Rick, a twenty six year old from Glastonbury, CT, graduated UCONN in 2018. He did not have a job upon graduation. The reason: he didn’t really look for a job as a college senior.
I have been running Career Counseling Connecticut since 2006. Back then, pretty much all college seniors looked for jobs. Now… not as much.
Rick faced what I see a lot of recent graduates without jobs face: jobless days turning into weeks turning into months and now turning into years.
Even in the more flexible work world we live in, years without a career building job is a problem.
Working for money as a bartender during the summer after graduation while enjoying himself and only occasionally applying to a job did not seem like a problem.
He told himself and his parents that he would get serious about his job search in September. And he did… but he found that many of his peers had taken the good entry level jobs that were starting in September. That frustrated him and he admitted that he his frustration led to motivation deflation. His “intense” job search was hardly intense. Soon enough, it was Thanksgiving and he was told that not many employers hire during the holiday season. He would apply with more vigor in January. He began to see it as a problem only when his relatives that he saw during holiday season asked him what he was doing. “Even the ones that were polite were obviously either worried or disapproving. I noticed their expressions.”
In the winter after his graduation, still jobless and feeling the sting of rejections, he started to feel anxiety. In my view, applying to 20 jobs and getting rejected is fairly normal. But no one told him so and he kept his private defeats to himself. His view that he was failing did not lead to him doubling his efforts but rather analysis paralysis and lower feelings of self-esteem. He never really had serious anxiety before and that led its cousin: depression. During 2019, he went down a mental worm hole.
It would have been good to get a job in 2019 because…. 2020!
And, so now, post-pandemic, Rick is four years out of college with a bartending job, two customer service jobs that were brief and terrible, and a lot of explaining to do.
You do not want this for your child.