Can we talk about this horrendous job market?
Employment over 50 is a wild ride—but so is starting out as a recent college graduate. Sometimes, we're even competing for the same jobs.
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I once worked for a creative director whom I’ll refer to as Moira,1 a woman with a creative brilliance that burned a little too hot. She went out on a limb and gave me—a young, inexperienced designer—an opportunity that she probably had no business offering, given my lack of experience.
At the time, I had just moved back to New York, was living with my parents and desperate to land my first real design job. Back in those days, we physically dropped off our portfolios with a front desk receptionist and waited for a call to collect it days later. I got rejected from every design job that I applied to—until one day, I received an unexpected callback.
I’m not sure what Moira saw in me. She agreed my portfolio lacked refined design skills, but instead flipped to a pair of collages that I had made in a color photography class that I tucked in at the back of my book.
“There’s something here,” she said, her eyes lingering on the page, then looking me straight in the eye as if she was searching my face for some validation to a hunch she was trying to suss out. She then offered me an unpaid internship which would later turn into my first real design job six weeks later.
Where are all the entry level jobs?
Everyone has to start somewhere. Often that “somewhere” begins with just one person taking a leap because they were able to read beyond the bullet points of a resume and see something that wasn’t obvious on the page. Everything I learned about design in my early career I learned from Moira—the art of typography, the nuanced skill of kerning and leading. Under her mentorship, I became a designer.
But where are the Moiras of the world today? Where are the on-the-job mentors? I imagine apprenticeship is still alive in the trades, but what about everywhere else? Efficiency and profitability leave little room for mentorship, as companies prioritize productivity over long-term employee development. Nobody has time or budgets to train anyone anymore, it seems.
The media and job reports insist that the labor market is strong with unemployment at all-time lows, but anecdotally and on social media, nearly everyone I know looking for a job is straight up struggling. It’s not uncommon to be looking for 6 months, a year, or even longer.
Social media is flooded with stories of recent college graduates and even MBAs who are still looking for their first “grown up” job. I know a handful myself, including one young UX designer from my alma mater who still hasn’t found full time employment since he graduated in 2023. Most are cobbling together a living by freelancing, working retail or service, picking up gig jobs, or monetizing content on social. But here’s the rub: I know folks in their 50s—ourselves included—who are doing the exact same.
There once was a time when you could study whatever you loved in college and figure out your career later. There were always going to be those kids who knew they wanted to be doctors and bankers on Wall St., but many of us stumbled our way from one industry to the next until we found our footing and a career that we sometimes fell into. I’m sure many of us thought we’d be employed in the same career forever.
Now, entry level jobs want years of experience, listing multiple lines of unrealistic and absurd qualifications in an exhaustive laundry list of bullet points. Some companies brazenly express a preference towards advanced degrees and skills beyond what is reasonable for what is advertised as “entry level,” sometimes for salaries hovering around minimum wage.
But because jobs are so hard to come by, the market is flooded with overqualified candidates applying for anything because people are desperate.
The rat race starts early because everything is stupid
This is why the rat race for college students starts early. Students are gunning for competitive internships in order to gain the years of experience that entry level jobs now require. Recruiting in certain competitive fields begin 18-20 months prior to a summer start date, (I didn’t know this! Did you?) which means teenagers have to strategically plan early in their college careers and know what they want to be when they grow up.
Some college clubs, which are critical for networking and serve as direct pipelines to top firms, are so exclusive in their membership that it perpetuates gatekeeping to high-profile jobs. It keeps the elite well connected. Anyone can achieve social mobility, but the barriers are much higher for some.
I suppose it’s the same as it ever was.
Successful job hunting has always relied on connections and networks. I’ll acknowledge that my first break into that design job did come from a connection through a friend of a friend. But I also see parallels between job searching and recent college application trends. Applicants are shotgunning hundreds, even thousands, of jobs similar to the way high school students are flooding applications to 20+ colleges. Even then, the expectation is that you may only ever hear back from a few. Resumes are now processed through ATS trackers that scan for relevant keywords, rank candidates, and filter out the ones that don’t pass criteria.
All of this happens before a human even gets involved in the process. In order to survive the culling for the next round, candidates are advised to run their resumes through services that optimize for keywords that match job descriptions and skills. It’s a vicious cycle that has now become the norm.
Recently, I read that more than half of Americans will be looking for jobs in 2025. With ongoing layoffs in tech and other industries due to offshoring and AI-driven efficiencies, the already broken job market—which is filled with ghost jobs—is set to become even more saturated with qualified candidates competing for the same few openings. The threats to federal government jobs will make it worse if those candidates flood the private sector.
It’s enough to wear anyone down.
I’m not in the job market anymore because I’ve essentially given up on my career for a number of reasons, but everyone else in my household is. The grind, the ghosting, and rejections are grueling.
Employment over 50 is a wild rollercoaster ride
Sometimes Mark and I will look at each other and laugh at how absurd life has become. I don’t think either of us imagined we’d be where we are now when we reached our 50s—aged out of our respective industries and earning less every year. We’re too burnt out to start another business and too young to fully retire. We’re really at an odd point in our lives (talk about liminal).