Unemployed? How Long Until You Find That Next Job

An anonymous reader writes "If you're unemployed like me, you probably want to know how long it will last. Well, someone decided to see if they couldn't stastistically predict how long they would be unemployed by polling others - the results page is up for a variety of industries and it's interesting. Clearly the more data put in, the better the results, so while your at it, submit your own information."

Comments

He won't find a job in statistics

[KDan]

Well, he sure won't find a job in a department that's involved in any kind of statistical work, that's for sure. The main thing which comes out of his tables is that there is little no correlation between salary and unemployment length. The only remotely useful table in there is the unemployment by industry, but there the sample is far too small to derive any conclusions...

There's nothing wrong with not finding correlation per se, but the author of the site presents the tables as if they had some meaning, without mentioning the fact that their only meaning is that they have no meaning... He should certainly make a note about it, and that page would certainly gain from having the Pearson correlation coefficient calculated for each table (and having only two data columns in each table).

Daniel

Make sense to anyone?

[evilviper]

Now why link to the site? It has practically no data so far, and that is all it's good for... There is no verification of the data, and the data is input by random visitors.

A /. poll asking the same question would be many times more accurate.

Re:Make sense to anyone?

[I Love Soup]

And of course IT is going to the lead the rest of the categories, since unemployed IT people are more likely spending their (abundant) free-time surfing on the webnet.

US Only ?

[JTunny]

Asks you to enter a state and salary in dollars Any chance of including UK ppl somehow ?

unemployment

[prmths]

I've been unemployed since January of 2002. Thats about 28 months so far
but anyways.. I've noticed that things look like cr*p lately and it'll be a while before they improve. So i've decided that i'm going back to school to get my master's. I've wanted to do it anyways... Hopefully that'll put me in a higher standing than I am now..

On a side note; I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the times or not, but a friend of mine told me that even if someone has a ton of experience, and then they graduate college with a bachelor's or masters or whatever... Some employers tend to ignore all work experience prior to graduating. does anyone know if this is true? if it is, i think it's the most retarded HR practice i've EVER heard of. Can someone PLEASE enlighten me on the subject.

There are always exceptions...

[Max Romantschuk]

I don't know if this makes any sense or not... but I would stress that it is kind of pointless to use a tool like this, since you might be an exception yourself.

Statistics often make sense on a demographical scale, but never on an individual scale.

A little Economics 101

[phusers]

For the unemployed out there, I can only offer some economic view on what needs to happen. According to Okun's law, there needs to be a 2.5% growth in the GDP in order for unemployment to go down. The GDP figure was released last week and well, unemployment won't be going down for a while. Sorry guys, until the economy picks up somehow either through increase consumption spending, govt expenditures in the form of jobs, or increased business investment the economy will not grow to the required 2.5% and will not lower unemployment.

Re:A little Economics 101

[freddyfred89]

Nice addition to the discussion. I think I can contribute here. First, the submission gives 2.5% as the minimum value of growth; economists refer to this as the "natural" rate of growth. It is the level of growth such that, if the economy grows above this value, the unemployment rate will decline.

You can estimate this value. In the U. S., recent estimates are in the neighborhood of 3.3% (see Blanchard's Macroeconomics, 3rd ed., p. 183).

I agree with the reviewer, though. The U. S. is nowhere near this rate of growth; therefore, unemployment rates will not decline anytime soon.

There is also a subtle issue of delays in labor markets in response to booms and busts. In all likelihood, it will take around three quarters after any increase in output growth for the condition in labor markets to improve. I think we'll all need to remain patient for a while longer.

Re:I've been unemployed since January of 2002

[DarkEdgeX]

Don't worry, I've been unemployed since 10/2001 and sure I've had a few interviews (even had one scheduled at Microsoft that got pulled out from under me 3 days before I was set to go (because a prior candidate got the job, nothing to do with me)), but now that the unemployments gone I've gotten used to the idea that I'll--

1) Be in debt (unemployment really did help, but unfortunately I still had to hit up the credit cards because it just wasn't making ends meet) for the foreseeable future.
2) Be making slightly above minimum wage doing "light industrial" until the economy stops felching it's own ass.

And yeah, for anyone who thinks "he didn't look hard enough" or some other holier-than-thou bullshit, I assure you, I looked real god damned hard, and I lowered my salary expectations considerably (going from $70,000+/yr to having salary expectations of only $30,000/yr I would hope qualifies).

To anyone who says it's not that bad-- you're clueless, or you're terribly lucky.

On a personal note, I want to thank the US Congress/Senate for finally passing that Unemployment Extension in January when they got back from their Christmas break-- too bad it didn't extend ANYTHING, it just extended the TEUC and TEUC-X programs to those who would have been cut off, for everyone else who had already exhausted both their TEUC and TEUC-X benefits, they basically gave us the finger. Way to go guys. (Read: The TEUC extension provided for 13 weeks of federally funded extensions, and the TEUC-X extension provided for an additional 13 weeks for states with high unemployment (mine, Washington, qualified easily) for a total of 26 weeks. The "extension" passed in January didn't add any additional weeks, it only extended the program for those who were just starting to use TEUC and/or TEUC-X, and added language that made it possible for someone starting on it late in the game to be able to claim their total balance, rather than being cut off on some arbitrary date).

Re:Well it depends on what you do while unemployed

[mark_lybarger]

there's a big difference between what you're describing and what the internet boom of 96-00 experienced.

in a web services world it will be companies that have a solid business plan, and compines that think things trough. in the Iboom, it was anybody and everybody putting up a web site that provided nothing. there was also the fact that there was this Y2K issue that many many of companies spent millions of dollars for legal reasons to change 5 lines of code in their software systems and spend enourmous hours testing said changes across the board and saving every test log file and going through various levels of audits of the testing. basically y2k projects coupled with the internet boom kept a lot of people employed and brought in a lot of others.

exposing webservices will let a few good people work for a while.

Unemployed because of no openings

[LinuxGeek]

I have traveled to three other states besides my own looking for work. It has been just over a year since I was 'downsized' and things are very tight. Friends that know my capabilities have recommended me to their companies and they have need for more people, but not one is hiring to fill the need. My contact at the unemployment office told me last week that he may be job hunting soon, they are going to have to cut back too.

I am capable and willing to work, even starting a business of my own. Then I got to watch my savings burn up while every single business I did work for waited months to pay me. If it were just withholding payment for services, that wouldn't have been so bad, but I paid for hardware that they were using. It took me four months to get paid for a couple of large jobs and that was my limit. I closed the business and went job hunting.

Now I am in the trap of being way over qualified for the advertised openings like roofing labor and convience store clerk. They either don't want someone they know will be gone as soon as the first decent job is offered or they don't want to hire someone that has much more managment experience than they have. Some quirk about not hiring their own successor, go figure. Thanks for letting me know that my previous employer was just providing me with income because of my good looks and not because I was the highest paid technical employee they had.

Becoming a student (again)

[BlueStreak]

I lost my job on Sept 11, 2001 of all days... After almost a year of unemployment, in which I couldn't find a bloody thing, I decided to cut my losses and return to school. I have an electronics diploma (I'm an Electronic Technologist - which is inbetween a technician and an engineer). I'm now doing my comp sci degree.

What I quickly discovered was that, as a normal unemployed person I was of little interest to companies. Once I became a student I was in high demand! It didn't take me long to find work (regardless of the season though there are distinct hiring times) and I could choose from really good jobs! The reasons why I found work so easily were :
1) I was much more skilled then the average student (I've got almost 5 years of solid SW development experience).
2) More importantly: as a student under 25 (I think the max age was raised to 28 now), I could fall under the federal government programs here in Canada where the government would subsidize my salary (it's an incentive for companies to hire students). I don't have to apply for it; my employer handles that.
3) The Canadian Federal government has a good website to connect students with jobs in the government. Anyone that applies for funding gets their job posted on their website (real jobs! holy @#%$#!). They also have a special program called FSWEP that helps students find jobs in the federal government. What's really cool about it is that they don't want to know what level of experience you have, only the basic skills. When a hiring manager wants to find somebody the program randomly pulls 4-6 names of people that have the basic skills require (i.e. knows MS office, speaks French, knows C++, etc) and they have to hire one of those people. With that program I got 4 calls - many of them for web development. Looking back I should have taken one of those jobs, a part time job, as the websites in question were really big and complex - it would have been interesting (I'm a C/C++ hacker at heart).
4) I was available for part time working during the school year. Lots of part time jobs during the year! The disadvantage is that it severly effects the time I have to study; I take the minimum amount of courses to be full time. As such, it'll take me 4 years to get my (honours) degree (if I took a full course load I could be done in 2.5-3 years, even less if I took summer courses).

The work has always been interesting and in my general field. The first place I worked at, a charity, I was writing custom video conferencing software using this nice SDK and accompanying hardware (it was very interesting work). I now work in an IT team in the Federal government, on a project to migrate from Win98 to XP.

As for pay, there are definite advantages to being a student. First off, since I fall under those government programs, there are guaranteed minimum levels of salary. At the moment I make $15.61 CND per hour ($10.71 US). Next year I can expect to make around $18/hour if I continue in the federal government. The other advantage is that by being in these organizations, I have the proverbial foot in the door (i.e. where I work now I can apply for any internal job postings).

I think that the biggest advantage of being a student, aside from that fact that I will get the degree I've been desiring for many years (actually I care more about the education then the degree), is that I pay virtually no tax. What I do pay, I will get (virtually) all of it back at tax time!

I know this isn't an option for everyone but in my case I really wanted to get my degree - everything worked out well. Life is good at the moment.

BTW, slightly offtopic but one of the HUGE advantages of being unemployed here in Canada is healthcare: it doesn't cost a cent (well, you do pay for drugs but generics are common & cheap). My wife made extensive use of the healthcase system here (got quickly treated by uber-experts for what, at first, appeared to be cancer). If we had to pay anything at all for the treatment she recieved for 3 months (i.e. even 10%), we'd be completely broke and living with my parents. The parking at the hospital, by itself, burnt a significant hole in my pocket!