I Just Got Paid Today

My year of unemployment has come to an end, at least for the next six months should I get to serve out my entire contract. And, after what seems like eons, I garnered my first paycheck today. Due to the timing of the payroll and the company's holiday schedule, it was only for three days but it was the sweetest cash that I have earned in a while and I am thoroughly excited.

I spent this last year polishing just about every aspect of my employable world, my resume, my interviewing skills, my professional skills through continuing education, my outlook, my aspirations and my well-being. I exercised, ate even less and lost some weight and increased my frugal reins in addition to spending quality time with my children. It has been quite journey. Now, I am simply grateful and elated for the opportunity to work while remembering my fellow compatriots for whom unemployment marches on. I am rooting for you all.

Reflection on a Graduation

Well, I am graduating first thing in the morning and while I should turn in early, it probably will not happen as usual. Anyhow, I'll be the proud recipient of a Certificate in Business Analysis and a Certificate in Project Management. Yeah! However, the resulting job offer that I expected to snag due to this dual achievement has not materialized yet. I still believe that I will find something but as I stare deeply into the abyss of an aging job search, it is hard not to get discouraged.

I do believe that everyone is allowed to be discouraged sometimes just as long as despair does not become our modus operandi. We should get mad and we should get angry sometimes so that we can dispel the internal stresses that are bound to build as we constantly assess our jobless situation. Then we must dust off our boots, strap on a new outlook and continue the search.

Tomorrow morning, I am to show up in professional dress looking the part. Though they call it a graduation, it is a lot more than handing us our certificates, patting us on the back and sending us on our merry way. There will be representatives from area companies and career development professionals to give us another huge helping of job search guidance. Maybe some of us will get lucky and make a beneficial contact that leads to employment.

But just in case, I will be taking a civil service test on Saturday morning. It is for a position that pays half as much but I have to create opportunity and options for myself. We are being told to think outside of the box when it comes to seeking employment these days which essentially means we must pursue every lead even if it is for less money. So, I will do it.

Things Will Get Better But There Won't Be a Job for You

I am so glad that economy appears to be stabilizing. It cost a lot of money to prop it up though, but we won't go there. Unfortunately, there is a lot of talk about it being a "jobless recovery" and that is where my joy fades quickly. This is bittersweet news for the unemployed. Things will get better but there won't be a job for you.

We have been hearing the term "jobless recovery" since 2001 when we entered a relatively mild recession, compared to the whopper we have now. This can't possibly be an acceptable result when millions of people have lost their jobs. We all can't continue to be unemployed, there are simply too many of us. Personally, I have never been surrounded by so many unemployed brilliant, educated and seasoned professionals in my life. It is amazing to see your competition staring you in the face and knowing they have a lot more education and experience than you do.

The cottage industry of the new "bend over backwards" standards for job searching is downright terrifying. How are we all supposed to set ourselves apart from all the others to land that job? Am I really supposed to ask my interviewer right there and then whether I have said anything that may affect their ability to employ me and what I can do to improve my chances of employment with their company?

Now, we are all supposed to be our own brand to be sold and marketed by ourselves and in return we will reap employment. It is a very very tall order for many who are great but haven't looked for a job in 15 years. These people are in my classes and I feel very bad for them. I only just got back into the rat race recently so I was in sandy shoes to begin with though I was hoping to make a lasting impression. I have to hone my saleswoman-ship; something about selling the Brooklyn bridge.

The Joy of Education

I have just completed 3 whole days of school this week with 2 more to go. Up until now, I have been scheduled for no more than 3 days a week which is just about manageable. This week is brutal. Though, the hours are technically the same as a work week, believe me, 8 hours on the job is a lot different than 8 hours in the classroom learning the methodology of a profession. Essentially, dull, dry theory that we know never rolls out as neatly in the real world. But, I will not complain.

Though I am starting to get very tired, probably because I stay up too late writing this thing, I am happy to be going to school and I'm happy to have this forum. Besides, by the end of August I will be able to add 2 professional certifications to my resume and possibly some alphabet soup to my name, providing that I also pass national accreditation exams. Hopefully, I can turn all of this into a job gain for the fall. Wish me luck!

Can Get There From Here

Well I am feeling much better today, having worked through my 5 stages of grief since my layoff a week ago and having resolved to make lemonade out of lemons, I have chosen to push on with purpose.

Friday night was the company Holiday Party at a fancy catering hall that I was looking forward to attending, so in keeping with the tradition, many of us ex-employees having reserved that night out anyway staged our own Holiday Party. We had a great time. It was good to remember why we liked working with each other and how we had a nice group of people to add to our professional networking profiles on the web. LinkedIn, essentially a Facebook-type networking site for professionals, is the most well-known. It doesn't have all the Facebook goodies but I suppose it might not be appropriate to send widget plant gifts or other plug-ins to our business associates or why not? Perhaps there should be some humor in job-hunting which truly is a thankless job.

Job-hunting requires full-time effort; nothing less will produce meaningful results. However, those around you suddenly think you are free and somehow don't seem to recognize the time and effort required on a daily basis if you are serious about finding a new job: revising and revising the resume, targeting the resume by incorporating verbiage from the job offering. refining and improving your professional network, writing those dreaded cover letters and the sheer time-consuming act of simply searching all the job boards. These last 2 weeks of December are probably the worst time to be job-hunting due to the distraction of the holidays, a great & enjoyable distraction, but a distraction nevertheless when you want to hear something from a hiring company. So, while I do spend quite a bit of time on it, I do recognize that the turn of the year may bring better prospects.

My family started this year with the slogan "2008 will be great" and we all know how well that turned out. Now, we are looking forward to "2009 will be fine." Did I really write this in my holiday cards this year? While I focus on the holidays, I will try to take the best of the holiday spirit with me and forever be grateful for the opportunities I was granted this year. My goodness, don't I sound positive? We get bombarded with rhetoric, teaching, healing, books, medicine and other pearls of wisdom that we should remain positive no matter what. I suppose I'll give it another few weeks to find out if my feelings are truly "live" or "memorex."

The State of New York

Probably the most disturbing statistic I read about this weekend is the extent to which New York State depends on Wall Street. Apparently, 20% of state revenue is garnered from the taxes on bonuses paid to investment bankers and capital gains (source: Newsday). Now I knew it was a significant amount but 1/5 of the budget is alot. New York State has a budget of $120,000,000,000 a year. Of course with the decimation of most of the major financial firms continuing to escalate, Citigroup announced layoffs of 50,000 workers today, it is not hard to predict that this stream of revenue will be significantly reduced. 50% is the amount currently anticipated or approximately $12,000,000,000 less. The State is on track to have a $1,500,000,000 deficit this year and a $12,500,000,000 deficit next year.

This past July, Governor Patterson sounded the early alarm and hauled the Legislature in to address an additional $600,000,000 in budget cuts to cover the then-anticipated budget shortfall for this year and at the time projected a deficit of nearly $6,000,000,000 for next year. As we can see, these numbers have more than doubled since July so tomorrow the Legislature is being hauled back in again to address the spiraling budget deficit. From the top - corporations and governments - to the bottom - individuals, we are all saddled with decreasing income/revenue and higher debt. 

Unfortunately, instead of trying to come up with solutions, the advance notice is of Legislators bickering about programs that they do not want to touch, funds for education, healthcare, adminstration, pensions and themselves. Yes, it will be difficult to cut funds for all of these programs, New York spends nearly half of its budget, $59,000,000,000 for public health care costs, Medicare, Medicaid and Child Health Plus, alone. 

These funds represent the neediest cases but for all of those people who are losing their jobs, the projection is over 160,000 jobs across the state this year, the prospect of a majority of those persons paying into COBRA; extending their employer-based healthcare beyond a layoff is slim. Cobra costs are daunting. I have done it. It cost us $1200 a month to COBRA our healthcare costs a few years ago when we decided to go into business for ourselves. Most people will not be able to afford COBRA so that will be more people on the public health rolls. How do you cut the budget here? The other major area is education. None of the Legislators want to cut those funds either; New York State funding helps to keep my school taxes at an unrespectable $7,000 a year. Long Island school taxes are legendary, most of us are hanging by a thread, we couldn't survive a hike in taxes if the state cuts aid. 

So if not, health and education, then where? You have try to cut people but NY State is a union state. The teachers union is 600,000 strong then there is the Civil Service union with 300,000 members and police and transit and service employees and healthcare employees adding tens of thousands more; all the heavy-hitters with generous pensions, healthcare benefits and salary to boot. All of the Legislators owe some allegiance to one or the other of these unions so who will have the balls to cut them? Look, the Congress is arguing over saving GM for precisely the same reason; huge legacy costs will probably crimp its ability to become self-sustaining even if it does come up with the car of the future.

There is no good solution to the state's budget crisis but someone has to pay because there is no more money; most economists have now agreed that we will suffer a deep and protracted recession. So far Governor Patterson has been effective in keeping everything on the table. Instead of bellyaching and intractability, our Legislators should attempt to come up with some budget-reducing ideas that they could swallow; like it or not, we all have to do it.

Confessions of a Weary Blogger

Today, for the first time since I began writing this blog back in June, I decided I should take the day off. The main reason is the addition of a full time job. When I added a full-time job to my schedule, I added a full-time job to the full-time job that I already had; mother of 2 and CFO of 2 LLCs and CEO/CFO of the household. Yet through it all I have adhered to the schedule that I initially set when I started this blog.

I didn't want to be a blogger who wrote a few times willy nilly until the blog trailed off into nothingness and I didn't want to be a blogger posting several times a day every day. To strike a balance that I could reasonably keep, I decided on the schedule of a single post M-F reserving the weekends for family demands which, if you have one, are plentiful. It has been working all of this time until today when I realized that I probably cannot keep up this schedule for too much longer if I ever plan to get any sleep.

Currently I begin writing sometime after 10pm with the goal of getting to bed by midnight which I have so far failed to achieve; usually it is closer to 1am. At the 10pm hour, everyone is in bed, the house is quiet and I can separate and find the time to think. Even if I wasn't writing I would be thinking for I have always been a bit of a night owl. Nevertheless, the reality is that I have to be alert and primed for my job every day all day if I plan to keep it.

Every person's job in the private sector requires pristine dedication and overt proof of indispensability; a tough order for any job holder but a requirement in today's economy. It is impossible for me to be comfortable and take my job for granted having narrowly survived a layoff this week while witnessing the news of thousands more being downsized from major corporations, the likes of Chrysler, Goldman, Xerox and Merck. The employment outlook is grim for the upcoming year and to lose one's job in this economy is a looming prospect; any day, any hour, any time into a world of shrinking opportunity.

Therefore, in the interest of preserving my job and by extension preserving some sanity, I will be reducing my output to M-Th. I think it will be fine.