are free, or
remote certification programs. Or if you’re burned out on school,
you can use this time to pursue personal projects. One of my
creative partners, actress and creator Jaime Lyn Beatty
recommends not waiting around for other people to grant you
opportunities. Now is the time, she said, to get creative and
“make things on your own or with friends.”
5. Don’t forget your social proof
Millennials developed a reputation for living our lives for
social media, but some of this is a learned response to our bad
situation. When I couldn’t convince employers or outlets to pay
me for my writing, I posted on my Medium account. I used these
pieces as samples, and they helped build the foundations of my
freelance career.
Breen calls this “social proof” and says it’s not enough to
explore and develop new strengths — you also need to convert them
into examples and evidence of your abilities and interests for
potential employers. “Maybe you want to be working on climate
change,” she said, “but you have very little experience that is
tangible on a resume. But you have the best garden on your tiny,
four-by-four deck. That is social proof that you actually care
about food sustainability. Now you have something to give them.”
Your social proof needs to be accessible to employers, and it
needs to live in a space you trust yourself to frequent and
update. For some that means staying current on LinkedIn or building a personal website; for others it means adding a
highlighted collection to your Instagram stories or creating a
thread under your pinned Tweet to link back to your work.
Multiple surveys show
that most recruiters will check your social media profiles or
Google you during the interview process. You can use this fact to
your benefit. Build the best version of yourself online and
introduce them to that person.
6. Lean into the instability and explore
My shortest-lived job was at a regional branch of a giant media
company, a position I took because I thought it would guarantee
me stability. I worked there for five months before the company
lost both of their key regional clients, laid everyone off, and
dissolved the whole office. I left with nothing, except a
predilection toward breaking out in a cold sweat if someone
even hints at an all-company meeting.
I’ve spent hours during quarantine badgering my therapist,
Stefanie Greenfield, about how to handle the pandemic era. During
unstable times, she says, it’s best to prioritize self-evaluation
and self-discovery. She urges all of us to lean into the
discomfort, pointing out that “while times around us may be
uncertain, figuring out your personal passions and purpose in
life is not dependent on the political climate or economic
situation.”
I didn’t know who I was when I graduated, and Hopkins says the
majority of recent graduates don’t possess enough world
experience to accurately determine their strengths or passions.
She recommends taking a generalist approach by dabbling in lots
of things and seeing “what pushes that passion button.”
I learned early on that workforce stability no longer exists,
which is scary. But the fact that I couldn’t rely on a certain,
steady path forced me to try lots of things, which in turn helped
me figure out what I really wanted to do (and what I really
didn’t). Breen says you should always be asking yourself and
discovering “what you want, and checking in again and again.”
7. Embrace your geographic freedom
It took me six years from the time I graduated to secure my first
job in TV, the first job I really wanted. I went to school for
screenwriting, but when the recession hit, I put Los Angeles on
hold, and moved to the Midwest to save money. Of all the
decisions I made in my twenties, this is the one I regret least.
It took me longer to start my career than I would have imagined
at 22, but I was able to make a big dent in my debt. And when you
consider that 86% of people surveyed list
student debt as a major source of stress, this is not an
insignificant way to boost your happiness in your early twenties.
This pandemic will have disastrous consequences, but one of the
upsides is a renewed focus on remote work. The job I wanted
required me to live in a specific city, but if this trend
continues, your generation can live wherever. You can move back
in with your parents for as long as it takes to get up on your
feet. You can uproot to a cheaper area to save money, or because
you feel it’s more reflective of the lifestyle you envision for
yourself — and hopefully you can do it without diminishing your
career prospects.
8. Make connections, not comparisons
This is the most fractured our workforce has ever been, and the
best way to combat the isolation is by staying connected. “Band
together with your friends as much as possible,” my college
friend and TV writer Max Kessler said. “You are not on an island,
you do not have to attack anything in your life alone.”
And try to look to your friends as a source of strength and
comfort, rather than a yardstick to measure yourself against. “I
wish I spent less energy comparing my successes to my peers,”
Greenfield said. “I felt down on myself for not being able to
land a job quickly. And when I did land a job I compared my
salary to the average for my field which then internalized into a
sense of worth (or lack thereof).”
COVID-19 has taken socializing and networking online, a boost for
people who struggle to reach out and a normalizer for making and
keeping up connections no matter where you are. That means you
can find mutual support with friends anywhere, anytime. It also
means you can forge professional connections wherever you may be.
Now is the time to push past passively following people on
Twitter and connect with mentors and thought leaders, Breen says.
“Be brave, actually engage,” she said. “Find people you admire,
and use the technology at our fingertips to make connections,
because most people don’t.”
I wanted to share the early years of my career with you not
because they’re special, but because they’re normal. Every person
I spoke to for this story has sent emails and applications and
never heard back. We’re still crying over jobs we don’t like and
sacrificing to do the work we care about. But we made it through
the gloomy days of the recession we graduated into and you will,
too, I promise. We’re excited to meet you in the workplace —
whenever meeting people becomes a thing again.
Read the original article on The Muse. Copyright 2020. Follow The Muse on Twitter.