It is possible to make all the right moves and still lose

It is extremely frustrating to be educated at one of the world’s most highly regarded academic institutions, have done extremely well against a body of your peers, have significant academic or work experience in a demanding and complicated field, and still be rejected out of hand from dozens of jobs.

We have all seen the type of applicants for jobs in Alberta. Handwritten resumes, poor spelling and grammar, declarations of homelessness and dubious past activities, interviewees dressed in tattered jeans who cannot answer you without lying and who will not look at you in the eye. Our employers often look for weeks, months even, for a suitable candidate to stand alongside us on the workline, only to settle on some ne’er-do-well who is much less qualified and experienced than you, if such a thing is possible, yet makes the same wage or higher, and does his work at a fraction of the speed and accuracy that you already achieve.

These are the people we see apply for the very jobs that we hold, and then when we, the supposed good employees with proven records of success, apply for different jobs, and we are rejected out of hand, for any one of a million reasons, none with which I am privy. I guess it’s possible that there are just that many awesome people who are better than us for all these jobs, but if that’s the case we shouldn’t have struggled to get these university degrees and should have just started working our way up from the mailroom in these organisations, since all of our bosses went that route and promote that way, regardless of the efficacy of the method.

There are university degrees that lead to jobs directly, and they are listed thusly: medicine, law, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, and engineering, to some extent. The remainder of the undergraduates, probably a good 70%, do not have jobs for which they can directly apply and reasonably expect placement. Technical schools provide direct skills application, often provide you with an employer upon graduation, have work experience built into their education, and charge a lot less and take a lot less time to finish. The technical graduates often make as much or more money than our 70% of graduates and some of our nurses, pharmacists, and lawyers.

The only solace is that regardless of how broken or frustrating the system is, we brave many, we band of brothers, can win this ridiculous war. It may take much longer than we would like, definitely longer than we were led to believe, but with tenacity and perseverance, we can navigate this horrid system and come out the other side...into a worldwide recession caused by bankers. Awesome.