If you'd asked me six months ago or maybe a year how I'd feel about getting laid off, I likely would have said I'd be happy to take a severance package and move on. Now that it has actually happened, I have a different perspective on the experience. I feel like I've landed in a special kind of limbo: I'm too old to be making a job or career change, too old be an attractive hire, too old to be trying to learn new skills; at the same time, I'm too young to consider retiring. What to do?
So here I am, in what ought to be the twilight of my career, studying and cramming for certification exams and submitting job application after job application after job application. I think I'm on pace to submit an average of 4 per day. And I am seriously, seriously considering starting a spreadsheet to track data about where I've applied, who has rejected me, who didn't respond, etc.
Meanwhile, I'm in the middle of the certification training. While I have sufficient experience and knowledge to continue doing what I've been doing, most prospective employers want some alphabet soup after your name. And, yes, if I sound a bit cynical about it all, it's because I am--especially since companies often seem to arbitrarily value one certification over another even though they both validate the same pool of knowledge.
Here's my ultimate cynical take on it: It's all just a game. I'm dead serious about that. If you've spent any time playing games on Steam, you understand how gaming itself is gamified with Achievements. "You've unlocked 25% of 125 achievements." "You've unlocked the I Found a Secret achievement, which has been unlocked by 5% of players." The same gamification is now applied to Careers. The way Career Paths are defined is very similar to how Blizzard has defined character class variations in games such as World of Warcraft and Diablo. You can move down the Shapeshifter Druid path or you can opt for the Storm Druid path. I see very little difference in how Career Pathing works.
What bothers me about it all is that it's artificial and arbitrary. Even worse, it results in pigeonholing.
What, I ask you, is the practical difference between holding a CSM vs. a PSM? And what motivates a company to require one specifically and declare you unqualified for a position because you have the other instead?
It's arbitrary.
I also have an anti-capitalist conspiracy theory about it, but that's a rant for another day.
Want to get noticed by an employer? First you have to get past the ATS that scans your resume for the right buzzwords. Or now it's about fooling the AI that digests the contents of your resume. People used to work really hard on designing attractive resumes and making sure they were grammatically correct. That doesn't really mean anything any more. It's about the keywords you jam into your resume and the bullet list of company names with dates and whatnot.
It leaves me seriously wondering: Does anything substantive and meaningful have value any more? It's like companies don't even want to employ people any more so much as they want to employ the a certain set of gamified achievements. Congratulations! You've defeated the lieutenant boss and unlocked the I Found the Secret Keyword to Land an Interview achievement.
I seriously feel like Murtaugh from the Lethal Weapon series. I am, in fact, getting too old for this shit.
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