I am broke

christaitfife

Hello! I am going to sound harsh here - but you need to get over yourself. I have two degrees and applied for job after job getting nowhere. I ended up ditching my CV and writing a 'bare bones' one missing out most of my education - I applied to work in a factory and got the job.

Now, I hate the job with a passion, and get paid minimum wage - and I am still broke. But I am better off than I was. The problem with employers nowa-days is that they want experience over education. They don't want to take a risk, they want someone who has already proven themselves. In many sectors there are plenty of these types of people around.

As I said, I hate the job, but I am grateful for it. it beats sitting around all day feeling sorry for myself.

I recommend you dumb-down your CV and find a job that pays anything and get working. At the very least you will have social interactions and not need to pay heating and electricity bills through the day. Start up your own business and do some free-lance work in your spare time. Re-write your CV (leaving off the low-paid job) adding your 'self employment'. After a year, you will have 12 months legitimate experience in your chosen field for your CV. You may live hand-to-mouth until then, but at least you will end up in a better place by then than you are right now.

How to find an easy to get job (my experience): find out where all the East Europeans are going to work - turn up and ask for a job. i was pretty much hired on the spot and seen as an assed being British. You will find that these migrants are, mostly, not taking British jobs but taking jobs Brits are not applying for.

Takeaway_Addict

christaitfife wrote: »

Hello! I am going to sound harsh here - but you need to get over yourself. I have two degrees and applied for job after job getting nowhere. I ended up ditching my CV and writing a 'bare bones' one missing out most of my education - I applied to work in a factory and got the job.

Now, I hate the job with a passion, and get paid minimum wage - and I am still broke. But I am better off than I was. The problem with employers nowa-days is that they want experience over education. They don't want to take a risk, they want someone who has already proven themselves. In many sectors there are plenty of these types of people around.

As I said, I hate the job, but I am grateful for it. it beats sitting around all day feeling sorry for myself.

I recommend you dumb-down your CV and find a job that pays anything and get working. At the very least you will have social interactions and not need to pay heating and electricity bills through the day. Start up your own business and do some free-lance work in your spare time. Re-write your CV (leaving off the low-paid job) adding your 'self employment'. After a year, you will have 12 months legitimate experience in your chosen field for your CV. You may live hand-to-mouth until then, but at least you will end up in a better place by then than you are right now.

How to find an easy to get job (my experience): find out where all the East Europeans are going to work - turn up and ask for a job. i was pretty much hired on the spot and seen as an assed being British. You will find that these migrants are, mostly, not taking British jobs but taking jobs Brits are not applying for.

Seems good common sense by employers rather than being a problem...

evillhomer

Christa you are not harsh, the society is.
Conclusions :
- Improve my English ( I wrote with capital letter - ok daytona0 ? )
- Keep applying
- Get any job at the moment
I consider this thread CLOSED.
Thank you all

gettingready

Evillhomer - I live in East London too, my current contract is in Reading. For the first 2 weeks I was commuting but now took a room there on a Mon-Fri basis and come home at weekends.

IT or not, bad English is off putting to potential employers so work on this please.

In my native language one would write "You" with capital letter as sign of respect, in English the "I" is always capital letter but not "you" etc etc.. pay attention to differences between your native language and English and.... learn from those. People mean well - offering you advise here.

All the best

[Deleted User]

Takeaway_Addict wrote: »

Seems good common sense by employers rather than being a problem...

Yup - we hardly ever hire fresh graduates, as they have a habit of requiring some experience then vanishing to another job. This is after we've spent a lot of time training them.

Experienced staff tend to stick around longer and not need that initial training.

makeyourdaddyproud

ringo_24601 wrote: »

Your grammar is appalling and reads like 'inglish' I think spelling mistakes are more tolerable online than poor grammar

I work in IT, and have done for 10 years. Have you used Linkedin? This is used by loads of IT recruiters now.

You are coming across as an 'IT generalist'; no one hires those. Find a speciality and target it. At least be a C++ coder, or a SQL guy, or something..

Even C++ coders are dying breed and rightly so. Write 10 lines and spend the next 10 weeks debugging it because some pratt think he's good with polymophism. "Oh ... damn ... it wasn't marked as virtual (in week 10)"

SQL guru? Good, but errrr ... where's your 5 years experience of dotnet to go with it? "Oh, I never needed that before" - "Sorry, you're no use here".

The problem with IT is IT itself. Some spotty kid in US with wealthy Silicon Valley connections has a hissy fit and suddenly wants to change the technology (only just learnt of course), for something equally horrendous and pointlessly complex, rendering many good people (with good English, I might add), instantly redundant.

Leave now. Learn something more self affirming.

daytona0

evillhomer wrote: »

I was wondering if changing the city will help me. Manchaster or Liverpool ? I've heard that people are different there. Any opinions?

Do you mean Manchester? :rotfl:

No but seriously, quadruple check any CV and cover letter you send off to an employer. If you apply for a job in "Manchaster" then your CV is going to end up in the bin. Silly little things like that may cost you a job! Gotta be harsh to be kind sometimes dude!

patman99 wrote:

I will just say this to all those who are knocking the op's English. Do you not think that any prospective employer would not notice the foriegn name on the cv and in the email communications and realise that the person may well not be from this Country ?.

Put yourself in their shoes and imagine what it must be like to up sticks and decamp to another Country where the languge is different just to be able to earn enough money to be able to live.

Yes of course, BUT IT work (coding etc) involves a lot of typing. He may be a native English speaker but just be weak at English (subject/skills), and he may be gifted in IT. Or he could be foreign. What it boils down to is whether the employer thinks that his poorer (it is absolutely fine for communicating to native speakers) English skills will hinder his ability to do the job. At the very least it shows that OP doesn't really want to portray a confident and positive image of himself. That is why I was harsh, because he has more of a chance simply by ensuring that silly mistakes aren't included in the first impression stage.

evillhomer

daytona0 I have a feeling that you live in Manchester, am I right?

szam_

I live near Manchester, and also work in IT.

I am also a generalist, or I was before this job. I now work mostly on consultancy aspects, or at least at the moment and will be getting more involved with the overall package sold on larger contracts rather than configuration or setup of software as I used to, but I would like to be more technical, too.

I think the problem you have is that you have the mentality that you can do it all. Writing an app or program at home is all well and good (I know, I'm writing something for myself), but larger companies also use best practice, have tonnes of procedures to follow, and most won't let you be creative with source code or update any code outside of the scope until you've established yourself and are trusted. You have to do it as they say until that point. I'm at the point where I'll configure a solution in all sorts of weird ways because I know how to work around things that may not have been designed for a specific purpose, and am now often tasked with coming up with working solutions to perhaps obscure problems or requirements.

People have come in to where I work thinking they know it all and are gods gift, one was chucked out after a couple of months, and a couple more we are still cleaning up the mess (botch jobs, essentially) to this day.

I think, whilst you can be confident, you also need to know to be humble and accept you will need to learn new technologies. I went for an interview a few months ago and they threw JavaScript at me, I didn't know anything about it, gave it a go, sorta got it right, but I also picked up feedback on it and learned a thing or two about the syntax I was misinterpreting. I'm now slowly building up my skill in it to apply it as a solution to things I wouldn't have been able to do previously.

I too, am quick to pick up new skills, I think it's key to being in software in IT because things are always moving so you need to keep up with the game. But I phrase this as quick or easy to adapt and understand new technologies, not "I can learn anything quickly" as that sort of phrasing comes off as cocky - not necessarily the type of personality you may want touching your code.

daytona0

evillhomer wrote: »

daytona0 I have a feeling that you live in Manchester, am I right?

near Liverpool as a matter of fact.