A
Door Closes; A Window Opens…
So, I just concluded my last position as an accountant and I am revving up my
career search once again. It was an all too familiar tale; the role was
supposed to be for a few weeks but ended up turning into a few months because instead
of working just hard enough no to get yelled at, instead of taking advantage of
my status as a “temporary” employee, I took the opportunity to set my desires
aside and put my career into laser focus. For me, the goal is always to bolster
the potential for better future positions and in order to do that I had to
sacrifice a livable wage for an experience that might provide me with better opportunities in the future. This is
something that needs to be done because if you don’t have a safety net to fall
back on; if you don’t have parents to move back in with; if you don’t have the
luxury of taking time off to figure out what you want to do with your life;
then you have to choose a path and run full-steam towards the finish.
A day after completing graduate school I left
my parent’s house with $400 to my name and all my worldly possessions. I slept
in my car in the bitter cold for a week, hustled my ass off to find a job by
spending countless hours at the library, and when I found a shitty apartment
for $200 a month surrounded by smokers and drug addicts I jumped on the
opportunity. Within a week I found a temporary job assisting with AR and when
the AP manager had to go out on medical leave I was an obvious choice by
management to fill the gap and I did so at an efficiency almost up to par with
the AP manager who had ten years and a much higher salary to figure things out.
I was paid slightly above a minimum wage
salary and as the acting AP manager when I eventually processed my own paycheck,
I was not-so-shocked to learn that the company was paying the temp agency
almost double what I was making per hour so they could avoid hiring a new
employee. Nowadays if you want to get to the next level in your career you have
to be willing to take low pay/high profile jobs so you can accumulate the
ammunition necessary to fire back at the next employer who wants to fuck you
and while the whole experience didn't make my wallet any
fatter, it’s something that needs to be done in order to progress to
the next level. This is a concept a lot of people in my life right now
don’t seem to understand: Why sacrifice making money to waste time at a
no-growth position? The answer is a bit more intangible than a stack of dollar
bills.
In
today’s sanguinary job market employers are looking for the proverbial “purple
squirrel.” An employee that provides high-level competency at the lowest salary
possible. And it seems for my generation we either have to settle for a few
years of this or face an indefinitely extended wallowing within the confines of
the lower middle-class. For people between the ages 20 to 35 it is no longer
possible to be lackadaisical with building your career. Taking time to start a
family, pursue dreams, or soul search may end up constricting the possibility
of obtaining a position that can actually provide for those things. For us,
it’s much more difficult to get to a point where we can become economically
viable because if you’re not constantly working towards stepping up your game
with each new job, if you’re not relentlessly pushing towards advancement, then
you are merely running in place and by the time you get going again it will be
too late. Employers want the cream of the crop and they don’t want to pay for
it so you can either push from job to job gaining experience along the way
making yourself the best candidate possible, or you can settle for the safety
of mediocrity.
-NJF-
