Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for February 23, 2019

Maybe Mike can bronze shoes with Zonker.

I was chatting with a woman of about 25 recently. She said that her little sister, age 8, was living in a completely different world than the one she had grown up in.

“Any openings for someone with 16-years of experience as a tool & die machinist and tool designer? Where? China? ….I see……..’K………Back to the TV, I guess……”

It’s me. Now.

Don’t get hyperbolic, Mike. You wouldn’t last a day in the Bronze Age.

Didn’t Ray-gun hold up a newspaper to show how many jobs needed to be filled?

Now it’s jobs asking for at least five years experience with software that’s only been around for two years. It’s asking for a master’s degree when you get your bachelor’s, and a PhD. when you get your master’s. Or it’s that there’s not a big job market for people trained in squad automatic weapons. And those bills and loan payments just a-keep on a-comin’.

Touch-typist, slide-rule operator, bowling scorekeeper, Morse code transcriber. Trained in all these skills that nobody needs any more.

Guess flipping burgers is out too?

“Ever feel you were perfectly educated for the Bronze Age?” Yes, it is called a liberal arts degree from a second string state university. Avoid at all costs.

When you have a job, you need to train for something else when it all comes crashing down. I worked in a factory and went to night school for programming. When the plant moved, I got a new better job. My parents worked for the same place for over 40 years each. That ain’t gonna happen anymore.

There comes a time in your working life when you find that you’ve become over-educated, too experienced, too old, and too expensive for employers. They can hire 3 interns fresh out of college for what it would cost to hire you ( at your reduced rate ).

If you’re lucky, and you live long enough, you can exact a measure of revenge by charging these same companies an exorbitant fee, as a consultant.

Career choice is a hard decision in retrospect. I mean look at all those expert car builders in the Midwest. What ever happened to the folks who build typewriters. You never know where you’ll end up.

Ha! “Perfectly educated for the Bronze Age.” That’s me.

The speed of technological advancement today is often rendering the knowledge a recent College graduate obtained obsolete by the time they are searching for a job in that field.

International currency issues?? I can get Mexico to pay for anything. Does that count?

Yup. All of the above. Even stringed instrument building got mechanized and computerized. And the instruments sounds like it.

Technologies/jobs are constantly being made obsolete. There are few jobs one can hold for life anymore (which also seems to be an obsolete concept). People need to be cognizant that they need to upgrade their job skills constantly. They might also need to be completely retrained in another field. Community colleges are an excellent resource for this and can get people back in the game usually within 2 years.

This is a great subject if you’re the one out there seeking a job. This goes to training, and creating the employee you need, rather then hoping to find that in anybody off the street. Too many think they are going to find the ripe banana and pass over the best of the green ones.

Especially when HR has the front door. They really don’t know much beyond the checklist you gave them to hire by.

One could always become a “grief counselor”. Or a social worker.

You probably don’t use the algebra you learned either. Doesn’t mean the logic you learned was never used!

This comic originally came out in the 90’s, soon after I finished up my degree in femtosecond lasers. Needless to say, I loved this comic then, and still do. As usual, lucky is better than good.

I went from being a mechanic to an ambulance driver and later an EMS Medic. I got on the cops, got laid off and went back to being a mechanic until I got recalled to the cops. It pays to have a fallback. BTW, never got laid off again and retired with a good pension 9 years ago.Too many folks rely on getting an MBA as a path to success, but there are only so many positions. People in the trades and engineers are in high demand. Yeah, you get dirt under your fingernails, but it washes off and you end up with job security and a good living.

Only College is pushed, but not Trade schools which are begging for new people to train so that they can get well paid.

I always enjoyed the Job Requirements that were obviously written by someone in “Human Resources” who had No Idea what any of the Buzzwords meant, but somehow managed to include Every Single One in the job posting. Even though half of them applied to systems the company didn’t even Use or to systems that never Interacted with one another.

A personal favorite was a requirement that needed 10 years experience in both CICS and CISC.

The First is Customer Information Control System (CICS), a family of mixed language application servers that provide online transaction management and connectivity for applications on IBM Mainframe systems under z/OS and z/VSE. CICS is middleware designed to support rapid, high-volume online transaction processing.

The Second is a type of Computer Hardware: A complex instruction set computer (CISC /ˈsɪsk/) is a computer in which single instructions can execute several low-level operations (such as a load from memory, an arithmetic operation, and a memory store) or are capable of multi-step operations or addressing modes within single instructions.

Needless to say, the number of people with any amount of experience designing Both is very small.

I’m feelin’ it. Most of the ads I find are for things I can’t do, all things that require years of study. I get an update from the local Civil Service site every so often. Every single job requires a degree I don’t have, plus years of experience in something I’ve never done.

I use slide rules to help students understand what logarithms are about. I also use them teaching navigation. I have a bunch of them, both linear and circular, which I hand out for use in class.