Being out of work sucks!

After 35 years in the workforce, I found myself on the bad side of a corporate lay-off. I understand that business conditions change and sometimes the company needs to do what it needs to do in order to keep the books in balance. It’s always painful to someone and it will never really be fair.

It’s been a long strange trip so far. My layoff happened just before the holidays at the end of 2019 (something as a manager I always worked to avoid doing to my team) and while it added a lot of stress to what would have otherwise joyous time of year, it also provided me with some long needed time with my family. I’m an Operations and Support guy, so taking time off has always been a second thought for me and knowing that there wouldn’t be a lot going on during the period around the end of the year, I did my best to scrub the boards and wait patiently for after the New Year!

I’m the first to admit I have been pretty lucky throughout my professional career. I’ve had a sense of when things were changing at the job or it was just time for me to go look for the next interesting challenge. And I have been able to kick off the next search with networking and skill building. This time though, I didn’t see it coming till it was too late. Likely a problem based on the way my manager and I communicated, it wasn’t clear that something had gone off track till my window of opportunity was very narrow. I can’t say I was shocked when the call came at my desk to come upstairs and help the CTO and HR with something, but I was surprised.

The job market has some definite cycles to it. Especially in the Media and Entertainment business where I have hung my shingle for the last twenty-five years or so. Studios, like manufacturing production lines find it less expensive to shut down between Christmas and the New Year holidays than to deal with the vacations and other absences that bring productivity to a trickle, so I settled in for a couple of month outage in my work life, fortunate for the severance to get my family through without too much of a change in our lives. People come back to work on January fifth or so and then get back into a daily rhythm with the world returning to normal in the mid to later part of the month.

But 2020 decided to be special! The first cases of the Corona virus started to show up in the US around the same time that the world was going to get back up and going for the new year and all of a sudden, all bets were off. As things progressively got worse, businesses became more cautious. Throughout February, everyone was in a slowly progressing state of confusion and while the new opportunities were still popping up on the boards, employers were doing more “Harvesting” of resumes than hiring. By the middle of March, when the Stay at Home order came down, the job reqs started to dry up or get put on official hold.

So, here I am… seven months at home, starting to have serious worries about the future and my ability to keep my family kept.

I want to call out a couple fo themes I have discovered that make it really difficult in the market these days (other than conducting interviews while completely social distancing).

When I started out in business, you found a job either at an agency, or through an advertisement in the local newspaper. These methods provided some genuine advantages to the job seeker, since the majority of applicants were coming only from the market where the job was hiring and/or the candidates were pretty well vetted before they landed on the hiring manager’s desk. Today’s employer wants to recruit on their own because they don’t want to pay the fees charged by the agencies if they can avoid them. They have built big web databases to harvest resumes on The Internet and as a candidate, you need to figure out how to craft a resume that will make it past the OCR Robots to actually get reviewed. This also opens up every job in every market to everyone in the world, which in a high profile industry like M&E brings a lot of chaff with it, because if you don’t want to pay the fee to have an agency vet a candidate, you probably don’t want to pay relocation expenses for an out of market candidate either!

Say you make it into the couple hundred or so resumes that land in the recruiters queue, they typically discount any experience going back beyond a decade. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been around awhile, and while I have chosen to make the entertainment business my home, I also have experience in finance and aerospace. You won’t see that on my resume unfortunately because of that ten year limit. What that means as a potential employer, is you won’t ever know about that diversity of experience and growth unless you decide to pick me as one of the top 50 to actually talk with. It also means you can easily discount me if I have decided that I’m finally done with Entertainment and want to go back to Aerospace for example.

When did education become more important than experience ? I have been an IT guy since the early 1980’s. I’ve gone from Programmer/Analyst to Systems Admin to Systems Engineer to Lead, Manager, Director and Sr. Director. I’ve maintained a great deal of my hands on skills and I’ve learned to develop and execute multi-million dollar budgets. I’ve managed large and small teams of people and architected large and small technology projects. I have also been turned away from even being considered for multiple positions that are looking for experienced managers because I don’t have a Bachelors Degree.

I recognize that we have decided that a college degree has become the equivalent to a High School Diploma in the old days, but I have always been one to value experience over pure schooling when it came to looking for an experience employee. That BA I would have gotten when I finished High School had me doing my programming using punch cards on an IBM 370.

I admit my state of frustration is hitting a peak! My family is beginning to feel the financial impact as the severance is running out as well as the Unemployment (which actually became valuable with the CARES Act bonus if $600 per week). But I get myself up every day, find my way down into the office I have built down in my garage, scan the job boards on Indeed, LinkedIn and Glassdoor and keep on keeping on! I’m spending my open time taking on-line courses to refresh and build dup my skills (Look for some discussion of that experience in a coming post) and hoping that soon, things will get better.