Even in Recession, Good Help is Hard to Find

Saying this deeply offends people, as the truth often does: If you are the best at what you do, you'll always have a job. People go home, drink beer, and watch televion.  They are then shocked to lose their jobs.

Sure, rarely an industry dies; but even then, start learning a new skill while your industry lives.  If I had been an auto worker, I would have been attending night school to become a male nurse.  Just as I was about to lose my job at GM, I'd be beginning my new career as a nurse.

This isn't complicated stuff.  You don't need to be smart to be a nurse.  Just study and memorize, which is tedious but not intellectually challenging.  Nursing pays well.  The nursing industry isn't going anywhere.  So go be a nurse.

Sure, it's hard to become good at what you do; or to learn a new skill.  Yes, studying at night after work is a bear.  You need to work harder than everyone else.  What does that have to do with anything, though?  

I'm supposed to feel sorry for out-of-work people who, for years, went straight home from work to a can of Budweiser and a television set.  Why?

Comments

[Dredge Slug]

American jihad?

[Aaron]

A similar insight from Seth Godin.

Don't make the mistake, though, of accepting a stereotype that all auto workers are incapable of doing anything but assembly line work then going home to a can of beer. My brother-in-law, for example, is a card carrying member of the UAW - but he's an engineer who goes home from work and remodels parts of his house (well enough that in a better economy he probably could start his own home renovation company). If something can be said to be holding him back, it would be that he doesn't want to relocate his family to another state.

It's also a mistake to point to a particular career and say, "The future lies there." Following that type of advice will often qualify you, by the time you graduate, for yesterday's job. (Not too many years ago, for example, there was talk of auto workers retraining as website designers.) As the article you cite indicates, that appears to be occurring with nursing, with the economic downturn making it more difficult for new nurses to find jobs. " 'There are probably more nurses recently trained than there are jobs for them,' [Dr. Robert Pearl] said, 'but for those with the highest level of skill and experience, there are always openings.'" What you often find in people who are "the best at what they do" is that they followed their passions - although people's passions don't always correspond to income opportunities, at least in the sense of walking into a job fair and finding a salaried job.