Job Hunting

So I leave work early today to go over and look for a new job at a job fair downtown. The best phrase I can think of to describe it is: disappointing. The first one of these things I went to coming out a college a few years ago had a couple hundred companies (2 typed pages in magnifying glass size print). This one had 28. The entire exhibitor list, plus all of the local colleges, save UCF, was on one typed page that was in type big enough to be read by the nearly blind.

Not that the job market is bad around here. I just saw a middle age guy in a suit and carrying a resume (which tells me he has more than a "got out of high school alive" education) getting excited about a $7.65/hour part-time pool tech job with no benefits. But I have got to find something. The job I'm in now doesn't cut it in any way, shape, or form.

One of the jobs I did apply for was as an advertising account rep with the paper. So on the way home (I have to meet with the plumber this afternoon, so I made it a long one by going to the job fair), I indulged in a bit of solo role-playing. Don't ask me why, but for whatever reason, when I'm driving alone, I role play what conversations might go like and I start to work on overcoming various objections or problems before they ever come up.

So today, as I'm puttering along, I'm role-playing a conversation about advertising with a friend who owns a store locally. And as I'm going along, I start trying to pitch how the internet would work into a comprehensive sales plan and to make it understandable, for both good and bad points, to a small business owner who doesn't particularly care for technology.

And then it hits me.

When the internet first really hit the scene, people raved about how it was going to put traditional retailers out of business. Bricks were out; clicks were in. The came the dot bust and suddenly bricks were back and the internet was put back on the back burner.

But I think a lot of people, myself included (Yeah, I know. I'm late to the party again.), missed the true revolution the internet created. It wasn't on a macro, or enterprise, level. Instead, the revolution was on the level of the individual.

Most big companies survived the internet threat without a real problem. They were able to restructure and to counter the threat. They streamlined and went on with life.

But at the level of the individual, the internet took out whole swaths of the employment realm. The restructuring and streamlining of the big companies in response to the internet for the most part wiped out the middle management as we know it. The ability of email and multimedia to transmit vast quantities of manipulative data lets the higher ups create their own middle management reports in minutes.

The result is a very flat organization with lots of low wage people at the bottom and a few high wage people at the top with almost no one in between. Yet our colleges and universities business schools continue to train students to enter the workforce in a middle management capacity.

The end result is the chaos I witnessed today. Individuals have not adjusted to the new paradigm. Middle management, the "home" many were hoping to fit into in the workplace, doesn't really exist today. Companies are driven by the market to provide the same or better services at lower prices. At the same time, they're driving the market to demand those lower prices by really only hiring for the lower wage positions. The cycle of lower, lower, lower has begun.

Eventually, as companies readjust to the new quantity of information available, they will eventually grow back into needing the middle management types again. Until then, this is going to be a really tough job market for me.