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- May 30, 2009 by radicalshorty
- A Lesson From The Credit Crunch
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Here's a depressing fact I heard about the job market the other day. The person I heard it from intended it to be motivational, when in actual fact it made me give up hope altogether.
Say that there are five thousand vacancies in the area one week. 5000 jobs are up for grabs, and you want one of them. Well, congratulations! You're just one in 50,000 people, looking for one of those jobs. That gives you a 1 in 10 chance of being employed this week.
By the end of the week, a thousand of those vacancies will have been filled. So there are 4000 jobs left, but only a thousand jobseekers will have been employed in those thousand jobs. 49,000 people looking for 4000 jobs. Your chances of employment just went down to 1 in 12.25. Next week, another thousand jobs have gone. 3000 jobs for 48000 people = 1 in 16 chance of employment. And so on, and so on, ad depressium.
Perhaps that's slightly unrealistic. The job market isn't always shrinking like this - new vacancies do appear each week. But more people are losing their jobs every week than there are new jobs created, so demand is constantly growing and growing.
Now, here's the kicker. It's approaching the end of the academic year. People will be leaving school, college and university, all looking for jobs. Demand for jobs is about to skyrocket. That 1 in 10 chance is now starting to look more like 1 in 20.
Luckily for jobseekers around here, I'm going back to university in September. There'll be one less in competition for those jobs. A year from now, I'll be a newly-qualified teacher, and this will all have been a bad dream. But it kills me to think of the number of good people suffering because of facts like these. All these kids leaving school will be out of work because of the mistakes their elders made. It's not fair.
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radicalshorty
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Plus, every workplace I look at wants experience now. I have four weeks of volunteer janitorial experience and I'm good at organizing things, but if I'm not hired, I can't really get real-life work experience! It's... an awful circle of being broke.
@ JD: I hadn't considered the nobility aspect before, but teaching runs in the family, so I hope I'll be good at it.
@ Jess: That's my plan too. What with music teachers in short supply at the moment, I'm almost guaranteed employment in a year's time, which is very comforting. But having spent four years in hiding to emerge with a qualification that's now by-and-large useless has been a pretty heartbreaking experience for me. Here's hoping for the future!