Pulled from comments: More reports from the job wars.

Thanks all for the advice and wisdom. I just got laid off last friday after almost 9 years with my company and 20 years since undergrad. I have heard similar stories form numerous people that echo the comments above, that it is just brutal out there, oh wait, I meant "out here."

Conversely, I've heard that there are opportunities, it is just a vastly different game to play now. It takes dilligence, patience, confidence, and using professional networks to uncover those opportunities.

All options are under consideration right now between looking for a new, full time opportunity, picking up contract work, going back to school, or starting my own business.

Good luck to all of us now in the new game.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Reports from the Job Wars
        

Pulled from comments: An inspiring story from Geof -- thanks for taking the time to share and congratulations on pulling yourself through challenging times. The bottom line:

Keep the faith folks. Even the worst storms, though long, can't last forever. You'll get through this period with determination, focus, persistence, and faith. Things won't happen for you at the times you may want them to, and you will have to weather a lot of difficulties on the way, but have confidence in yourself, your abilities, your talents, that there is an opportunity out there for you; there's an ocean of them and you just need to land one.

Here is the whole post:

To buoy folks' perspective on things, I'm a professional in my mid-thirties, 12 years experience, was laid off in January of last year.

Had a lot of troubles last year: was laid off a few months before my first child was born, my mother in law died suddenly and unexpectedly (about a month before our daughter was due), my wife lost her job the day she came back from maternity leave, and to top it off, I needed emergency back surgery. (Fortunately, that issue cropped up while my wife still had her health benefits--she was given three months insurance as part of her severance.)

Having been laid off in prior slowdowns (post 9/11, and then the plague of corporate scandals in '04) through it all, I was determined that I was going to come out better off

Continue reading "An inspiring unemployment story with a happy ending" »

Posted by Jay Hancock at 6:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Reports from the Job Wars
        

Buried in Monday's report from the Conference Board on help-wanted ads were several encouraging new measurements showing that Baltimore and Maryland continue to lead the nation in job openings.

The Conference Board counts online job openings from state to state and month to month and matches them up against unemployment rates -- ie. supply vs. demand. The latest figures add to the good news delivered by Indeed.com on the Maryland employment market in the second quarter, which I wrote about last week. The hiring picture was decent then; it's even better now.

"Modest strength for the last few months seen in several large states in the South including North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland" was one of the deck heads in the press release. Maryland, for example, listed 3,300 more openings in July than in June -- about a 3 percent increase, the private research group said. Nationally there were virtually no month-to-month growth.

Maryland had the best ratio in the nation of the number of jobs listed compared with unemployed people seeking work; to wit, there are two people looking for work for every one help-wanted posting. Not perfect, but compare that with Michigan, where there are 10 people looking for work for every opening listed. In Pennsylvania there were nearly five unemployed folks for every opening.

On a metro level, Baltimore was No. 9 nationwide for the total number of ads. (New York is No. 1, but only because it's huge.) Metro Baltimore was No. 2 for the number of ads measured against population and No. 3 for ads measured against the number of unemployed people.

All this suggests that the Maryland economy is set to grow in the next few months, if maybe only gradually. That's good news for everybody including the state pols who are trying to make the budget balance. For more on the Baltimore jobs outlook see Friday's Hancock column.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 6:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Reports from the Job Wars