“Entry-level.” Employers keep using that term, but it doesn’t mean what you think it does. Given a prolonged period of sluggish economic growth, companies are pushing additional responsibilities and abstract skills onto employees at entry-level positions, The Wall Street Journal reports, demanding more skills from the very pool of people struggling to find a first position.
“Economic studies show that employers, spoiled for candidates over the past few years, have been raising experience requirements for what might be considered entry-level work,” the Journal reported.
Companies need to keep the cost of their payroll down and therefore are hiring fewer workers, while at the same time expecting those they do hire to have a wider variety of skills. Additionally, companies are reducing the budgets and resources devoted to training new employees. This has resulted in a labor market that values experience very highly.
According to a paper by economists at Harvard University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, writes the Journal, the “number of recruiters requesting two or more years of work experience for some middle-skill occupations rose as much as 30% from 2007 to 2010.” The article tries to ameliorate this grim statistic with the soothing news of innovative new careers like “social media coordinator” and growth in fields like public relations and computer systems, which have already added thousands of jobs in the last few years and are expected to continue to grow in the future.
True, the economy is changing. Employers are certainly taking advantage of a buyers market in labor. They can afford to be picky. At the same time, telling millennials that they just need to improve their personal hygiene in order to land a job is not just unhelpful advice, it’s out of touch with reality. Many are turning to internships, sacrificing income in the hopes of gaining sufficient experience to land the elusive first job, a payoff which is ever uncertain.
The need for experience creates a Catch-22, where recent college graduates need to have a job to get a job, a situation which can easily end in giving up and furthering stereotypes by taking a job at Starbucks. It’s a true problem. Millennials are underemployed, indebted, and “living paycheck to paycheck.” And now, getting out of that position is harder than ever.
