Note: I was going to post this on the 20th, but there were some server issues that kept me from doing so until today.
20 March 2013
I realized this evening with a start that it was exactly four years ago today that I lost my job as the Chief Academic Officer of an online university I co-founded and helped build from the ground up. I knew things were getting tight; it was 2009 and everyone was still feeling the effects of the 2007-2008Â economic collapse. I had recorded in my journal just a few days prior that I sensed something was up. I had already taken two pay cuts, and feared that there was a third in the offing.
I really didn’t expect a layoff. The University President and the CFO broke the news me just before the weekly executive meeting I normally attended. I told them I wouldn’t be at that meeting; “I have work to do.” I immediately went back to my office and started looking for my next job.
Getting laid off has not been an unusual thing in my work experience. As a tech writer during the boom time in Silicon Valley, it was standard for the writers to get laid off once a major project was finished. But jobs were plentiful and I usually had something new within days. I knew the job market out there was harder this time, but I had what I thought was a truly amazing resume and a personal network orders of magnitude larger than I had before this job. I honestly felt that I had an almost unfair advantage this time around.
What I didn’t appreciate was just how much things had changed. This was a shock to me, since I had been carefully following the economic news since 2002 with help from a CPA friend of mine, who had been educating me in the wiles and barely-controlled chaos that is our economic system. I saw the housing bubble, the derivatives crisis, pretty much all of it coming well ahead of time. But the job market was something else.
A sustained flurry of resumes has turned up nothing. Job centers, placement programs, went nowhere. I even tried a headhunter service, who wouldn’t even look at me. It was at that point that I started to sense that something was and remains profoundly wrong with our economy.
Everything is backwards from what I was always taught it should be. My previous experience both as an employee and as an employer (I had helped recruit and trained roughly 100 faculty members for the university) was that competence and qualifications were good. Lots of experience was good. What I have learned since then is that competence must be hidden or downplayed. Excessive education is a recipe for rejection, as is lots of experience, which probably gets read as a sign of being over 40 and therefore to be rejected out of hand.
I got utterly sick of hearing that I was either “overqualified” or “under-specialized.” Versatility apparently indicates a lack of focus. Since I have tried to develop myself as a generalist both as a career strategy and a personal philosophy, this proved to be a problem. For the first two to three years, I got exactly one interview. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve basically mothballed my job hunt to a background consideration.
I did manage to create myself a position as a part-time Director of a Science Education Nonprofit Corporation, but that’s all.
What has also been profoundly disturbing is how so many, especially of the conservative mental disorder are so quick to label the long-term unemployed as “lazy” or “lacking ambition” or “incompetent.” At my one interview at the headhunter agency, the interviewer suggested that my writing skills may be outdated. “Nonsense,” I shot back.
“Did someone change the rules of English since I got laid off? Besides, I make a point of writing at least 500 words a day, usually more” (Which is still true).
So to address the charges of “lazy” and “unambitious”, here is a list of things I have done for pay, usually on a very short-term, basis:
Technical Writing
- Handbook for Kids’ science education program
- Mentor’s handbook for the same program
Ghostwriter
Accreditation consulting
Voiceover talent
Pulling weeds, mowing lawns, trimming hedges
Handyman work
Driver/attaché
Musician (Vocalist)
Lecturing (Local adult education programs)
- Biblical Studies
- Middle East current events
- Unemployment/Economics
Janitorial work
Tutor
- Roman History
- College writing
- Calculus
Part time college teaching
- Religious Extremism
- Secret Societies
- Research methodology
- Introduction to the Old Testament
Sales agent helping a friend sell a piano
Game designer and developer
Rare book appraiser
Music critic/reviewer
Contract intelligence analyst
Founder, NPO
Director, NPO
Web site developer and editor
Just to drive the point utterly and completely home, here are things I also did, for free, just to keep myself learning, growing, and engaged:
- Freelance writer
- Book reviewer
- Author, of a peer-reviewed academic journal article
- Academic journal peer reviewer
- Project Manager: Volksdata.com (a start-up that couldn’t really get started)
- Manager of student internship program
- Subject Matter Expert (Islamism) for Master’s Thesis
Who you callin’ lazy??
It is tempting to conclude that this is how things are going to be for awhile, perhaps permanently. Such a conclusion is tantamount to surrender. I will acknowledge that I’m very capable, and smarter than the average bear. But that’s just the point: one should not have to be a genius/workaholic with the ambition of Alexander the Great just to get by in this economy. I actually prepared myself and our family finances, with help from my CPA friend, against the bad economic times that were clearly coming. I’ve had to make a lot of hard decisions and painful actions since the layoff. My CPA friend tells me that my decisions were sound and well-informed. The right thing to do at the time. Usually, making all the right financial moves means you’ll live comfortably. In my case, it means we’ve avoided having to live in a cardboard box—so far.
So what does one do if you can’t find steady work? The mantra that your new job is finding your next job is bullshit. In the current market it amounts to panning for gold in a snowbank. Occupy has it right; the appropriate exercise for someone with smarts, intelligence, experience, and ambition who cannot find a job is to raise holy, bloody, raging hell with the powers that be. Fight them, denounce them, subvert them without mercy, directly and indirectly, without letup, until the system changes.
