Thirteen months & counting

Dragon Mood? -- struggling

To borrow from Mr. Rogers, it's a BEAUTIFUL day in the neighborhood... And that's where the loveliness ends.

I have been in the job market for 13 months now. Most people would agree that's a long time. While I don't publish these thoughts in my other more public blogs (which career gurus tell me prospective employers may look at), here I can tell you how difficult, tough and stressful it is to seek work unsuccessfully for so long.

The Huffington Post published an article full of grim statistics on the unemployed. Eighty percent of workers unemployed last summer are STILL out of work. Here's a quote from the original Rutgers report:

A dismal one in five (21%) of those looking for work in August of last year had found it by March of this year. Fully two-thirds (67%) remain unemployed and looking, with the remaining 12% having left the labor market. Of this 12%, more than half say they got discouraged and stopped looking, while the other half have turned their energies to different pursuits, such as school or parenting.

The stats are even more brutal for workers 50 and older: only 12% now have jobs. TWELVE percent! That OTHER 88%, well that's where I fall in. In and down and through the cracks. Ouch!

My neighbor, Jan, across the street, is also unemployed. She lost her job about six weeks before I did. Coincidentally, we are the same age. Coincidentally, we are both still unemployed after sending out countless resumes, networking, preliminary phone interviews, face-to-face interviews, second interviews and still no jobs. Is that a coincidence? Bad luck? We're just a couple of unemployable people after all these years of being employed? What???

I can't believe that both of us could go from being employed, competent, productive workers to unworthy, unemployable schmucks in such a short time. If we haven't changed, then the market has obviously changed. And it no longer has jobs for people like us, like me. And I'm not even sixty yet. What is that all about?