I am just going to ramble on about my recent experiences as a relatively green IT professional in the job market today. I have applied to hundreds of jobs, worked on my resume countless times, and have changed my job search from preferred choice roles to just about anything. Regardless of this, I have come to the conclusion that the job market just sucks right now. I finally broke through the application stack last month and was thrilled to learn that it was a healthcare organization being that my last profession was a nurse. The interviews went really well. I thought I had it in the bag. They asked me how soon I could start and that I would hear back from HR. I did eventually hear back, but not from anyone in particular. Another automated email informed me that the hiring staff had chosen another candidate.
I have gotten this email countless times at this point and I have become quite jaded about even applying to roles. I see so many roles with even more applicants. It is rough out there; no question.
I decided to reach out to my network and start asking around to get different insights. I love picking people’s brains. It helps me work through things and see from different vantage points. It is all in the hope that someone provides me with a view that I can run with. This past week, I came across one such view.
One of the guys I play softball with for a men’s league happens to work at a well-known recruiting and consulting firm and I asked if I could speak to someone within the IT department. He passed my name, info, and resume on. I heard back the same evening and set up a call with her. She was very cordial, but also very honest. To distill her sentiment down to a few words; it’s just a really difficult job market. She said she had reviewed my resume and that it looked very novice on the technical skill side of things. While true, I was hoping to hear something more encouraging. Though our call was not with video, I could feel her shrugging and even tossing her hands up in the air at times. She said 2 years ago, I would have had a much easier time (which I would have loved to have heard then). However, in the here and now, I am unfortunately competing with a ton of individuals with at least my same amount of experience or more all vying for the same roles. This on top of a rocky at best economy in the shadow of proxy wars and an upcoming presidential race that will likely be full of drama leads hiring managers not to pull the trigger on the unproven.
In light of this not so exciting news, I asked her about areas of continued growth within IT. She mentioned anything with data and AI. My curiosity was piqued, and that is now my new direction. So if you need me, I will be learning the ins and outs of Excel, SQL and hopefully python to pull it all together.
