Just a rant because I don't have an outlet and I'm about to loose my mind, so just ignore if you don't care about people with terrible grammar moaning on 🤣 But I know that many people here will relate. Also I'm based in the UK for context.
So, I graduated a year before the pandemic, only doing a month of my art masters degree before realising that this was perhaps a really misguided decision for my future, given the state of the world. As you can imagine after this and also being a student for so long, I only have a history of short term temp positions. Trying to find a job one year out from graduating is hard enough, but when everyone is locked down at home it's even harder. My last job was with Test and Trace, but we were all dropped at a moments notice a few weeks before Christmas, when noone was hiring!
After a depressing Christmas, sick of temp roles and never wanting to be back in this position again. I took the opportunity to retrain with a government schemes in Tech, who at the time was crying out for people. This took around 6 months overall. However I think others must have had the same idea, because by the time the courses had finished, I was going into a completely over saturated market! But after 2 anxious months of searching sick of living off nothing, I finally landed a job and signed a contract. Incredibly excited that I'd managed to turn my life around, proud to tell my friends and family…Unfortunately, I've basically been ghosted by the company since, waiting for a start date after signing a contract.
So now I'm just applying for basically anything and I've stopped applying for career jobs, feeling hopeless that I'll ever have job security. Only now I have to contend with the prejudice of being out of work for comming up to a year and employers and recruiters just seeing me as a benefits scrounger. Anyone that knows me knows that I'm ambitious, I work hard, and that this couldn't be further from the truth. I'm sick of this narrative of people on benefits essentially wanting to be there and not interested in working (not that working is the pinnacle of life), it's so demoralising to hear when you are trying your best to get by. Especially when the amount of money that you have to try and live on is just pure no thrills poverty. Feel like I should put accountancy on my CV, with the amount of fine detail I've had to assess my pennies with during this cost of living crisis. This kind of thinking, actively pushes skilled workers who've fallen on hard times out of the jobs market and leads to so much hopelessness.
I'm so lucky and privileged to have a supportive partner and family that have gotten me through, but dear God I can't wait to have a secure job and be out of this hell. My long standing mental health conditions are honestly the best they have been in years, due to work that I've put into lots of therapy. Yet situationally, this is bloody dire comming up to winter. It really helps me to empathise with people who end up in this cycle for years on end. Now every time I see some shitty poverty porn content placing stereo types on unemployed people, I'm incredibly close to loosing my marbles.