With the advance through the years of the internet, it is some while now since job hunters relied on newspapers and cards in shop windows to find a job. Indeed, I got my first job by one of the most traditional methods of all used for generations of school leavers, my mother. I had wanted to be a teacher and for years imagined myself with proud parents as I went off to university. However, it dawned on me through my school years as I grew and became far more aware of my background, that this was not going to happen for me.
My mother made it clear to me that she stayed with my father only as long I was attending compulsory school and that she needed me independent. She herself born in 1927, had won a scholarship to grammar school but with her mother unable to afford the uniform, she was unable to take it up. I often wonder why children in her position were even made to sit for an exam that someone must have known would only set her them up to failure and disappointment…. She later wanted to be a hairdresser, but yet again her mother was unable to afford to pay for her training and so she followed the same path as many young 14-year-old girls of her era, she left what was called Wandsworth Central school and went to work in an office, bitterly resentful and terrified of the bombs from the blitz falling down around her as she did so …it’s difficult to imagine that only two years before she had been seen as a child and evacuated to the country, but in those days children from poorer families , which was most of the families my mother grew up with, grew up fast and work started at fourteen.
Apart from my mother desperately wanting me financially off her hands and no longer the responsibility of her and my father, from whom she wanted a divorce but felt that she had to stay with him as long as I was of school age, while every day she reminded me of it and made me pay for it emotionally and physically, she also was of a very firm opinion that what was good enough for her was good enough and indeed going to be the same for me …
It may sound incredible to some that this was the 1970’s and we were supposed to have already had the swinging sixties. I was born in 1959, but the sixties certainly did not swing for me and for my family, indeed they did not swing for most average people as Cilla Black told in her documentary Cilla's Unswung Sixties
My parents and the parents of quite a few of my contemporaries at school were born to parents who were born in the Victorian era. My mother’s mother told me stories of Queen Victoria’s funeral day, this my maternal grandmother was in service before she married, my mother was born in 1927, she grew up at the end of the 20’s and in the 30’s, raised by Victorian parents and in the years of depression in the UK. she didn’t have influences on her that encouraged her to swing, one of five children, money was very tight and her mother took in washing to help make ends meet. When the 1960’s arrived my mother was already in her thirties, the war had only been over for fifteen years and I was born to a mother who was already exhausted and barely had the energy to live, never mind swing …
Things were somewhat better for my father ...born in 1920 and in Bethnal Green East London, from what one hears of the east end of London, one would have expected him to have had an even worse time of it than my mother did in Wandsworth. However, things were better for his family than for many as my paternal grandfather had his own business, a bacon stall in a market and was known as the bacon king of Bethnal Green. My father was old enough to serve in the army in World war 2 and unlike my mother aged only 14 and terrified as she went to and from work with bombs dropping around her and precious little sleep after a night in the air raid shelter, my father who saw Greece and Italy and North Africa described the experience as the best years of his life ….However, he didn’t exactly swing either, his music tastes were more along the lines of George Formby when I’m cleaning windows and Gracie Fields The Biggest Aspidistra in the World….my parents were products of their times.
The
sixties certainly did not swing for my parents and not for many other people
either and the seventies were still an era where many parents stayed together
miserably but apparently for the sake of the children and an era when they
desperately needed the children to be working and financially independent.
While I was at school at Mayfield in Putney South west London, the earliest age
at which a child could leave school was raised from fourteen to fifteen, my
mother had assumed and banked so much on my being working when I was fourteen,
so desperate was she that she beat me when I brought the letter home from
school, believing that I had typed it myself so that I could stay at school and
said that she was going to write to the school to request that I be allowed to
leave , until I managed to convince her that the rules were not going to be changed
for me , even this did not stop her from accusing me of being a lily livered
lizard, hiding in school afraid to go out to work and telling me that I should
have gone to work in the bombing like she had to do because it would have given
me some backbone, which since I wanted to go to university, I clearly lacked.
Instead
of university and teacher training college I found myself where many young
People before me had found themselves, in a job found for them by their mother
or father. In my case my mother had done
most of the application for me before I went for the interview and at seventeen
I was working in a children’s day nursery and living in a bed sitting room in a
shared house, my parents having separated. I do believe that the savage cuts
that the governments of the UK and the USA and indeed other countries too have
made to welfare and education budgets will see a return to many children being
forced by their parents to leave school at the earliest opportunity and take
whatever job they can, because the household needs the income and / or the
parents cannot and will not even try to continue to support them financially ….
However,
some things have changed the job market since my parents time and when I was
first starting out to work , newspapers do list jobs, and local ones especially
can be very useful, as can national ones for executive positions, but with the
vast number of resources, not just job boards but CV and resume advice and
templates and advice on the job hunt itself plus interview skills, the computer
is the way to go when looking for that job.
The use of a computer and the web for looking for and applying for jobs has now become the norm, with e-mail, web searches, CV and resume and covering letter examples and templates as well as other job-related products. Also, the advent of the internet has given people choices, some people choose never to work for any employer and start up their own online business at a very early age. If I was raising children now I would do everything in my power to help them to get a money making venture up and running because it may well be the making of a lifelong career and keep them in employment …
Google
online businesses for teenagers, for many more ideas and remember that these
are not all limited to teenagers, as many of them require no experience and are
good ideas for older people looking for money making opportunities as well, as
for teenagers, the Saturday job and newspaper round have come a long way!!!
With the advent of job boards
such as Monster, Total, fish4jobs, Reed and Indeed and many, many more,
companies publish employment opportunities to a vast reach of possible applicants,
while at the same time job hunters can find many job opportunities that would
not otherwise be known to them and submit applications online. Also as most of
these sites have online CV storage as part of their services, you can be
headhunted by recruiters looking for your skills, who may contact you. There
are advantages and disadvantages, because jobs are advertised online there are
far more people seeing them and applying, hundreds of people can be chasing any
one job, but an advantage of online job hunting is of course the number of jobs
that you can see and apply for.
A
geographic advantage is that with the internet applicants are not limited to
knowing about only jobs in their own locality, if they are in a position to
consider employment further away. In fact, the internet removes many
restrictions for the job hunter including that job searching and applications
can be done on any day of the week at any time, not just Monday to Friday
during business hours.
An
often less well known feature of the jobs market is the hidden job market as
opposed to advertised jobs.
One of the best ways to bring yourself to the attention
of employers who may have a job available or know of jobs, or indeed freelance opportunities,
is through your social networks, such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. I
guess this version of the hidden job market, letting your social networking contacts
be aware that you are looking for a job or earning opportunity is not so
different from the days when you often got a job because your parents had
mentioned to their own bosses, to people that they knew or even in the pub,
that you would be leaving school soon and needing a job!!!
However,
it is vital that if you are looking for employment opportunities, you keep your
online presence respectable and clean and protect your
online image.
There
are many groups online for all kinds of interest from relatively harmless
interests such as books and music to more explosive ones such as politics, and
increasingly in more recent years’ potential employers on seeing your resume,
have then checked out your social networking profiles. Wanting to shoot or blow
up your government leaders and raving about various political issues is not
helpful and can be very risky when you are hoping to get a job, as can photos
of you half naked with your tongue hanging out or drunk ...watch those selfies!!!
