Foreign Perspectives

With the economy being in the doldrums there’s an awful lot of people out there basically twiddling their thumbs whilst waiting for the next job opening to appear.

It doesn’t have to be like that though as the number of ways to earn extra income from home has exploded in recent years. The mix of opportunities has changed quite dramatically too. No longer is the “pin money” something just for the bored housewife but rather it’s for everyone.

Startup costs are minimal to non-existent too which is handy in this cash-strapped economy. That in turn means that there’s little or no downside in trying out a number of potential opportunities as most of the time your initial commitment will be extremely low.

So, what’s stopping you?

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Searching for a job these days can be a very demoralising affair, as it usually is in any economic downturn.

To begin with, you’ll find that your job search will turn up fewer opportunities. That in itself isn’t a problem but as the economic woes continue it turns out not to be the major problem.

The major problem seems to be that the jobs are unrealistically specific, ruling out large swathes of the population for what seem like poor reasons, at least from the point of view of someone looking for a job. That aspect arises from two basic reasons: 1) since the job market is pretty soft, why not be more specific? and 2) since there are so many potential applicants for a job, how else can the numbers be reduced to something manageable.

Being more specific is certainly good in principle but not necessarily so good in practice. For one thing it can have the effect of ruling out the ideal candidate who may have all the required attributes but perhaps not hit all the “required” experience. Typically that’ll happen in technical jobs where sometimes you see people asking for the equivalent of 20 years experience in using Windows when the product hasn’t been available that long. Secondly, even if someone did manage to tick all those boxes chances are that they are already in a well paid job and the salary on offer might fall well short of that.

Reducing the number of applicants is clearly necessary these days. Not so long ago McDonalds had 5000 applicants for one post. Yes, five thousand. Upping the experience and qualifications demanded isn’t always an effective approach to that. After all, were they to ask for a degree in food or something similar then they’re unlikely to retain anyone who was appointed with such qualifications. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way out of this though.

Overall, you should expect to work harder even to get to the point of being asked to interview. Once you’re there the competition is fierce too.

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Whilst the big news has been of banks going bankrupt all around us, there are many more smaller news stories around the world of individuals getting hit with the effects of the economic slowdown.

You don’t see those in the papers terribly often but the effects are real nevertheless. The banks going bankrupt is only the highest profile instance of it that we see or perhaps the odd football club on the brink. In these high profile cases there are oodles of negotiations done and, effectively, fiddling of the books to get everything to balance in some way. On the smaller scale, the equivalent is the i.v.a. and other similar standardised negotiations.

What both the high and low profile financial problems involve is some rearrangement of payments and, usually, a certain amount of writing off of the debt. In days gone by it was a relatively rare thing to see but these days the number of cases involved are clogging up the processing mechanisms. Sadly, although we sometimes seem to be nearing the bottom of this recession, the number of factory closures continues to mount with Cadbury’s factory being just the latest of a long line of closures. It’s a very long line too as these days only the high profile closures make the news.

One wonders when we’ll get back to the days when going bankrupt is something that happens solely because of your own mistakes rather than as now when many people have little or no control over it.

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