faking experience?
For some perspective: I am a 26 year old with a B.A. in History who currently works in the educational field. I have two seasonal jobs that don't exactly leave me employed the entire year (so I'm currently unemployed for about a month). I'm a substitute teacher (technically "part time" work, and voluntary, but I work 5-day weeks) and my other job is with Measurement Incorporated, a company that bids on contracts to score educational assessment tests for various state educational departments. (I always have trouble explaining this job to people -- basically it involves reading hundreds, even thousands of student essays and assigning a score to each one. It's contract work, basically.) Other than this my only other jobs have been retail (I'd rather starve than go back to doing that) and child care (with the YMCA's after school program -- thankless job that paid for shit).
Anyway, my question is -- why is it so damn hard to get into a new job field? For example, I keep wanting to apply for various office grunt type jobs, but all of them are usually looking for an "experienced" applicant. I can type about 90 WPM and I know my way around a word processing program (and I like to think that I'm competent at Excel, or rather, I'm sure I can learn the program from top to bottom in no time at all). However, I can't even get a temp office job since every temp agency I go to won't even work with me since I've never worked in the office/administrative field before. I have applied for similar jobs with the state and gotten interviews, but I gave it up after several interviews yielded no results. To even get an interview for state clerk positions, I had to test for the positions (which involved showing up at the labor office and taking tests on my word processing, editing abilities and so forth). I scored pretty high on the tests, but for whatever reason I never landed a job this way. I don't really know how to put these test results to any good use, either. I've tried including them on resumés but it doesn't seem to do any good.
Do you guys have any tips? It's really frustrating. To make things worse, I have a friend who is a college dropout and landed a pretty good job selling insurance over the phone that started out as a temp job. Prior to this the only jobs she'd ever had were at a pizza place and a Hallmark store, so needless to say I'm confused and infuriated.
What I'd really like to do is go back to school and get my Master's but I don't think I can afford it and I've already got about $20,000 of student loan debt hanging over my head that I'm not itching to increase.
Anyway, my question is -- why is it so damn hard to get into a new job field? For example, I keep wanting to apply for various office grunt type jobs, but all of them are usually looking for an "experienced" applicant. I can type about 90 WPM and I know my way around a word processing program (and I like to think that I'm competent at Excel, or rather, I'm sure I can learn the program from top to bottom in no time at all). However, I can't even get a temp office job since every temp agency I go to won't even work with me since I've never worked in the office/administrative field before. I have applied for similar jobs with the state and gotten interviews, but I gave it up after several interviews yielded no results. To even get an interview for state clerk positions, I had to test for the positions (which involved showing up at the labor office and taking tests on my word processing, editing abilities and so forth). I scored pretty high on the tests, but for whatever reason I never landed a job this way. I don't really know how to put these test results to any good use, either. I've tried including them on resumés but it doesn't seem to do any good.
Do you guys have any tips? It's really frustrating. To make things worse, I have a friend who is a college dropout and landed a pretty good job selling insurance over the phone that started out as a temp job. Prior to this the only jobs she'd ever had were at a pizza place and a Hallmark store, so needless to say I'm confused and infuriated.
What I'd really like to do is go back to school and get my Master's but I don't think I can afford it and I've already got about $20,000 of student loan debt hanging over my head that I'm not itching to increase.