In Ireland, unemployment is over 12%.\u00a0 It\u2019s approaching 10% in the USA.\u00a0 It\u2019s estimated that the real rate (not the propaganda rate) in China is around 24%.\u00a0 It\u2019s global and it is indiscriminate.\u00a0 In Ireland, half of those unemployed were probably in the construction industry.\u00a0 A sizable percentage are office\/skilled workers.\u00a0 IT is being hit hard.\u00a0 I checked the jobs pages out of curiosity for Windows admins.\u00a0 Monster and a few of the Irish sites only had around 10-15 recent job adverts.\u00a0 Over half of those were for the same job (that internet gaming company on the southern part of the M50 I talked about before).\u00a0 I saw one looking for a senior administrator for \u20ac35,000\/year \u2013 just over half what it should be.\u00a0 I\u2019m starting to hear from friends and ex colleagues who are losing their jobs.\u00a0 There were two last week.<\/p>\n
I know unemployment.\u00a0 I was recruited out of college by a hardware\/software\/consulting company back in 96.\u00a0 I stayed with them for 4 years. I thought I was doing great.\u00a0 Promoted every year, pay rises every year, etc.\u00a0 I got bored and changed to another company that was a consulting firm \u2013 when I joined them.\u00a0 A month after that they decided to become a \u201cdot bomb\u201d and ignored consulting sales for a year.\u00a0 I spent a year surfing the net.\u00a0 Then the inevitable happened.\u00a0 They started laying people off and my team was second to be hit.\u00a0 I got a nice payoff and went to the USA for a road trip.\u00a0 This was the end of 2001.\u00a0 The IT business was in its own little recession and there was zero work.\u00a0 What little there was required skills and certifications.<\/p>\n
During those last 5 years I hadn\u2019t really developed the way I should have.\u00a0 I knew products from my first employer.\u00a0 I\u2019d picked up things a long the way but there was no directed effort, no focus.\u00a0 I had no certifications.\u00a0 It was only towards the end of my time with the dot bomb that I\u2019d gotten my first MCP with a plan to become and MCSE.\u00a0 I was now seeing the few job adverts that there were and they all wanted certs.\u00a0 Ask a veteran IT pro is a cert worth anything\u2026 is it?\u00a0 Only a little.<\/p>\n
I had my single MCP and wasn\u2019t even getting rejection letters for my applications.\u00a0 When you register for the dole here in Ireland you have to also register with F\u00e1s, a state training organisation.\u00a0 They told me thy could do nothing for me.\u00a0 I hit Amazon and ordered my next MCP exam book.\u00a0 I did it two ways: MS Press official books and Exam Cram books.\u00a0 The latter was sometimes better than the former for content.\u00a0 I found their W2K AD design book was concise and superb.\u00a0 Every 2-4 weeks I did an exam.\u00a0 I had all the time in the world.\u00a0 I\u2019d VMware Workstation on my 2 PC\u2019s and worked out every lab.\u00a0 I studied from when I woke up until I went to bed.\u00a0 For 6 months I did that and in the end I got my W2K MCSE.\u00a0 It became an almost OCD thing … I felt guilty on Christmas day for not studying.\u00a0 I found myself refreshing notes at 2 or 3 in the morning.<\/p>\n
Finally in Feb 2002 I started to get some traction on my job applications with my recent MCSE.\u00a0 I did some interviews and got a job \u2013 which I came to hate.\u00a0 That didn\u2019t work out and one Friday I got the bad news.\u00a0 My first reaction to being on the dole again was to go to a book store.\u00a0 I\u2019d been working with XP, Citrix MetaFrame and ISA.\u00a0 I bought the best books and started studying again.\u00a0 I added those 3 exams to my CV over the next couple of months.<\/p>\n
After that I got my big break in 2003 after 3 months signing on.\u00a0 I did a 6 month contract where I proved myself and then landed a job designing, deploying and managing a Windows 2003 network for an international bank.\u00a0 I was able to use everything I\u2019d learned during my unemployment.\u00a0 From that job I learned loads more about the larger IT Pro picture.\u00a0 I got great experiences.\u00a0 I went from asking questions all of the time to answering a lot of them.\u00a0 It\u2019s because of the hard work I put in while I was unemployed that I am where I am now.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s pretty crap that people are finding themselves out of work.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been there and I remember the emotions of it.\u00a0 I know we\u2019re all at risk of being there, especially here in Ireland where or economy was mismanaged before the collapse and has made it worse.\u00a0 My advice is simple.\u00a0 If I found myself unemployed tomorrow, I\u2019d hit Amazon.com and order in books on the latest exams.\u00a0 In the morning I\u2019d be running (I actually was running 5K a day a year and a half ago before I got too busy for it).\u00a0 Exercise is supposed to stimulate the brain and aid memory.\u00a0 Then I\u2019d come home, shower, make a coffee and hit the books with virtualised labs with a TechNet subscription.\u00a0 In Ireland, there might even be a way to get F\u00e1s to pay for some of this.\u00a0 It\u2019s worth asking.\u00a0 I\u2019d use the free TechNet labs on Microsoft\u2019s site.\u00a0 I\u2019d sit every exam I could and progress up the cert ladder.\u00a0 You\u2019d learn a lot.\u00a0 You\u2019d make your CV more likely to get past the HR people.\u00a0 Importantly you wouldn\u2019t be sitting in the house, getting depressed.\u00a0 But most important, you\u2019d look self motivated \u2013 show in your CV that\u2019s what you\u2019ve been doing.\u00a0 It will impress \u2013 I promise.<\/p>\n
If you are in that boat then I wish you the best of luck.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been there and I\u2019ve felt like s**t.\u00a0 But you can get out of it.<\/p>\n
If you have anything to add, please post a comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Ireland, unemployment is over 12%.\u00a0 It\u2019s approaching 10% in the USA.\u00a0 It\u2019s estimated that the real rate (not the propaganda rate) in China is around 24%.\u00a0 It\u2019s global and it is indiscriminate.\u00a0 In Ireland, half of those unemployed were probably in the construction industry.\u00a0 A sizable percentage are office\/skilled workers.\u00a0 IT is being hit … Continue reading “Unemployment Hitting IT \u2013 What I Did When I Was Unemployed”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9776\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}