"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." ~ Mark Twain

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

On the job hunt...

So... the job hunt is well under way and I can really only comment one thing: where are all the jobs? Isn't America the land of opportunity? So WHERE are the opportunities? What ever happened to the American dream, with a great 9-5er and the white picket fence? Is it not time for the economic crisis to be OVER already?

As I'm sure you've guessed, I have come up empty-handed. My daily search of sites such as Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, Craigslist.com, and ProZ.com have offered nothing more than a sinking feeling in my stomach everytime I see the "no matching job postings" glaring back at me like a bright red Do not enter sign. In my close to three weeks of searching I have had ONE blinking interview, which in all reality was a no-go before I even arrived at the office. I mean driving 40 miles each morning through "lovely" LA traffic for a job that at best in the same industry as what I plan to do permanently, and then driving another 40 miles home down the 405 into the heart of the 5 South/91 West traffic, well, I had a momentary lapse of judgement, that's all.

Truthfully, its disheartening waking up each morning and browsing through the lack of new job postings online. I knew it would never be easy, there are entirely too many (non-qualified) translators in the industry, but I guess I hadn't really prepared myself for the complete void that I now find in the job sector. In-house translator positions are not very common place in the States it would seem, and turning an established Language Service Provider away from their go-to Spanish translator is no easy feat, I would venture to say, even impossible. I know this because I worked in an LSP and I saw how hard it was for a beginning translator to get any work.

I guess as with everything, experience gets you what you want, but how do we get experience if no one will take a chance on a recent graduate? How do I get experience without work?

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