A TV programme in 2011 was a turning point for me. The programme followed a familiar format. There were four participants, all facing similar difficult situations. They were shown struggling on their own; a guru offered advice; they acted on it. When the credits rolled a voiceover updated us on their situations a few months later. This is an account of what happened as I watched the programme, and what I did as a result. First I'll describe the programme itself and how I responded to it. Later I'll write about the action I took, progress so far, and what may happen next. The name of the programme could influence your response to what follows, so I won't name it yet.
We were introduced to four main characters. My heart went out to them. I have struggled with similar situations at various points in my life. I could tell you those stories, but the details are not important here. What matters is that you know I am qualified to comment on this subject, and could give you ample evidence should you so wish. If you are facing redundancy, or have been struggling for some time to reposition yourself in the world of work, or you are supporting someone you love in that situation, or you are seeing relationships crumble under the relentless onslaught of failure to find work, then be assured that we could talk easily and truthfully together from areas of deep shared experience.
I've “served my apprenticeship” in suffering and surviving unemployment. I also know about its close companion, underemployment – that half-and-half world where you want a “proper job” but are scraping by on odds and ends of part-time work, casual work, and occasional respites of full-time, but short-term, “real employment”. I know it from my own experiences and from the experiences of people close to me. Unlike “book learning” that kind of first hand experience is not easily forgotten. What is happening to people now (as their expected futures are torn away from them) is triggering in me deep emotional responses and memories that I thought I had put behind me.
When the guru came and told the participants what they should be doing I was expectant. What deep knowledge and practical advice would he give? Would he say something that “had I known it at the time” would have turned my life around with far less of the pain and destructive power than I associate with redundancy, and unemployment?
I was deeply disappointed by his advice. I felt there was a serious mismatch between his perception of reality, and my experiences. In theory there was nothing wrong with what he was saying, but it didn't resonate with what I know. I must admit that to those who have not lived the reality his advice seemed plausible, and it was certainly delivered with confidence and apparent authority.
The solutions that he was advocating pointed to some hard truths which I fully acknowledge. They fit my own experiences. There were kernels of truth in his advice, but he made the solutions sound too easy. The problems were not spelt our quite as clearly as this in the programme, but his advice fitted this scenario, and suggest we are in agreement on the following points:
-
When you've been made redundant you need to accept that things have changed.
-
Don't be surprised if you never return to the life you have known up until now.
-
You're not likely to go back soon to the kind of work you've just lost through redundancy because, by definition, that's an area of work where employers are shedding labour.
-
The nearest chance of work may be hundreds, or even thousands of miles away.
-
You may well finish up doing something “further down the food chain”.
-
Your best chance could be to give up trying to find a job, and try to make one for yourself instead.
-
When you lose a job you lose much more than your pay packet.
-
Other losses include the myriad of things that make up a working life – a sense of identity, interactions with other people, structure and more besides.
-
Isolation and loss of structure can undermine your ability to find work.
-
Once you are out of work your confidence is likely to crumble, so things will get harder, not easier.
-
You need to learn to face repeated rejections.
-
Like it or not you have now entered the world of sales and marketing, a highly competitive world, and the product is you – either as you are now, or repackaged, or deconstructed and reconstructed with some extra ingredients.
-
Time is not on your side.
So if we were largely in agreement about the problem what was it about the guru that made me so angry? Was he the wrong target for my anger? Would my anger have been better directed at the programme as a whole? Where should I point the energy that anger gives me to do something about the problem itself?
Some of the guru's advice was certainly appropriate for some people in some situations of job seeking, but it is not as simple as “Do this and you'll get a job. Don't do it and you won't”. I felt sorry for the participants who were being directed to jump through hoops. I was angry that the advice they were following might be pushing some viewers down pathways that would lead nowhere, and could even make things worse for them. I felt the guru was trivialising the enormity of the challenge facing the participants. That was bad news for them, bad news for anyone in their situation, and, just as importantly, it was bad news for anyone not in the situation but trying to understand the realities.
I particularly remember the guru's advice to apply for jobs for which you are over qualified. In my job-seeking experience “over qualified” is another name for ”wrongly qualified”. It is as much of a disqualifying factor as “under qualified” or “lacking experience”. Why employ someone who is wrongly qualified when there are plenty of suitably qualified applicants queuing for the job? There are people of the right age, with correct qualifications and previous relevant experience who will see the job as a step up the ladder, and who will be committed to it. Why consider someone who may see it as a step down and a “temporary fix”? It can come as a surprise to find that isn't easy to get a job for which you are overqualified. It's a shock to be repeatedly rejected for jobs you know you could do easily, and you're desperate to have. Rejection at that level only adds to your distress as a job seeker.
In my time it was easier for women to expunge evidence of being overqualified than it was for men because of women's greater responsibilities for home and family. It was acceptable for women to drop in and out of the labour market due to family commitments, so gaps in a woman's work history didn't seem to be quite a significant as they were in a man's. I don't know if that's still true.
I didn't find it easy, even as a women, to break through the overqualified barrier, but at one point in my life I did manage to get agency work that was a total mismatch with my previous experience and required none of my qualifications. I only offered character references, instead of job references. I did have some family responsibilities which I exaggerated. My employment history left out my studies and talked down jobs I had done, I claimed extended periods of “family responsibilities and caring” (implying they were now reduced and so I was re-entering the job market). Getting a job for which you are overqualified is not the easy option that the guru suggested.
The guru's advice was followed. The four participants obediently jumped through the hoops that were supposed to turn their lives around. The hoop jumping, of itself, did not seem to solve their problems. One of the people did find a temporary job for which he was overqualified (I wondered how much the TV cameras had helped to open doors for that opportunity). The job didn't last much longer than the TV programme. Perhaps they saw the chance to increase their visibility as the best option they had, having tried and failed in their more mainstream attempts to find work. The TV programme was a possible doorway to new opportunities and was obviously a gamble they were willing to take when they agreed to share their stories with a wide audience. At least they found each other and knew they were not alone.
TV visibility was a high risk strategy and I hope it paid off, though I doubt it. The participants shared their struggles, disappointments, vulnerabilities and the crumbling of their confidence. One of the “rules” of job-seeking is to “think positively”. After all “The best way to get a job is to have a job.” and the next best thing to having a job is to be perfectly confident that you are about to get one. This means that you are increasingly living a lie, and trying to hide how you really feel from your friends, family, and anyone in your network who might hear something that could lead to the possibility of work.
During the programme all the participants confessed about their dwindling confidence and growing hopelessness and desperation. One showed a heap of unsuccessful applications he had sent in. He was facing a crunch point. He and his wife were struggling financially. She had a part-time job, and he had no work at all. They didn't have enough savings to continue paying the mortgage. If he couldn't find a job soon their home was at risk.
Under the interviewer's sympathetic (or manipulative) questioning as to whether the situation had reduced him to tears, he agreed it had. Later the interviewer shared this nugget with the man's wife, asking if she knew. She didn't know. Until that moment his level of despair had been hidden from her, and probably from everyone else. I don't remember the interviewing prying into the state of their marriage but I wondered if participation in the programme had any impact on it, positive or negative. Unemployment can lead to the “break up of the happy home” in more ways than one.
The participants took a risk in being honest. When you are unemployed it is important to keep your feelings about your situation under control. You can't afford to be seen to loose confidence, to seem hopeless or appear as “damaged goods” in any way. I remember the perceptive comment of someone who interviewed me at a recruitment agency. She asked me about my previous work/redundancy history. Learning to give your story as positive a spin as possible is one of the challenges of job hunting. The interviewer's feedback was brutally honest, and took me completely by surprise. I knew I was nervous about the whole interview, but I thought I'd handled the redundancy issue okay. She said “You will never get a job while you come over as so angry.”
Deep rooted feelings, such as anger and the erosion of confidence are acknowledged as key issues in trying to get back to work. What did our guru have to offer on that front? He talked to all four participants together. It was in some big factory setting as I recall, presumably chosen to demonstrate his position, power and authority as a captain of industry. It certainly wasn't chosen as a neutral space where the participants would feel most comfortable and confident.
They were all standing, around him, as he gave his advice. It reminded me of school children brought before the head, to be ticked off and questioned about some misdeed or failure that has “let down the school”. Regarding confidence our guru berated one of the male participants for failing to look him in the eye. The guru pointed out to the participant, in a forthright manner, that he was looking down instead of meeting the guru's gaze and that this gave an unacceptable impression of lack of confidence. The guru demanded to be looked in the eye.
I wanted to shout out that the “unemployment problem” won't be solved by teaching people how to tell lies through their body language. Communication is enough of a problem already. Let's not make it even worse. Let's bring some honesty and realism into the situation.
I'm reminded of the Beatles lyric “Eleanor Rigby, wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door. Who is it for? All the lonely people....”. It's not only “the lonely people” who put on a brave face. People without a job have to do it too. As for the “lonely people theme” well, social isolation is another trap that opens when redundancy hits. For a start socialising costs money, even if it's only a cup of coffee. Socialising also requires that you feel sociable. If you can't even be yourself with your nearest and dearest, how can you face meetings with old friends who are still in work or with strangers? Besides which, strangers nearly always start a conversion with the question “What to you do?” It's no surprise that people who are out of work are often sliding into social isolation just at the time when social support is most needed.
Back to the programme. I heard the guru's advice. I watched the subsequent hoop jumping. I felt angry on behalf of the participants. I felt that somehow they had been betrayed, and that therefore all the people currently caught in the reality of “repositioning themselves in the world of work” had also been betrayed. The enormity of what people were facing had somehow been trivialised by the simplistic advice the participants had been given. There seemed a mismatch between what they were doing (according to the guru's instructions) and any genuine long-term solution to the problems they were trying to solve.
This unacknowledged mismatch made me angry. It's bad enough that people are suffering unemployment and all that goes with it. The situation of being unemployed isn't made any better by being given advice that doesn't match reality. Jumping through hoops that lead to nowhere just increase the experience of rejection and feelings of failure and futility. There has to be a better way.
I decided to do something about it, and what I decided, the first steps I took, and the story so far will be the subject of another post.