The Rut

Artwork by 731, Bloomberg Businessweek

Having a good education is not all that is required to land a good position. Nor it seems, is experience. While my degrees have resulted in more call backs, interviews, and job offers than at any other time in my life, I am not positioned well (geographically) to secure a good paying job in any reasonable amount of time.

I was lucky enough, however, to land a job soon after arriving back in Rexburg. ArtCo, which has been a community fixture for a few decades, hired me first as a temp in B2B sales of their Holiday card division, then hired me permanently a couple of weeks later. I guess they didn't want to lose me. I was leaving for interviews every other day to find a permanent job. With that little bit of security I began the search for a second "joe-job" to cover the additional costs of living with rent, utilities, and Internet. The motel provided all those costs.

I had several prospects but ended up settling on a delivery driver position with the brand-new Papa John's pizza place just a couple blocks from home. Wage plus tips. Can't beat that, but you sure can beat the hours of a full-time job combined with a part-time gig. This week alone I'll be putting in 63 hours, and I will still fall short of making $2500 per month.

I will continue in this vein with hope for the future as I have been doing since August, that something better will arise.

It is difficult to imagine for a ridiculous amount of people the fact that I and my family of five are living on wages like these. Worse still that an MBA with an excellent GPA is doing telesales and delivering pizzas. But this is the new economy. Networking, certifying, and looking for better positions can literally be a full-time job. People are slow to accept any change, which is a slippery position given this world of continual, and radical evolution. It is my confident prediction that my generation will experience less retirees than any previous generation in America. In other words a large percentage of us will work until we die.

In a recent article by Businessweek it said that 44 percent of graduates in America are underemployed. By the way; those 44 percent do not work full time hours. If you work full time you aren't counted because there is no way for the government to know that you are underemployed.

(From the article): Mario Mendoza says he works as many as 70 hours a week driving a taxi in Miami. The 34-year-old has a bachelor’s in sociology and anthropology and a master’s in global sociocultural studies from Florida International University. He says finding an entry-level job where he could do social or market research would put his driving days behind him. “I’ve applied for many of those jobs. I just haven’t been called up for the position,” Mendoza says. “If you spend so many years in school preparing yourself and studying, you want to use those skills to work, not do something like be a waiter or drive a cab or work at Starbucks.”

I cannot empathize more. But I am not going to whine about it - I am in a city where the only application of a Master's degree is either at BYU-Idaho as a member of the faculty or administration, the government, or Idaho National Labs. Rexburg is a closed economy that rises and falls with the student population so it has a myriad of positions; none of which pay over $10 per hour. I am lucky to be where I am, but I am still looking for something much better.