What our Job Market Really Implies About Education
I don’t want to write a long post. I hope people read this post to understand how unfair our job market really is. It’s an attack at the “need experience to get a job, and you need a job to get experience problem” in our economy. I have a masters degree, 3.5 years of experience, I am published academically, and have had internships. I know multiple computer languages for web design and have other skills, yet somehow that is still not enough for today’s market? What is? Does anyone know? I sure don’t. I am seeking a career driven position, and I am noticing a trend. What is that trend? The trend is that we value knowledge attained by privileged people, but not by people with potential. In fact, I am almost confident companies don’t value potential given the fact that they create discriminant measures in their job postings just to hire you. You may have a master’s degree, but if you don’t have 3 years of HTML experience then we won’t bother. Well what if I have 2.5 and a 1 month training could help me? In today’s world its 3 years or bust.
Years ago, having a bachelor’s degree meant being eligible for a wider range of jobs, which means that companies valued your achievements for the sake of employment. More so it also meant that training was given to you to hone your skills. Now having a bachelors, masters,or PHD is not enough. You must have the exact number of years of experience on a skill set that could be trained on the job. More so many of the skillsets cost money that most people do not have. So what does that imply? You must have already attained wealth and specialized resources to be gainfully employed in this economy. Much like republicans in the Trump Administration want to push for healthcare attainability for the sake of the wealthy and not the maintenance of a healthy human capital.
I know I have a lot to learn in my career, but where has training and development gone in the workplace? Why do we expect our human capital to already have a base level of experience out of college when our internships have only taught us to fill in excel sheets and coffee cups? Everyone does not have the privilege of gaining highly skilled internships to be ready for the jobs of today. More importantly how is anyone supposed to predict what skills they need when in transition regardless of how many subscriptions to business journals they have?
What is the return on investment in raising the bar for only rich people to be able to work ? Meanwhile people who have attained high level degrees are still left in the dirt. I think I have reached my point here. I think there is something wrong with creating job requisitions that discriminate potentially talented human capital because they don’t have 1 to 2 years of experience in SQL when they already possess the potential to learn and use SQL or any other skill on the job through training. Granted I have no data, I think its about time we bring training back into our job selection process, and we don’t use skills that are only attainable by people with fiscal privilege as a measure to discriminate our job selection process. I think companies should learn to invest in people more, then maybe the job market would be more stable. I may be frustrated, but I will continue searching and making myself more well rounded to find a position that aligns with my career goals.