My 55 year old mom works at Target. She spent most of her adult life in the aviation industry, working an extremely niche position that doesn’t exist anywhere else because her boss essentially created the position for her. However, she still acquired a lot of experience and valuable skills in this position that can absolutely be applied to adjacent positions in the industry. In 2021 she got laid off, and has tirelessly searched for a new job, even looking at sales, but prospective employers won’t hire her because her previous experience was too specific, she spent most of her career at this one job, and (my guess) she’s older.
My mom is a really hard worker and she’s humbly accepted this undesired change in her career trying to make the best of it. She has been working at target for 2 years with the intent to go into management. She’s spoken with her managers about this countless times, worked every job they’ve asked, taken as many shifts as possible, doing all the grunt work so that they will put her on the bench to become a manager of some sort, which they’ve told her they would do.
Well, they’ve been bread crumbing her this whole time telling her that the higher ups are noticing her and just wait, but at this point, I don’t think they have any intentions of promoting her. In fact, she says they tend to hire college grads into the team lead positions that she’s been working her ass off for.
My dad is much older with Parkinson’s and an array of health issues and can’t work, so she is bearing the weight of paying for all of their needs on minimum wage and no benefits. It’s all just so unfair. She seems to have accepted that she won’t be able to re-enter the corporate world. Any advice that I can pass along to her? Anyone work at Target that can shed some light on this?