Poll: Worst Age to Get a Job

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I've never had a problem with a job interview when I was young. If I was in any way qualified for the job, I could make that interviewer picture me in the job and want to hire me. Until I married a sailor.

We moved four times in the first two years we were married. I worked as a phone operator, a receptionist, a clerk at a Joann Fabrics. I had a job at an office furniture place where my boss cursed me daily. I promised myself that as soon as we got to Norfolk, I would have a real job. Until we moved to Norfolk.

No one was hiring. No one was especially hiring anyone with an incomplete college degree. My husband deployed and I despaired -- in every sense of that word.

I think of that feeling every time we hear from a military spouse who is having trouble finding a job. I remember that hopelessness and I don't want any spouse to ever feel that way. That is why we are working on new spouse employment articles. We aren't interested in the basics, but the specifics.

So the longer I work for Military.com, the more I realize that military spouses have very different experiences of joblessness depending, I think, on age.

My theory about mil spouses and employment is that we are perfectly capable of finding hourly employment (if it is available in our area).  We can read the sign at Starbucks. We are perfectly capable of filling out the application at Home Depot. A call center job is not hard to find.

Instead, things get rocky when you want other things when it comes to employment. When we listen to our readers, we start hearing the same stories over and over. We hear from young college educated spouses who have trouble getting a job because they have no experience beyond a couple of internships and no contacts in the area. We hear from highly educated spouses like lawyers and doctors and dentists and Ph.Ds who can't get hired much less get tenure. We hear from stay-at-home moms who have done all the volunteering that they have been told to do over the years, but still have trouble finding work.

But anecdote is not data. Just because we hear a few stories doesn't mean that these things are a pattern. So please let us know by taking our poll.  In what stage did you have the most trouble finding work?

 

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