This is "The Livelihood Chronicles", a group-blog at DK4 to help unemployed/under-employed/under-paid folks find work or other means of income during this unemployment crisis and keep their heads held high in the meantime. This is also meant to be a comfortable place for unemployed folks to vent and connect and hopefully get something that will help them. Long term, or maybe sooner than that considering how dire things have become, I hope we can organize some political action for unemployed folks. If you want to be a contributor or co-editor or co-admin, please send me a message.
So you're unemployed, or you're under-employed, or you hate your job. What kind of job or livelihood do you want? Where are you looking for it? What's your biggest problem? Do you want to switch careers, or keep doing the same one? Are there any jobs available in your field in your area? Do you want to start a business but don't know how to get the money? Do you want to go self-employed and don't know how to start or how to keep it going? Come tell us. Somebody may be able to help.
My biggest problem when I was unemployed was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, or at least that's what I thought my problem was. I only knew that I didn't want to do the things I'd done before and wanted to do something "meaningful" and "challenging". Like a lot of people, I glommed onto "What Color is Your Parachute?" as a way to find out what I wanted, but I have to say that that book, and that whole approach, just didn't work for me. It seems to me to be disconnected from reality. I mean, what good is it if I have writing skills, writing experience, a degree in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley that was extraordinarily heavy on writing and analysis, and I very much enjoy writing, when for 99% of us you can't possibly make a living doing it?
For some professions, "doing what you love" is quite doable because the job pays a living wage. For writing, IMHO, it's the path to utter poverty. I am not planning on a life of poverty :) Therefore, it seemed a more practical approach was something I was more comfortable with. The book "The Wizard of Work" was very helpful for me in doing a practical inventory of my skills and in getting in the mode of thinking about how my skills could be useful in a job. to see what jobs are available and figure out how to fit yourself in there. Some advice from that book that helped me was if you don't want to do what you were doing, take an inventory of your previous experience and try to move "sideways" into some other field or job that uses a lot of the same skills. It also suggested volunteering as a way to build your network, put something on your resume, and keep or increase your skill set.
So I put the advice to work and started volunteering (go DFA!), and I met some very nice smart people, and later one of these people got his name and picture in a local paper for a story about a non-profit company he'd just started, one that was sorta sideways related to previous work I've done. I thought that I could probably help him. and that since he knew me and knew I was a responsible person it would get me a little farther, so I contacted him, and as it turned out I was able to help him and he hired me on for a project. I met some more very nice smart people on that project, and after the project was over, one of them went to work for a local company, and when they needed some help he contacted me out of the blue. So after many years of thinking I didn't want to do the things I'd done before, I ended up in the same job field I'd had before but in a polar-opposite environment and at a far more challenging level than I thought I'd ever be qualified to tackle.
So what's your *** unemployment problem? Unload here please.