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Career Advice

Kendra Pierre-Louis | Friday 5th February 2010

I was talking to a friend the other day and she pointed out that in her immediate circle of friends at least half of the people - educated young people in their late twenties and early thirties- had been unemployed for at least some point in the past year.

I know a lot of smart unemployed relatively young people. People who did the so-called 'right' things and loaded up on degrees and when they emerged found out they couldn't find a job. They've endured round after round of internships, both paid and unpaid racking up an impressive amount of debt that they are now uncertain that they will ever pay off.

Is this what we call progress?

A critical component of creating a sustainable society is creating one in which all of its members have the opportunity to become contributing members of society.

And yet, if you look across the expanse of developed nations you'll find that most are finding that they have more hands (and brains) then jobs.

This is leading to an ever increasing need for education. It used to be possible to be an administrative assistant with a High School diploma, but increasingly some college is required; many places go so far as to require a Bachelor's degree.

In places such as the US, the UK, and Canada where education is fairly expensive this disconnect is particularly acute. There are jobs requiring Master's degrees that pay a fraction of what a candidate probably forked over as a year's tuition.

In other places where education is cheaper, such as France you find people with Master's degrees working as cashiers (most infamously Anna Sam in her book The Tribulations of a Checkout Girl). I believe that most jobs have dignity, but people with both the intellect and the training to be forced by society into positions which utilize neither is both frustrating on a personal level and a travesty on a societal one.

As author Michael Young pointed out in his book Rise of the Meritocracy, such a system rewards not the smartest, or the hardest working, but the most connected (the term meritocracy was originally designed to be a pejorative one) only serving to deepen the divide between the haves and the have-nots.

This is not sustainable.

The current economic crisis has only made finding a job that much harder, but this problem preceded the crisis. There are work arounds, naturally. Work sharing - the 40 hour work week standard in the US is an arbitrary one, and if we reduced it to 30 hours a week we could employ more people. But this would involve a shift in thinking and would also result in a reduction in income.

In a system where we've been trained to consume ever increasing amounts, can we retrain ourselves to happily do with less?

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Sara Wolcott 1 March 2010

Great question.

Kendra Pierre-Louis 1 March 2010

Funnily enough I've never (luckily) been laid off. I know of a few people who were eagerly hoping to be laid off because their work situations were so horrible.

Lavinia, I don't know if my generation as a whole is asking these questions. A lot of us have become resigned to the fact that we're going to have a lot of jobs over the course of our career, and that ultimately it's in our own self-interest to hop before the axe drops.

Lavinia Weissman 7 February 2010

Marcia you have courage. I avoided Up in the Air because I have seen it in action first hand.

Kendra, your post gives me faith that your generation is asking and wants to find a solution to this.

Marcia Stepanek 7 February 2010

Good post; just got in from seeing "Up in the Air" -- the way our society and workplace cultures handle dislocation is, in itself, unsustainable and terribly inefficient from a human capital standpoint. There's got to be a better way, and I agree that these issues need to be more visible in all of our talk about sustainability. Thanks for raising it here.