Posted on 09/04/2011 3:55:52 AM PDT by barmag25
Francis Murillo, 21, had a job this summer, putting her in the minority for her age group.
Getting a job is a less-than-common occurrence, and now that Murillo is back at school, away from home and her summer job, she’s rejoined the majority of her peers who either aren’t looking for work or just can’t find it.
“I don’t care where I’m working,” said the Johnson City, Tenn., resident last week while looking for another job in Chattanooga. “It’s really hard.”
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 48.8 percent of those between 16 and 24 had a job in July, normally the peak of employment when school is out.
The share of teens and young adults employed this summer was the lowest on record.
“There’s two things going on, but they both conspire against young people,” said Carl Van Horn, a labor economist at Rutgers University. “The economy is bad, we know that. But the other thing that happens when the economy is bad is it has a ripple effect and it tends to push young workers out.”
Van Horn is an author of a recent report that surveyed college graduates. He found just over half are working full time with a median salary 10 percent lower than earnings of graduates three years earlier — before the recession hit.
Struggling businesses tend to lay off their most recent hires in tough economic times, pushing 25- to 30-year-old workers back into the job market, Van Horn said.
Those slightly older workers then grab jobs below their education and skill level that younger workers could have taken, keeping the youth unemployed.
Costly Resume Gaps
It’s a phenomenon not lost on 20-year-old University of Tennessee at Chattanooga student Tyrell McKinney, who has been looking for employment over the past few weeks.
“There’s just a lot of people looking for jobs and a lot of people trying to settle,” he said. “That just leaves out younger people trying to get jobs.”
As unemployed youth continue to search for work, the ever-expanding gaps in their resumes can cause long-term problems. Unable to take the first step in their careers, many young people aren’t learning the value and discipline of work and that could hurt their upward mobility for years, Van Horn said.
“A lot of employers look at that as a sign that there’s something wrong with the person,” Van Horn said. “It has a decadelong effect in terms of depressing your wages and salary.”
Many high school age job seekers are also feeling pushed aside.
Kyle Hixson, an 18-year-old senior at Chattanooga Christian School, took an unpaid internship this summer just to get experience.
“Any time you do something that puts you a little bit out of your comfort zone and pushes your limits, it’s definitely good for you,” he said. “It’s tough because at the age when we were able to get jobs, that’s when the economy got rough.”
The consequences of that rough economy are perhaps most serious for the recently graduated, who after time can give up on a job market with few signs of life.
“The worst thing that one worries about is people who just completely drop out of the labor market and engage in the underground market, illegal activities, crime,” Van Horn said.
Employed Outside Area of Study
Recent University of Georgia grad Colin Owen, 24, hasn’t fallen to crime but has needed to fall back on family as he enters his third month searching for a job.
When he went to college orientation in 2006, 80 percent of graduates in his landscape architecture program had jobs and the remainder found work within six months. Out of the 80 students who graduated with him in May, he hasn’t heard of a single one landing a landscape architecture job, Owen said.
Owen applied to every prospective civil engineering firm in Tennessee, South Carolina and Texas and is working his way through North Carolina.
“It’s hard to find anything, whether it’s just a ‘pay the bills’ job or a career,” he said. “The two biggest challenges are making what little money I have last and then just the constant bombardment of being told no. Even if you know you have a great resume, great portfolio, great credentials, being turned down, after a while, it’s nothing personal but mentally it gets to you.”
I'm not sure about that but at just about every fast food restaurant in my area it seems as if fluency in Spanish is a prerequisite for a managers job.
Who is *everyone*?
My clients send checks, in envelopes. My husband changes the oil in our vehicles and maintains the small engines in various other things. My bills arrive by snail mail and are paid by same, with checks.
Email use I will agree with. All my wholesale orders are now via e-mail and no one I do business with even uses fax, any longer. I occasionally receive product inquiries/retail orders by snail mail, but it is rare. Outside of some family Christmas letters, few people write to each other. We do send and receive birthday and holiday cards by snail mail.
As for the hand tools: everyone ought to be able to identify and use them. Why would a mechanical engineer not know what a phillips head screw driver is, for example (or any other tool/instrument)? So he can design a system, but never be able to do installation or maintenance? This person was working _for_ someone who knew these things. How lucky he was that his boss took an interest in him and expanded his education.
I know I am an old fossil, but at some point, *everyone* was not a college graduate who was dependent upon CAD-CAM and calculators. Prior to even thinking about college, people learned how things worked and needed to take them apart and put them back together, themselves. People were capable of drafting by hand, using a slide rule, architectural scales and instruments that did the job. People maintained their property by themselves. They cooked from scratch, mended or even made their own clothing and still managed to design machinery, draft exploded drawings, draw accurate maps and plans and basically produce the infrastructure today’s professionals take for granted and perhaps couldn’t replicate.
How does an entire generation function without this knowledge? What do they do in a power outage, just for one example? I suppose their parents are of a similar mindset, but I know many of us were inspired to learn such basics when we saw our own parents clueless and dependent upon tradesmen. In an economy such as this one, basic skills can be lifesavers, as well as ways to actually earn income.
barmag25, kudos to you. This young person will likely remember your instruction for the rest of their life.
To properly size and design an HVAC system all you need are the building specs and blue prints. You don’t ever have to visit the sight or be involved in the construction. I designed a grain storage and handling facility for a Kenyan Ag Conglomerate. I never went to Africa never even saw the finished facility. I was paid to do a job, design a facility. When I was done I went on the the next project. THere is a big misunderstanding what a design engineer does.
I meant to post
You are a good person
to you, not to myself lol
How do you know what adjustments had to be made to your designs to make it actually work?
You would learn a lot if you got away from your factory mentality.
Even lawyers draft things they don’t exactly know will work right until the rubber meets the road and the client croaks. Then you can tell if the weird stuff the client wanted in their will or trust will work or if the banker is going to tell you “I don’t understand why everybody thinks they need a trust.”
Are the military branches not recruiting any more? The military is not for everyone but it could be an option. With a college degree of just about any sort, you are eligible to become an officer. High school diplomas will get you in the door as an enlisted person.
To me, it would be a better option than sitting in your parent’s basement moaning about the inability to get a job but that’s just me. As an 18 year old high school graduate, I couldn’t find a decent job and had no means to go to college, so I enlisted for 4 years, I’ve never regretted it, the experience was invaluable. Of course that was a long time ago. Perhaps the military is different now, I don’t know that I’d be so eager to do it with queers taking over.
We submitted the design and it was approved and we got paid. Whether the design was changed in the field is not my concern. I never went to Africa and changed the oil in grain trucks or wrote checks to Kenyan sub-contractors.
Yeah, the getting paid part is the big deal, huh?
You obviously don’t give much of a hang if it really worked the way you think it did in your head.
The client liked our design and told us how great it was. It was hard work but in the end their rep in the US took us all out for a very nice celebration dinner. They were happy we were happy. Anyway who cares, my company could not possible build the thing in Africa. It was a huge project and our construction branch probably couldn't of handled it anyway. Nobody on the design team, all PE's, were asked to change oil, address envelopes or write checks. LOL.
But that doesn’t mean that can’t design an HVAC system.
What will they be engineering? Throw away HVAC systems? How can you engineer something you have no idea of servicing?
Except for physical access, the engineer need not design maintenance into design. If you are required to spec out the equipment, which isn't always the case, then the manufacturer is on the hook for service while under warramty. A PE doesn't crawl around and service air handlers. Jeez.
Let say you want to put a 3000 CFM air handler on the roof of a factory. If the roof can't handle the load then yes the design is wrong. Maybe 2 smaller ones instead. But a PE doesn't install and maintain air handlers.
THere is a big misunderstanding what a design engineer does.
No there is a big misunderstanding by design engineers as to what is needed in improvements to existing systems. They are a lazy lot for the most part
Nobody who is lazy gets a BS in ME or EE. No matter what your IQ is it is a lot of work. We used to joke in Physics that we are givin 16 weeks to learn what Einstein studied for almost a life time.
I take it you are nothing more than a draftsman. Nothing against that, but one needs an understanding of what they are drawing to draw something efficient and useful.
I have a BS in Electrical and Civil Engineering. I am a few credits from A BS in ME also which I have no interest in getting. Draftsmen(CAD) worked for me. Actually I am a software designer now, so what’s your point?
You must be a wonderful draftsman. Don’t be surprised when you’re out of a job because the computer does it better
They will help them be a professional engineer with some understanding of the total market for their skills. Designing a system with no understanding of installation and maintenance vs. designing with that understanding can be the difference between being retained and being redundant.
Just receiving a degree is only part of any profession. Again, this student was working for someone who was not only a professional engineer, but someone with practical skills. Moaning about the poor job market while being narrowly focused only upon degree requirements is rather counter-productive in today’s world.
Are all engineering graduates assured that they will never have to fall back on practical skills to stay employed in a tight job market? It is precisely this sort of attitude that frustrates the older professionals whose jobs the young graduates hope to someday fill. Why do you think this boss was amazed at the lacks of his intern? Why do you think he went out of his way to add to the student’s education? Perhaps the employed professional engineer knows something about his profession?
This doesn’t even take into account the possibility of a global market collapse and subsequent long global depression. Being able to shift one’s professional weight and having many strings to one’s professional bow cannot ever be a detriment to employment.
I am a PE. Knowing how to change oil in a car will not help in any way an engineer’s career. If an engineer has to fall back on being a mechanic then so be it. He is no longer an engineer, he is a mechanic. If a lame research physician can’t “suture” a button on shirt is he a bad research physician?
Maybe not, but the car will run, and the shirt will look better and the engineer or the surgeon will save time and money.
You do know that in the expanded medical universe, the underlings say: “Doctors don’t do details”, meaning they really have to rely on the staff and usually fail when they try to undertake any business outside of being a physician. I gather this is something that contractors might say about engineers.
Meanwhile, physicians complain about their profession and many are going out of their way to become educated in something like plumbing or trying to leverage their compensation into something less regulated. If engineers are confident they won’t ever need any other skills, then bless their hearts.
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