Growing up I learned a lot of things. One of them was about how I needed to go out and get a job. I needed to stay at that job for years and I would be taken care of. The company I worked for would invest in me as I invested in them. There would be a mutually beneficial relationship. We would both thrive.<\/p>\n
That is a fairy tale.<\/strong> That is a story for another time. Another generation. That is not the reality of today. I learned too late in life the only person looking out for me is me.<\/strong> So I needed to do a better job of looking out for me.<\/p>\n I made one huge mistake when I entered the job market. I believed what I’d been told all through growing up. I believed loyalty was rewarded.<\/p>\n I went to college and learned in my four years there I did not want to work in Advertising. And I worried. What would people think of my Mass Communications degree?<\/em><\/p>\n Absolutely Nothing!<\/strong> And I don’t meant they didn’t like it. It didn’t matter.<\/strong> All my employers were interested in was if<\/em> I had a degree. Not what<\/em> the degree said on it.<\/p>\n I had a Bachelor’s degree. That’s all they cared about. Something I quickly learned was that having the degree won’t get me a job but it will keep me from being disqualified.<\/strong><\/p>\n A college degree won’t land you a job. It will keep you from not being considered for the job.<\/strong><\/p>\n A little story from the first time I’ve interviewed someone to hire. I was the lead Desktop Support Tech and we were looking for a new technician. The job was posted and we were flooded with resumes. We had well over 1,000 applications for this single job.<\/p>\n How do you think we filtered the list? We started eliminating anyone who didn’t fit the criteria. And one of the criteria was having a college degree.<\/p>\n From my first job working in IT Support I stuck to a simple plan when selecting jobs.<\/p>\n I’m a hired gun. I’m a technical mercenary. I work for the highest bidder.<\/strong><\/p>\n Want a raise? Get a new job.<\/strong> I started making $12 per hour. Then $17, $19, and eventually $21\/hour for the same job title doing the same work. But I’d worked for a different place each time.<\/p>\n While I worked as a contractor, I had no paid time off. That meant if I didn’t work, I didn’t get paid. Period. I would work through being sick. I didn’t take vacations. I worked. It’s what I did. That was my reality. So I wanted more money to justify the lack of time off. This is not sustainable and it was always my goal to get through it to something better.<\/p>\n And health benefits\u2026 Yeah. I had them. Technically. But they were often terrible. Expensive benefits that covered little if anything. It was barely worth the money I paid. And since I didn’t take time off. I didn’t go to the dentist or the doctor unless I absolutely had to.<\/p>\n Then I moved out of the area and landed my first job with benefits. I had time off. I had decent healthcare for the first time since leaving school and I was salaried. That changed everything.<\/p>\n That meant I got paid the same thing every pay check. No overtime but also very little demand for it. But my pay checks were consistent which made budgeting easier. Not that I had any money in savings. But I could pay my bills.<\/p>\n And I had a little on the side so I could enjoy myself and go out to eat some times. I could go see a movie. I could even take time off and enjoy life and visit friends or family out of the area without having to race out-of-town Friday night and return by Sunday. I had freedom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Growing up I learned a lot of things. One of them was about how I needed to go out and get a job. I needed to stay at that job for years and I would be taken care of. The company I worked for would invest in me as I invested in them. There would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1989,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[510,312,603,197,195],"class_list":["post-1982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wrote-about","tag-contractor","tag-employment","tag-it-support","tag-job-hunting","tag-work"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/65H.jpg?fit=2000%2C1333&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1982"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1988,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982\/revisions\/1988"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}I’m my own best advocate and ally.<\/h3>\n
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