Somebody’s Lying – Big Business and their Unreasonable Preferences

Is it just me or is it that every time you go to find a job they have this exhaustive list of “desired skills” and “required experience.” If you are like me before you look at what the job functions are and what you’ll be responsible for doing if hired, you go right to the bottom of the job post where the company sits on its soapbox and asks for all of these specific skills – and then you rule yourself either in or out. It like the job hunt process has become nothing more than a technical, jargony information-rich, search engine where if you don’t fit the desired qualifications you might as well save your time and energy putting together a cover letter and tailoring your resume. Sucks out all the fun in the job-hunt process, right? So then what, we all know the story – you close that tab and you go back to the search engine (other tab) and scroll down to see if something else might match your skills and experience. The job hunt has become a crapshoot.

 

We’ve heard all the issues about the recession and the lack of jobs and also the convoluted campaign language about the demand for highly skilled workers and the lack thereof, but it’s time for somebody to come clean. We all know that jobs that pay adequate salaries are a dime a dozen especially to the masses who don’t have a college degree nor the social capital to tap into these exclusively information-rich networks. Let’s spotlight LinkedIn for example. Now as someone who is active on LinkedIn with a 100% complete profile, I cannot help but notice that LinkedIn represents a new model for finding jobs and how complex this process has become. No longer are the days of the basic application submitted to a company after looking at the classifieds or some simple search engine, now we have a fully developed process that requires strategy and relationships just for an entry level position. Thus, I go back to original point – somebody is lying. All of a sudden (well since like the 80s) the income gap has become solely based on education and training because companies need “highly skilled labor.” How you need to have a masters degree to look at documents, analyze them and present your thoughts on what could be done next is beyond me. I would say that certain fields (i.e. engineering, healthcare, technology, finance) require specialized training but the other sectors probably don’t. People running those sectors didn’t have oodles of degrees behind their names two decades ago. Now the change? It’s funny because most people that I talk to say their jobs are “boring”, I wonder why. Maybe if I sat at a desk all day and only used about 50% of my brain because the job wasn’t challenging enough, I’d be bored too. Sound familiar? But wait, what about all the debt that you had to take on to get those degrees and that “special training.” Sounds like a market to me; supply and demand (basic high school economics).

So back to my thoughts on big business and their “unreasonable” preferences, I’d actually venture to say that this is all some communications tactic to incentivize people to get a higher education and of course take out a bunch of loans to finance it. It doesn’t take a dummy to recognize that corporations have run rampant in their “overseas” work and that technology is putting a lot of people out of jobs. It seems like corporations need to reinvest in human capital and big business needs to reign it in, before you know our society bottoms out and the income gap becomes too wide and irreversible but that’s just my own thought…some would say that it already has.

Corey Matthews

Corey Matthews is an avid reader, self-proclaimed movie critic and “part-time” socialite from South Central Los Angeles. He holds both a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Psychology and a Master of Arts in Education from the University of California - Los Angeles, where he was both a student leader and researcher. On any given day Corey can be found interacting with awkward strangers at inconvenient times, participating in his new media classroom (Facebook, Twitter & Google) and talking about race and politics with his friends. He’s fascinated with exploring the meaning of life and is a proponent of self-love, growth, empowerment and understanding.

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