I am 24 year old female hailing from the booming metropolis of Ottawa, Ontario (just kidding, anyone who lives here knows that it's hardly "booming"). But really, I am a (semi) recent graduate of the University of Ottawa who has spent the better part of the last 2 years looking for a job. I know, you must be thinking, "what's wrong with her?" "why can't she find a job?". Trust me, I've asked the same question many times myself.
Not only am I a recent graduate, I am the recent graduate of a Master's program. One would think (or rather, one was taught) that once after high school, you would go off to university, work hard to finish on time and with good grades, and then from there you'd be a fresh new addition to the workforce, right? Wrong.
These days, it's not so much the reality. Many (read: most) of my friends and colleagues who are a couple of years out of school STILL do not have jobs. So, what are we supposed to do? We thought we did it right. Our parents and teachers told us that if we worked hard and went to university, we'd be able to get a job. But wait! Not just any job, a job that we wanted. One that made us eager to get up every morning, and satisfied to leave every night. What they didn't know (and to their credit, would never have been able to predict) was that shortly after we all started on our path to long-term employment, people stopped retiring.
I'm not going to get into all of the reasons behind why this happened, because frankly it wouldn't change the end result and therefore I am disinclined to care, but it royally screwed over an entire generation. I know what you're thinking: "oh great, this is just going to be another 'Generation Y' rant about why they're entitled to everything without working for it". Well, technically you're half right. It is another Gen Y rant, but the difference is I don't think I'm entitled to anything. All I want is to be given the same opportunities that my parents had at the same point in their lives. I don't care if I have "the perfect job", I just want A job. Any job. In any city. I'm not even picky about where it is!
Since graduating, I've applied to well over a hundred jobs (and even more while still in school). Of those -we'll call it even at a hundred - jobs, I got interviews from... wait for it... FOUR! If you sit down and think for 0.0043 seconds, you'll very quickly come to the astonishing realization that I heard back from a paltry 4% of the jobs that I applied to. Each of the jobs I applied to interviewed between four and twenty people (I know, who has time to interview twenty people?!), and I didn't get any of them. Pitiful. And the worst part about this whole thing is that I'm not the only one, nor am I having the worst luck.
The number of entry level jobs in Canada is falling, and it doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon. The government can boast all they want about the increase in jobs and blah blah blah, but what they fail to mention is that the majority of the jobs "created" are part-time, or in retail or maintenance. How are we supposed to pay off our years of accrued student debt with a part-time, minimum wage job?
Sure, you can blame it on the Gen Y attitude or on our sense of entitlement, but the reality is that nothing is being done to help. People with "good jobs" are retiring later in life because they can't afford to do so at an earlier age. Where this used to leave a nice gap for new graduates to fill, it is now blocked up with people who cannot afford to retire, so we're forced to take 2, 3, or even 4 part-time jobs to pay the bills and our tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. There are so many problems that we don't even know where to start in order to fix them, or what the root of the problem even is.
I keep hearing that once the baby boomers start to retire, the pendulum will finally swing back and there will be an influx of new positions to be filled by our generation. But really, that's not for another 10 years (at least). What are we supposed to do in the meantime?
I know what I'm going to do. I'll keep applying for every job that I can. I'll keep my fingers crossed that I annoyed them enough with all of my follow up phone calls that they'll interview me, and hopefully, one of them will hire me. Until then, I guess I'll have to continue to pay off my student loans with Monopoly money.
-BJ
