3 ms·
No, you're not screwed. Acquire a useful skill that's in demand and which can be done from a desk: drafting, CAD, graphic design, 3D modeling, video editing, we
by lambda 13y ago
No, you're not screwed. Acquire a useful skill that's in demand and which can be done from a desk: drafting, CAD, graphic design, 3D modeling, video editing, web design, programming. Do that craft, and develop a portfolio of work. Find a non-profit that you like that needs that work and spend some time donating that work to the non-profit so you can have some real world experience in that field, that demonstrates that you can work with other people.
Almost every reasonable hiring manager (which may be a minority of hiring managers, but is still non-zero) will value someone with a good portfolio who's shown that they can get the job done over someone with credentials and years of experience in the industry who doesn't have a good portfolio to show (as someone who's been doing technical hiring recently, I've always wondered about people who apply for a job with 20 years of experience and not a line of code they can show me; I realize that there may be many jobs where you work on proprietary code that you can't show to someone else, but not having a single side project, one-off hack, a few patches to the mailing list of an open source project, or even a former employer you can ask for a code sample to show under NDA in your whole career seems a bit odd).
- kefka 13y agoI already am going for drafting, which includes Autocad and Solidworks. I already am decent at general 3d design (and still have plenty of classes to go). Still, because I'm past the 6 month employability gap, NOBODY will touch me. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-terrifying-reality-of-long-term-unemployment/274957/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-terr... http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/04/16/after-six-months-unemployment-turns-into-permanent-unemployment/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/04/16/after-six...
- michaelochurch 13y agoIt's actually easier to do "creative career repair" on a 6-month gap than a 4-month one. Don't get me wrong. You always want to avoid being unemployed for 6 months if possible; but there are ways of touching that up. If you were in full-time school, just use that. You don't even need to lie. The truth is always better-- not because there's major risk of getting caught, but because it's always better to form relationships based on the truth, and the cognitive load of maintaining a lie will take steam out of you even if you never get caught. The "6-month problem" doesn't include full-time students. If you were a part-time student, maybe you can make it look full-time? However, if you are stuck needing to lie, I advise the "odds and evens" strategy. Rank your choices 1, ..., N. Odd-numbered choices get full disclosure of the truth. Even-numbered choices get the story you want to tell. (Or, if you think your history is that damaged, tell the truth to evens and your new career history to the odds.) This gives you a sense of whether the issue you are covering up is an actual employment problem, or whether it's something else.