oh man. yeah. Right in the depth of the dot-com bust, I was in a real bad place. Deep, deep layoffs, then many people quit. So yeah, it was really stressful, and my supervisor was, uh, kinda crazy, which was exacerbated by the stress of running a company on 1/10th the usual staff. I was just a kid and I couldn't take it. I quit.
I was so messed up that I thought I didn't want to work in IT any more. I tried to get jobs in other fields; retail, even. It's harder than it sounds. Eventually my money and my credit ran out.
I got pretty lucky; I come from an I.T. family and my dad (a mid level IT manager at the university) was able to get me an interview with a guy who used to be one of his student interns who now had a fairly successful company, so I ended up working through the dot-com dump in my chosen field.
So yeah. some advice:
1. use all your contacts to their fullest extent.
Seriously, I know it feels weird to do it, but ask your family and all your friends if they know people who have the ability to hire someone with your skillset. probably 80% of the full time jobs I've gotten (oddly, only maybe 10% of the contract gigs I've gotten) came through knowing someone.
2. if you want, sure, apply to lower-skilled jobs. But don't stop applying to jobs in your field.
Unemployment in the unskilled sectors, at least in America, is ridiculously high. This is much less true of the more skilled sectors. Also, working a unskilled job, while it can get you out of the parent's house, still counts as unemployment as far as getting your next skilled job, which brings me to 3, which may be my most important point:
3. build a resume excuse for the unemployment.
It's extremely difficult to get a skilled job after a long period of unexplained unemployment. Most of the time, resumes from people who are not currently working are simply round filed. Picking good people is /hard/ and picking bad people is /expensive/ so hr people tend to behave a bit like sheep and mutual fund managers; if nobody else wants you, the reasoning goes, there is probably something wrong with you.
This is where your side business comes in.
You now work full-time for your side business. Consulting, web design, what have you. Doesn't matter if you actually pay the bills working at the piggly wiggly, as far as your resume and your on-line identity is concerned, you are running your own company.
This works best if you actually do work on your personal company. I would advise giving your services away for free, but from experience, it's actually often easier to sell your services than to give them away (don't be ashamed to accept below market pay if you can't get market pay. Of course, try to get market pay, but there is a 'shadow IT' industry that pays little more than retail... don't be ashamed to work there if you need to; it might not pay much but it does count as IT on the resume.)
I was so messed up that I thought I didn't want to work in IT any more. I tried to get jobs in other fields; retail, even. It's harder than it sounds. Eventually my money and my credit ran out.
I got pretty lucky; I come from an I.T. family and my dad (a mid level IT manager at the university) was able to get me an interview with a guy who used to be one of his student interns who now had a fairly successful company, so I ended up working through the dot-com dump in my chosen field.
So yeah. some advice:
1. use all your contacts to their fullest extent.
Seriously, I know it feels weird to do it, but ask your family and all your friends if they know people who have the ability to hire someone with your skillset. probably 80% of the full time jobs I've gotten (oddly, only maybe 10% of the contract gigs I've gotten) came through knowing someone.
2. if you want, sure, apply to lower-skilled jobs. But don't stop applying to jobs in your field.
Unemployment in the unskilled sectors, at least in America, is ridiculously high. This is much less true of the more skilled sectors. Also, working a unskilled job, while it can get you out of the parent's house, still counts as unemployment as far as getting your next skilled job, which brings me to 3, which may be my most important point:
3. build a resume excuse for the unemployment.
It's extremely difficult to get a skilled job after a long period of unexplained unemployment. Most of the time, resumes from people who are not currently working are simply round filed. Picking good people is /hard/ and picking bad people is /expensive/ so hr people tend to behave a bit like sheep and mutual fund managers; if nobody else wants you, the reasoning goes, there is probably something wrong with you.
This is where your side business comes in.
You now work full-time for your side business. Consulting, web design, what have you. Doesn't matter if you actually pay the bills working at the piggly wiggly, as far as your resume and your on-line identity is concerned, you are running your own company.
This works best if you actually do work on your personal company. I would advise giving your services away for free, but from experience, it's actually often easier to sell your services than to give them away (don't be ashamed to accept below market pay if you can't get market pay. Of course, try to get market pay, but there is a 'shadow IT' industry that pays little more than retail... don't be ashamed to work there if you need to; it might not pay much but it does count as IT on the resume.)