2:51 a.m. - 2002-11-21
Stats and Careers
Phew! Well, the lady Venus moves forward in the heavens tonight. She started retrograde (backwards) on October 10 mid-Scorpio. The lady represents all things feminine, relationships, public affairs, and finances. So in whatever house (section) of one's astrological chart she was traveling, one might have noticed some lost ground, bumpy ground - or no ground at all. She was in my tenth house - career. What a surprise. Now that she's back on track I hope that some work comes back into my life. I know I'm doing my thing with the resumes, but I'll take any kind of help I can get.
I talked with my supervisor this morning. Just passed on the information I had gathered yesterday, while talking with some past co-workers. He seemed to have moved forward quite a bit with this project. Right now he seems to be evaluating whether there is enough work to warrant a bid and the admin time that will be necessary to sustain it. Something that lasts only a few days isn't really economically viable for the company, I guess. However, I really don't care about the length of the assignment just so long as some income is coming in.
When I first started back into the workforce nearly ten years ago, after 17 years of being an at home mom, I went through a temp agency. Short assignments lasting anywhere from a couple of days to several months or even a year. One reason I chose that path was that I really had no idea what jobs were out there anymore, nor did I know what changes had occurred in the corporate culture. In addition, when working on curriculum committees at the high school level as a volunteer, I had the chance to work with a really knowledgeable statistician with Canada Manpower. There had been an analysis by their department published, looking at workplace trends and the growth or demise of certain careers. When the school board bureaucrats were using it to determine what courses should be offered in the high schools in our area, we parents became quite concerned. The "growth" jobs they cited didn't jive with what residents were finding when they actually went job hunting.
I was asked to talk with the manpower people to try to determine the reasons for the disparities. Remember my essay on lies, damned lies, and statistics? Well this was more of the same. Only in this case, Manpower had published a companion guide for interpreting the raw data they had collected - the bureaucrats just hadn't bothered to read it before they started making their assumptions, nor did they tell us of its existence. For example, hairdressing was seen as a phenomenal growth area for women. (We won't talk about stereotypes tonight - promise) The raw numbers of new hires was seen as a good indicator for offering the course. However, the fine print noted that the amount of hiring was due to a very high attrition rate - people quitting. Reason? Poor working conditions, low wages, and low job satisfaction. What was happening was that workers were assuming that if they moved to another worksite the conditions would improve - they didn't. Therefore, people were moving horizontally (same stuff, different salon)in the trade every few months. That meant inflated hire rates, not lots of positions and not a good career choice for most people, because of industry conditions. The statistician went through several different examples with me, each with a slightly different interpretation of the data, for several careers. The results came a lot closer to the reality our residents were finding in the real work world.
It's a very long explanation for why I thought a temp agency might be the most efficient way to figure out what skills I really needed to add to my repertoire, or which I should highlight on a resume. A lot of the local authors who published articles on career paths had fallen into the same trap as the school board bureaucrats, so their analysis wasn't useful. Sometimes it would even have been a detriment to my family's economic survival because they recommended chasing after courses or accreditation that wasn't what employers really wanted. I also wanted to find something for myself that had some level of personal satisfaction in it and that would pay enough to allow me to raise the boys on my own. I knew I'd be working for a long time, so to me it was worth the ambiguity that is part of temping if I could find a niche that suited me in the long term. I would still rather stay where I am now but I sent in a resume to the temp agency that helped me in the beginning today. I hope my supervisor can give me a reason to wait, but I'll have to take something else on soon.
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