Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area
This General Chat area started off as a place for people to talk about things that are off topic, however it has quickly evolved into a community and has become an integral part of the GAW experience for many of us.
Based on its evolving needs and plenty of user feedback, we are trying to bring some order and institute some rules. Please make sure you read these rules and participate in the spirit of this community.
Rules for General Chat
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Be respectful to each other. This is of utmost importance, and comments may be removed if deemed not respectful.
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Avoid long drawn out arguments. This should be a place to relax, not to waste your time needlessly.
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Personal anecdotes, puzzles, cute pics/clips - everything welcome
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Please do not spam at the top level. If you have a lot to post each day, try and post them all together in one top level comment
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Try keep things light. If you are bringing in deep stuff, try not to go overboard.
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Things that are clearly on-topic for this board should be posted as a separate post and not here (except if you are new and still getting the feel of this place)
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If you find people violating these rules, deport them rather than start a argument here.
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Feel free to give feedback as these rules are expected to keep evolving
In short, imagine this thread to be a local community hall where we all gather and chat daily. Please be respectful to others in the same way
Any advice for me on what I can do to get my foot in the door? In case you didn't catch my username, I'm deaf and I graduated with a Bachelor's degree in I.T. and I have a couple of certifications that I taught myself, without going to school/boot camp to earn them. I also worked for a big box retail store, servicing computers and I have worked with a company on an internship (CO-OP was actually the name of the program). At the big box retail store, I got best employee of the year 5 years in a row due to my ability to get computers out of the store quickly enough and most of them didn't come back for further repair.
15 years later, no one wants to hire me, despite them telling me I'm a perfect fit for the job. I've noticed that they said that before they found out that I'm deaf.
Soon after finding out I'm deaf, "Whoops! My supervisor went ahead and hired someone else! We will keep your resume on file for 6 months. After that, feel free to apply with us again!" and not a word from them since.
Applied to over 1,500 jobs since then, both in two different states, one state with a top 3 cities (where I'm from) and one in a red state (where I'm currently living now) and no luck.
I've revised my resume so many times but all of them looked great as I've had some former HR employees and job coaches check them out for me. They said there's nothing wrong with my resume and it's very attractive, enough for it to be noticed by HRs.
I'm in my 40's now and it's very discouraging that I'm unemployed and unable to work with computers, which was (and still is) my dream job since I was 8 years old when I fiddled around on my Amiga computer.
To add, I had the worst luck of going to college, where they said they will teach us 10% (the essential stuff we need to know for entry level) then once we're hired, the company will teach us the 90%. Then 9/11 happened and everything was in chaos, which delayed my job search for some time until everything was "normal" so I can apply.
I am sorry to hear you are having so much difficulty finding IT work. I wanted to say, I think it's the market, not you. What the crooked media reports vs the reality on the ground for IT jobseekers are two different things, and have been for a very, very long time (see Norm Matloff's work).
I have heard anecdotally that the IT market is very bad in the U.S. at the moment. In Ireland, I met an IT guy with an M.Sc. two years ago who was doing blue-collar work. We chatted for a while, and he told me there were "no IT jobs" in Ireland, even for experienced people. His last words to me before we parted were, "Recession is coming."