WTF!!!!! I am educated and the head of my department in NL. For some reason it’s not good enough for the employers in NS. I have applied for jobs which meet my qualifications for the last year and nothing. If they contact me and find out I’m in my 20’s and not 40’s it seems I’m overlooked. Maybe I’m not meant to have a job in NS??????? —Give the Younger Generation an Opportunity
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2012.
Did they tell you this is why you were turned down? Or are you merely assuming this is why?
Oh, my duckie…don’t be contrary! 🙂
Some reason you can’t work in NL?, I agree with Hell Ella might this just be an assumption.
The reason i say this is because they would never admit it. That’s age discrimination and illegal. So unless this company is REALLY retarded, op can only ASSUME this is why he/she got turned down. And maybe it’s not. Maybe something else? Lots of employers are trolling facebook OP. Got anything on there you didn’t hide well enough?
You may not like it but you might want to consider it.
“hell ella”? This nickname suits me.
I know how you feel, I’ve suffered from the same prejudice. I’m usually surrounded by people at least 10 years my senior in my job. They look at you funny at first, but eventually if you’re as qualified as you say you are then they’ll warm up to you. I just don’t what advice to give you about actually getting the job besides, ‘Keep trying!’
Im one of the youngest people at my work… actually i am the youngest but I have the skills and nail the interview and I’ve never had a problem getting a job around the city because of age… idk just me!
The thing about Halifax is it’s kind of an old people city, so you are competing against older more accomplished people.
It is rough out here for everyone right now though, my dad is in his 50s and has 3 degrees, he’s looking for work right now.
“Maybe I’m not meant to have a job in NS???????”
We’ll tell ya when you’re older, son. Now, run along and play.
And no going to the store. You always buy junk and end up ruining your supper. It’s pork chop night tonight.
Halifax is still growing out of “who you know, not what you know” kind of employment. Sucks, OP. I’m always 10-20 years junior of almost everyone I work around and it takes a bit of proving before they accept that I know what I’m talking about.
Also, try making some contacts with potential employers in advance of them posting an ad… AKA network! When they finally do post an ad, if your name is mentioned they will probably have at least a vague recollection of you and it never hurts to have insiders!
Good idea longwalker. I’ve noticed that a lot of companies might need to hire someone, but they’re too busy to post an ad anywhere. Try making in-person visits to a company you’re interested in, it shows initiative and it puts a face to a name for the company. Also, be really nice to the receptionist, it never hurts to have someone on your side
The ‘Old Boy’ network and nepotism are alive and well in Nova Scotia.
I know what you’re talking about OB, eccept it’s the opposite for me, I’m over qualified & too old.
i hear ya o.p., a buddy of mine, from dal, had the same trouble years ago. he had more education and smarts, than a lot of people applying for the job. he was turned down, basically because he had no experience in the field he was looking for. the field, was oceanography. he had marine biology under his belt, plus a whole shitload of other courses, and as i said, was smarter than most that applied for that job. he wound up working as a fucking cleaner at modern for about 4 years, then he up and moved to ontario. this might be your best route too.
mmmmm, drool, in best homer simpson look, pork chops.
why would you want to come work in nova scotia right now?
..lord tunderin jebus bouy..maybe they don’t be needing a new head of screech sales 😉
“I am educated and at the head of my department in NL.”
The poster has, like so many others, confounded education and training. Education, properly conceived, has nothing to do with being “at the head” of any department. It concerns the cultivation of the mind in the context of a broadly conceived process of “enculturation.” Training, on the other hand, is concerned with the preparation for a job of one sort or another.
Although it is unlikely, perhaps the employers in NS are philosophers who have rejected your application on the basis of this egregious confounding of education and training. It has nothing to do with your age but everything to do with your mind, or more properly, your lack of one. I know that if I were an employer in NS, I’d reject your application as well.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!
Amen, OP. When I was in my 20’s I was ripped off so hard by an ageist employers. I was the youngest in the company and one day I opened an excel spreadsheet with everybody’s salaries on it.. I saw I was earning waaay less than everybody – even the receptionist who was like 40.. And half them old fucks didn’t know how to use a computer.
Hey Smeagol, that’s kinda like when you couldn’t get a job, even with all youur philosopher training.
Give him a break Monsieur, he got his extensive education at the University of South Los Angeles. Why he can’t find a comparable job in Nova Scotia is a real head scratcher.
I have heard employers in HRM spend more time looking, often their plans to hire are canceled before they hire.
RSVP
: troondon formosus (March 11, 11:29AM)
I think you may be on to something there, Troon. It would also explain how he became the head of department in NL. I think I’ll send a note to his boss there.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!
I’ve got the reverse problem…been in the same industry for a long time, it’s just in this one horse town there is only so many higher level jobs and lots of competition. Once the last kid is gone, I’m out of this place.
montrealman you’re making good sense. Unfortunately you’re telling people things they don’t want to hear 🙂
Education has very little to do with it. Unless you’re trained at the trade level where you’re working as soon as you walk into your first day of class.
Case in point. I know a girl who did some sort of graphic design degree or another at NSCAD. She is unemployed currently. I never did a degree in graphic design but because i’m a programmer and have been learning photoshop and illustrator and inDesign through osmosis at work, I have been able to take on a partial graphic design role at my job.
It sucks because to get that experience you have to get the job. But to get the job you have to have experience. So while you’re waiting for that first fish to come along, why don’t you do up a portfolio? volunteer? do work in the field you want to be in so you have something to put IN that portfolio? (I don’t know what you do OP so i’m throwing random ideas out there) and work the best job you can find in the meantime? You’re not above that.
It was the diapers that put them off…
Maybe you didn’t get the job because you reek of pompous douchebag at the interview..
RSVP
: eats_crayons (March 12,11:41AM)
“montrealman you’re making good sense. Unfortunately you’re telling people things they don’t want to hear…Education has very little to do with it.”
Well, thank you crayons. As far as I can recall your’s is the first comment where “Montrealman” and “good sense” appeared in the same sentence. However, I was – at least initially – puzzled by your claim that education has very little to do with it but, of course, it all comes down to what you mean by “it.”
If by “it” you mean simply getting a job then we agree with each other totally. Where education is understood as the cultivation of the mind, then it does have very little to do with, um, it.
However, in our contemporary culture, getting a job has assumed such an overwhelming importance in life
that the cultivation of the mind is seen, where it is seen at all, as simply a frill if not completely irrelevant to the main purpose of life. It is this blinkered, utilitarian, pragmatic and materialistic conception of human life which is my principal target in my “education vs. training” distinction. For many, perhaps most, life and work – no matter how banal and soul-destroying – are identical concepts.
Of course, everyone has to work at something in order to survive but work itself – where it is not the expression of the worker’s creative impulse, however minimal – should never be the guiding principle of life. Ideally, there should be a match between what one does for a living and that creative impulse but at the very least there should be the understanding that work does not define who one is.
Finally, there need not be that radical dichotomy between an education and training as one sees so often on this site. A BA in one of the Humanities, for example, can provide the foundation for the “generalist,” one who can then engage in any work but with an intellectual perspective denied to one who is simply “trained” in that work.
Remember, Immanuel Kant was a watchmaker.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE “QUALIFIED?”
“Ideally, there should be a match between what one does for a living and the creative impulse…” (Montrealman, March 12, 4:43PM)
Reflecting on his previous post and the relationship between what one works at – what one is qualified to do on the one hand and creativity on the other – Montrealman has articulated a new theory, one what he calls, “The Inverse Relationship Between ‘Being Qualified’ and Creativity.”
In a nutshell, it claims that after one ascends beyond the lowest forms of work – waiting on table, a shoe salesman, etc. in the service sector and ditch-digging, garbage collection, etc. in the manual labour sector where it makes no sense to talk about “being qualified” – it also makes no sense to talk about “being qualified” at the highest forms of work which place the premium on creativity – the artist, the inventor, the imaginative teacher, the philosopher, and so on.
This means that “being qualified” applies only to that middle-range of occupations where the routines are explicitly specifiable and where one has given evidence of one sort or another that one is competent in those routines. Consequently, it makes no sense, in respect to any particular job, to say that one is either “under qualified” or “over-qualified.” There is, of course, a range of jobs in this routine category extending from driving a bus to flying a passenger plane but, in any case, to be “qualified” here applies to those jobs where the routine is, unlike creative pursuits, explicitly specifiable.
A pleasure as always.
Cheerio!