Late last year, I asked Amy Zipkin, a fellow journalist, to share her family’s story of unemployment and career exploration. Here’s an update on how things are going.

amy.jpgBy Amy Zipkin

When Eve invited me to blog about my family’s career journey in a time of transition last November, my daughter, a college sophomore was considering majors and taking baby steps in career planning. Her father, a longtime sales engineer was five months into a layoff. A lot has happened since.

The newly declared history major jumped right in to courses that interested her. Bypassing a required course she still has to take, she enrolled in Movies and America—The Past Lives Forever and American Popular Culture. That final paper, she told us, analyzed how television shaped the rock and roll music and culture and examined American Bandstand.

I wasn’t surprised by the choices. A good student in high school, sometimes it seemed nothing stood in the way of reading Entertainment Weekly and watching television. More than once I said, “No one ever got into college watching Gilmore Girls.”

Still, the television and pop culture diet may turn out to be a career starter. This summer she returns for the second time to a two day a week unpaid internship in the curatorial department of the Paley Center for Media in New York City. And she’ll return for another summer to the part time job she began as a high school junior at the local branch of a national book store chain.

Her longevity at the book store may have inoculated her against a summer of unemployment according to Andrew Sum, Director for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. “Grown-ups” he said, “have displaced kids in mall jobs and fast food jobs that would have once gone to teenagers.” In what he calls nothing short of an economic depression for teenagers, I asked my daughter to reflect on her gigs. She wrote in an e-mail, “I started out in both places doing smaller tasks, like the inventory in the bookstore and organizing library databases at the museum. Sometimes I think there is an inclination not to take these jobs as seriously because they seem menial, but I try to do them well and without complaint.”

Eve’s written about the importance of working as a teen and my daughter took her advice. When she was 17, after being at the store six months and promoted to a children’s bookseller after three, she had a career setback. She didn’t show up for work for several weeks. (She needed to file working papers, but didn’t turn them in promptly.) She was reassigned to her inventory position, although she kept the same salary. She writes, “I remember we talked about it and you explained to me that it was a way to show them I was reliable.” Two month later she was back in sales.

She now feels that supervisors who see she does small things well are more comfortable giving her more responsibility. “I try to be an employee who my supervisors can rely on,” she writes.

My daughter’s had advantages by having resources available, but I wonder whether her father’s unemployment is coloring her decisions.

He’s been out of work ten months and a new survey issued by The John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University says he’s not alone. No End in Sight, The Agony of Long Term Unemployment charted what happened to those unemployed in August 2009 nine months later. More than 70% of those in my spouse’s age group, 55 and older, were still unemployed. Many had stopped looking. Only 12% of workers his age were newly employed, many having taken pay cuts.

A Challenger, Gray and Christmas study showed the average length of unemployment for a worker over 55 in March was 35 weeks. Beyond that now, my spouse says he’s “cheerful and optimistic.” But is a positive attitude getting in the way of being realistic?

After one set of interviews that went well (he had been referred by a former colleague) two neophyte employees were hired at the combined salary of a more seasoned employee. At another company, after three interviews, the company halted its hiring process for six months.

Recently he’s ramped up his efforts, joining a jobs group at our house of worship, streamlining his resume and attending a trade show in cloud computing, a hot area in IT right now. Hiring a career coach is still on the back burner.

In a recent post Eve gave advice about networking. And the Rutgers study gave high marks to learning about job openings through word of mouth and from family and friends.

Still, my spouse says he sees managers showing preferences for job candidates who are employed by a company’s competitor. John Challenger, the CEO of Challenger Gray, the outplacement firm agrees. “Anything in a person’s experience that aligns with a prospective employer, gives someone an edge,” he said.

The search continues. Will it end in a survivor job as it did once before after the dot.com crash? Sometimes, you just need to get back to work, Challenger said.

Amy Zipkin is a freelance journalist who reports on emerging business and career trends and the people who create them. She regularly contributes to the popular The New York Times profile, “The Boss.” Her feature stories have appeared in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, special supplements to The Wall Street Journal and the papers of the Tribune Media Company. She blogs at AmyZipkin.com.

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