Taking Inventory

Let's see...it's mid-February. Let's see where things stand:

• Right now I'm living with my father and his wife, an arrangement they're definitely not too thrilled with.
• The part-time retail job I took at the mall at Christmas has ended. Business is so slow that the store manager was sending employees home; he certainly wasn't about to put me on the schedule.
• I have no health insurance (the COBRA from my last job ended in October). Each day is a gamble; I hope my luck doesn't run out.
• In between job hunting and looking for job networking and low-cost educational opportunities, I've been selling my personal items. It brings a few dollars in to help me pay my auto insurance and other bills.
• My 10-year old car is a beater. It runs, more or less, but it looks like hell and sounds like a tank. In fact, I've taken to cutting the engine halfway down my street and coasting into the driveway when I come home from the library at night, to keep from waking my dad and stepmother.
• I don't watch TV. I don't have the time for it, and besides, I think the cost for cable television/dish channels is obscene.
• New clothes? Ha ha ha ha ha. Not likely.

I'm lucky, in many respects. My dad and his wife haven't put me out on the street -- yet. I don't have children, which would add a whole different element to the equation. When I got a flat tire last week, my brother came and got me (and his kids, we were coming home from a family event). And my dad drove me to the tire shop the next day so I could get a new tire for my car. (Dad didn't pay for the tire; he just played taxi.)

But still, I think to myself, this is nonsense. Why am I knocking myself out to get a job here? Why am I living hand-to-mouth here, when there are better opportunities in Charlotte, N.C., Atlanta, Austin, Tx, Las Vegas -- even Columbus, Ohio.

You Need to Apply Online...

Employers don't want paper resumes anymore, I was told. Most employers want potential hires to apply online.

I certainly don't have a problem with that -- especially since my resume and work samples are all online at my personal job-hunting Web site.

So I applied for jobs online, applying anywhere and everywhere I could think of.

I applied for more jobs at PNC that I can count. Even if the jobs were only remotely interesting, I applied for them. I even opened a checking account at PNC to improve my odds of getting a job.

I paid a visit to a restaurant owned by my brother's friend, Jon, a mid-level executive at PNC who has worked at the bank's corporate headquarters for 17 years, to personally ask him if I could list him as a referral on my applications. "Sure!" he said. "Great!" I thought.

But despite the many applications I filled out online at pnc.com, I didn't get a single phone call or e-mail reply.

Other organizations that I applied to include Heinz Foods, National City bank, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, Carlow College, Blattner-Brunner and many, many others.

So why didn't I try for a job with one of the Pittsburgh area's smaller businesses? Here's why: with a few notable exceptions, most smaller companies are behind the curve regarding technology. My two and a half years at my last job, a smaller Pittsburgh-area organization, left me without the skills I needed to compete in today's workforce.

I really don't want to play a constant game of catch-up for the rest of my life. I love education and I love learning, but I don't want to spend ALL of my free time online or in the classroom learning important job skills that I could -- and should -- be learning on the job.

Thinking Outside of the Box

Over the last few days, I’ve been reflecting on some of the other ways I’ve tried to find a job here in the ‘burgh. Here's one; I'll share some others in a subsequent post.

I was pretty proud of this particular job hunting idea: the Financial Education Consortium of Southwestern Pennsylvania was holding a Financial Education Fair at the Convention Center downtown. It was free, so why not attend, do a little networking, make some connections?

I was excited, because my last job had been at one of Pittsburgh’s financial institutions, so I had the experience I needed.

True, it wasn’t a ‘traditional’ job fair, but frankly I hadn’t had any luck with those -- and besides, job hunters need to think outside of the box, right?

So, with a handful of personal business cards tucked into my wallet and small stack of resumes in my attaché, I headed for the Financial Education Fair. Stopping at each table, I schmoozed and networked and exchanged business cards with the representatives of the banks, nonprofit organizations and other entities that were in attendance.

At the end of the day, I left, cheered at the prospect of getting a new job.

I followed up with an email to each person from whom I had received a business card, briefly reiterating some of the issues we had discussed at the fair, and attached the link to my resume.

I never heard back from a single person.