Life Changes

So what does one do after 21 plus years at one company with a couple diplomas under your belt and lots of experience and a layoff notice in your hand? The emotions that flood your mind are amazing. The ideas of why me, what went wrong, what do I do now, where do I turn, am I too old to start over, will anyone hire me, are there any jobs to be had without going back to the beginning?

All these and more are what I have been working through since I found out I was being laid off from my work. Here I am with in a very short period of early retirement and I can not do that because i am being laid off. Here I am on the down hill side of things concerning employment and now I am or will be shortly unemployed.

Resumes are harder than ever to write. Much different than when I first entered the job market. Then it was one page only and main bullets and nice expensive paper to print it on. Now it is no bold, or different size types. It can be more than one page but not more than three. The biggest change however is that a real person more than likely will never touch your resume unless it is chosen by a computer for closer review. And how is it chosen? By key words. You must have those key words they are looking for or you will never even be looked at.

Kind of funny how that works. I know of a job that was written for a certain person they wanted to hire. But they had to post it so everyone had a chance to apply. They put out the job rec and told him to apply. His resume was not even amongst the final resumes chosen by the computer. Realize the job rec was written to match his credentials because they wanted to hire him. But he did no use the proper key words the computer used as filters. Thus he was not chosen and they had to go have him resubmit and rewrite his resume so it would be picked up by the computer.

I understand companies receive thousands of resumes every day especially in these hard times. I know they need a way to weed through all of those and get down to something they can use. But I am also positive they are missing out on many good candidates who would be perfect for the job who maybe did not use the exact key words that would have gotten them picked. How sad to rely on the computer to do your work for you rather than as a tool to help you do your work. But we are not going to go that direction any further in this post as that is a story unto it self.

So here I sit thinking back before this job when I was unemployed and poor and trying to raise a family. Now it is just me and my wife as the kids are grown and gone. We have money in the bank and I have more education and experiance than before. That is not hard since I had none way back then. But I also did not have a large house payment either.

Well, I will write more as things move along. It should be interesting to see where I fall when all is said and done. Later..