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I'm not going to post cover letters right now since I don't bother saving them, but I am rewriting my resume and trying to do it myself. This what I have so far, but it is draft one. To clarify, the sections under the claims coordinator and self-employed contractor are mostly written by other people. I changed a few words in those sections. The section under Marketing Manager is all my own writing. This isn't a complete history, but I'd rather not do hard labor anymore. The formatting is a tad funky, but you'd have to visualize bullet points where appropriate.
The "free" job-hunting classes in Los Angeles are... Let's just be polite and call them substandard. Basically they just tell you how to open an email account and fill out online applications to Target. There is another one, but you have to pick up trash along the side of the street with no pay for about 6 months to a year and the job is contingent on how much the program-runner likes you. There are a few other resources, but they are all of similar use.
It's a pretty bad resume. It's not about the experience, but it is mixed up and scattered without focus.
Your strength is programming. Your focus is on the wrong thing by taking more programming classes, instead of fixing your weakness. You could be twice as good a programmer in a few weeks. It's not going to get you a job, if nobody knows it from your resume.
What you are doing is not effective. Another 50 hours won't make it effective. You could learn from other people and move in a different path. Speak to some older people who are farther along in their careers than you.
I never got an associate's degree. I had been making less than $12/hr and had short periods of unemployment for over 12 years. I worked as a security guard, fast food worker, shipping clerk(mostly), call center work.
The difference? I went twice a week to a career skills class, about 5 years ago. I got an offer for $12.5k/more and another offer for $25k more, after 4 months in the class. I went from a $12/hr shipping clerk with Access and Excel reports to a business analyst job with Access and Excel reports.
Now, I make over $80k in another job, after I got laid off last year. I got more experience and was able to move on to another business analyst job with basic SQL skills to do "select" querying. It's not bad for giving up 1.5-2 hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays to take these worthless job hunting skills classes for a year.
I am way below your skill level technically. I don't even know what those programming languages are. You could be where I am, if you quit making up excuses and make being the best resume writer and interviewer, your #1 goal.
I've been seeking a job for more than ten years. It's a strange problem to have. A person can explain away one year of unemployment: he can say he traveled for a year or perhaps tended to his sick mother, both honorable things to do, especially when you are in your early twenties.
After two years comes along three years, and at some point, I began making sarcastic snarks about never having a real job again, and at least in my early 20's, when I was standing next to the Mexicans on the street corner chasing cars down so I could lift a shovel for a day, that attitude, at least to those on the outside looking in, worked well. What people didn't know was that I was actually stomping the pavement whenever I had the chance.
At some point, I simply couldn't take waking up at 5am to go stand at the street corner with illegal immigrants, so I signed up with Labor Ready and worked there, but earning $35/day in Los Angeles is far from an optimal income. I started working as a background extra, but the pay for that kind of work isn't much better.
After reading the above, people may wonder why I let myself sink to such levels. I grew up well beneath the American poverty line, so I was raised with the attitude that you just do what you have to do to get ends to meet. Survival is paramount to all other considerations, and if you have any pride, you never ask for help, you don't complain, and you most certainly never go the welfare line. College was not an option for people like me. When I was 18, I came home and found my bags sitting on the street corner.
I am now 34 years old. I haven't had a “real†job since I was 22 years old when I was a bike messenger in Miami, Florida. This is not to say that I have not had any jobs at all. I had one job working in a restaurant, but I was fired because someone accused me of using and selling drugs. I'm not a teetotaller, but I do not approve of drug use; that accusation was made on purely false grounds.
The next job was working at a call center for FEMA in response to Hurricane Katrina. That is the year 2005. Eight years ago. I then volunteered at the Los Angeles Film Festival.
At some point, especially if you are not interested in working for yourself, and your entire focus in life is to pound the pavement 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, for years on end, you fall through the cracks. I spent two years of my life sleeping on the street. Somehow I managed to maintain some of my friendships and even make valuable connections that allowed me to attend school for a year and get off the street. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to go to even get an associates degree, so I attended a trade school and that ultimately got me nowhere except, despite finishing at the top of my class, pounding the pavement for nearly a year in a fruitless job search. My practicing license ran out and I was basically back to square one.
At some point, I found a girlfriend and we eventually moved in together. After a year together, we broke up. A month later, we talk and I visit her and her sister, and I get a job at her sister's company. This is great but not-so-great for me: I finally got a job but I was stuck living with someone I don't get along with anymore. It turned out the company was a total grind-house and I was quickly fired, but I had one expertise that they needed and they couldn't easily replace, so the company decided they needed a marketing department and I became the entire marketing department there. Despite my lack of work history, some things seemed wrong about this job, and I asked around and people let me know that the job I had was not only terrible, but my coworkers and management were clearly manipulative and abusive, that my best route of action is to try to find something better where I'll be happy and have better pay. After a year of working at this place, I could no longer take the job and I could no longer live in an abusive relationship, so I had to quit both of them.
The reason why her sister got me the job wasn't so much because she liked me or the fact that I was dating her sister, it was that she was mystified as everyone else that ever knew me: how could someone so damn intelligent not be able to find a job. I'm not a social moron either and I'm far from lazy, so what was the issue? She isn't the first person to be mystified by my inability to find a job. Pretty much everyone I know thinks I am highly intelligent, and everyone I've known assumed that I have 4 to 6 years of college despite the fact that my college experience is walking around a campus once or twice. I used to get enjoyment from watching people's reaction when after asking what college I attended I told them I had no clue what a college classroom looked like. What used to be amusement now just creates a sense of dread, especially at an interviewing table.
So, to people who think that all unemployed people are lazy, I hold myself up as an antithesis. Before getting the job mentioned above, I put out 100 resumes per day, every day for one whole month. That is 3000 rejections. I spent over a decade of my life looking for a viable job I could enjoy. I spend months on end walking around the city of Los Angeles dropping resumes and filling out applications. Since September, I have sent out at least 10 resumes a day. I've had 2 interviews during that time. It's sad to think that people I know were very happy to see I manged to be interviewed at all. So, I've had 2 interviews from about 2000 resumes, which is a large improvement over the 0 / 3000 resumes I experienced just a year ago.
Okay, so that is all hum-drum rejections. You may wonder what I have done to improve my own thinking and life. I am a hard-core autodidact. It wasn't by accident that I was made the marketer at my old job. They knew that I was self-trained in Statistics and Calculus. They knew that I was learning how to program. I have been spending the past year and a half working through the MIT OCW and Coursera, learning how to program, do math, and basically absorb as much information as I could. I built 4 website by hand (no frameworks for me). I haven't read a fiction book for years. If you saw my bookshelf, you'd see about 20 textbooks ranging in subjects from Economics to Biology to Psychology. I may not have went to college, but I surely made it my purpose to educate myself as much as possible.
So, what is a hard-working, able-bodied, and decently intelligent person to do when no one gives that person a chance over the span of ten years? I'm so sick and tired of hearing people say to me: “You can do better than this. You're way to smart.†Well, if I COULD do better than this, then I would, right? Apparently I cannot do better than I do in life because if even ONE interviewer in the past ten years examined my resume, met me face-to-face, and decided I could do better, then it would be done.
This is an issue that breaks my spirit more than anything: I am placing my entire self-worth on the opinions of people who don't even know me. I have faced down malicious and rude interviewers, pushed hard to learn and work, and all of this hard work resulted in nothing at all. What happened to the ideal that if we work hard, we can accomplish at least some of our goals in life? All I wanted for ten years was a stupid little job doled out by someone, anyone, anywhere, doing literally anything at all, yet here I have nothing. Am I truly unemployable? And if I am, what am I supposed to do? I DON'T want to work for myself. I've done enough of that in my life, and I would rather just relax in a job until the day I die. Being a reluctant entrepreneur isn't a viable life strategy, trust me. Working for yourself is seriously hard work, and if you aren't married to the idea of self-employment 100%, then you are 100% guaranteed to fail. I don't want to work for myself and I never wanted to. I only did it out of no other options, but can it be true that I am truly 100% unemployable?
you sound like me.
i too have a pretty big reach between my last real job and my current one. my current one is under the table for my insane landlord, which i just had to quit.
i finally smartened up last year and got into school. i actually get money back from the Pell (no loan) and go to LA City College. Signed up for an electronics certificate, and loved it so much i want to become an engineer. make 60 K right out of school. being a female i have the untrad advantage. if you learned calculus you are a FOOL NOT TO GO INTO ENGINEERING. electrical engineering is quite psychedelic. i am amazed at how bizarre science really is, having been of the artistic bent my whole life. there are jobs along the way you can take and the community colleges in LA are EXCELLENT and cheap.
also, there are cheap places to live in LA if you know someone. i pay 550 a month and have a very unusual living situation but it works for me.
i thank the lord i am off the self teaching thing and am actually in school at almost 40. tis never too late.
in short, you aren't unemployable. not as erudite as you are.
Sorry, I didn't mean to come across as combative to the suggestions. I even tried to be patient and reasonable with the people that are questioning my mental health and personality because I know they are well-intended and they offer some clues to this issue.
I have put thought into the advice I have read here and I have read this thread more than once, but you are asking me to make serious life decisions not so much within 7 pages of a thread, but to make these decisions within the course of 48 hours. I'm not on Shark Tank and I do have a bit of wiggle room to ponder a bit and I'd like to have a little time to reflect on this.
But I'll tell you where my brain currently is:
1- Get out of Dodge.
2- Make sure that the "Other Dodge" is a bit cheaper to get by on.
3- I'll continue my studies and getting the certificates as I earn them. Currently working on getting a certificate in Calculus and Statistics.
4- I'm leaning on simply taking my current resources and working on my own, but as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I'll probably only earn about minimum wage. The fact is that sending out 1000+ resumes a month is an awful life strategy. When I really consider it, sending out those resumes uses 3 to 5 hours per day. Even at $7, I am wasting ~$1,500 / month of potential income.
5- In regards to programming: I will continue to learn. I have a few projects that I am working on. One is a website that I was considering turning into a business, but the idea was lambasted so hard that it is pointless to bother with it. I'm going to fix the code base and "give it forward" by open sourcing the entire project. I'll probably do a few more major projects and do the same with them. I'd like to create a nice Statistical Marketing and Metrics program and open source it.
6- Eventually look for a mentor or someone that can offer guidance. This will be the most difficult step for me, but it is possible that this is the most vital step I will make. This may be 6 months to a year down the road because I don't want to be a full-on "taker" and I hope that whomever I talk to can appreciate what I have accomplished and will hopefully take something of value from me for his or her insight.
Just note that I am quite prone to changing my mind on things, but perhaps the answer to the title of this thread is "Now."
Glad to see your thinking about this in practical terms, not just "what should I do?". Of course it's a major life decision and it will take some time and preparation. It also must be pretty scary. My main tip would be, think about what you have to lose? It sounds like not very much. That should help ease your mind a bit.
You've got some good experience and you're a "go-getter" type. Some employers may like that. My advice would be to stay away from those major companies with computerized applications. Those will probably be less willing to accept your unconventional journey. See if their are any small/mid-sized IT firms in the area and reach out to them. They generally care more about personality type and skills rather then qualifications.
Have you reached out to your friend in Texas yet? anybody else you know that is doing well in another part of the country?
OP: Another bit of advice, stop thinking of yourself as unemployable. A lack of confidence will come out in an interview even if you don't say it. I know I was unemployed for awhile and thought of myself as unemployable. It wasn't until I changed my thinking and then I found a job. It wasn't my ideal job, but it was a step toward success.
Apply everywhere, literally. McDonalds, Pizza Hut, factories, UPS or Fed-Ex package handler, convenience store, gas stations, farms, temp agencies, whatever. Then, think about the type of job you would like to have on the long term(career). Next, start working on skills that will allow you to find this job. Then, start looking for your ideal job.
Your thinking is crippling you, and o at least not helping your situation. Change the way you think. Change your attitude. Find motivation for something (money, love, not being homeless) it doesn't matter. Try some approaches you have never tried and or thought might not wok to change things up. Cultivate skills you think will help in the short-tem. Address the short-term if it's dire, and than take steps to tackle the long-term. If you are desperate, apply using a shot-gun specified method. Finally, speak with someone if you have troubles you feel need to be spoken about.
When I'm between IT contracts I'm driving a cab. Just going to the local cab company, leasing a cab and starting to drive. You can make some good money (3-4k) and you can go to job interviews without problems because you are an "independent business person" that works whenever he likes, and you can apply online to jobs from your laptop while waiting at the train station for customers.
So, maybe you can think about it.
First you to prove that you can KEEP yourself employed full time. Employers are going to look at your history and assume you tend to "burn out" or get sloppy too fast to work anything but day laborer temp jobs. You need to PROVE the opposite.
Make a plan to build a STEADY employment track record without worrying about career path for now.
1) Go get a low wage job (with standard bi-weekly paychecks) raking leaves, washing windows, painting houses, etc and work fulltime for at least 6 months. The goal is to establish a solid near-term work history. Get along with your co-workers and bosses.
2) Next, while still working for the landscaping/handyman company, apply for an entry level fast food job or a cashier job. The goal here is to get in with a well known company that looks recognizable on your resume (McDonalds, Target, Dunkin Donuts, etc). Do not allow yourself any time between jobs when you make the move - maintain employment.
3) Work that cashier or fast food job full time for at least a year, preferably two years. Stay there longer if there are upward mobility opportunities - head cashier is a potential goal, or shift manager. Always be punctual, mind your manners and build references.
Once you've worked these steady jobs 40 hrs a week for 2 years or more years, you will have shown an employer that you're capable of showing up on time every single day as required. Then, and only then, worry about "career goals".
When I'm between IT contracts I'm driving a cab. Just going to the local cab company, leasing a cab and starting to drive. You can make some good money (3-4k) and you can go to job interviews without problems because you are an "independent business person" that works whenever he likes, and you can apply online to jobs from your laptop while waiting at the train station for customers.
So, maybe you can think about it.
Just curious, is it really this easy to be a cab driver?
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