I’m in the US, no degree, and absolutely sick to death of working in retail.
I’ve tried all the jobs website. They haven’t even gotten me an interview. The only job search method that’s ever given me results is to think of businesses near me and apply to them directly. But that only leaves me working more retail, since public facing businesses are all I’m interacting with.
I just want a job that pays my bills, and lets me work on a consistent schedule. I’m so sick of having my hours constantly whipped back and forth. I just want to go to bed at the same time every day.
Door to door construction sales. There are lots of companies that do thinks like install new windows or solar panels. They pay people to go around, knock on doors, and see if people are interested in their product. Technically the job title is “lead generator”. And these companies are always hiring for these positions, since, to be honest, it is pretty shit work. You walk around all day in the hot sun, knocking on peoples doors and having those doors slammed in your face. Base pay isn’t great, and you make your real money in comissions, which are rare, since you are cold calling.
But it is regular hours, exercise and sunshine, practice keeping a positive attitude and meeting people. And as soon as you get hired, you can start applying for other, better jobs in sales.
Go to a place that seems intetesting and ask for a job. Tell them that you have no experience but are willing to start by sweeping the floors and then learn as you go. The worst thing that can happen is that they say no.
Plenty of places aren’t actively hiring but that doesn’t mean they don’t have need for an extra pair of hands. Showing up in person gives a good impression.
There are worse things than saying “no.”
Companies aren’t hiring people without experience, and it’s cheaper to not bother upscaling your employees and just leave them trapped in their current job.
No one cares if you show up in person to ask for a job anymore, and if their hiring system is all online it can even be a bad impression because it indicates that you can’t find information from their website and follow instructions.
This seems like the kind of boomer advice my dad thinks still works and hasn’t worked in decades.
I don’t think its worse its just that your chance of finding a job that way is such that you could be just as productive buying lottery tickets. Seriously. Have you ever worked at a place that you could do anything more than tell the person to go to such and such a place and fill out a application or more likely now go to the website and fill out an application.
hasn’t worked in decades.
Not if you’re applying for Apple or Goldman Sachs. Different story with smaller local businesses.
Well I’m not sure how I’d pay my bills in the meantime while I’m sweeping floors for minimum wage.
Ok boomer
Sorry that I tried to be helpful.
Your “advice” hasnt worked in 30 years. No, it’s not helpful, especially when someone is serious about needing a job.
Have you tried? Because I have.
When was the last time and did you know the people at the place you did?
About two years ago and no, I didn’t know them (but I did have experience on the field) I just googled local companies. I got an interview in the second place I asked.
Well, 2 years ago when I was looking for a job and tried the same thing, I got told the don’t take resume’s unless there was a specific job posting. And I was asked if I saw a position advertised. Then asked to leave the business when I said I was following advice like this.
You hit a one in a million.
Yes. It is bad advice. Live and learn and stop suggesting it.
Edit. You reported me because you have a boomer attitude? Lmao checks out
Boomer
Get on as a construction helper. Zero experience required, just show up on time with some basic tools every day.
what would basic tools be. Seems wierd they expect the person to show up with tools for a general helper job.
If youre super green (no experience at all) they wont expect much. You wont need much for the first year other than being able to show up, listen to directions, and not hurt yourself or others.
A framing crew will expect you to have basic hand tools more than a general construction company would. One is teaching you a trade and the other just wants a laborer.
Being a good helper gets you started toward something better. A lead, a contractor, whatever. I work for myself now, and that is very achievable for anyone.
Measuring tape, speed square, pencil, bags, durable and weather appropriate clothes/shoes. Lunch. Water. It’s just the industry standard.
thats not to bad but I honestly do not know what a speed square is unless its that little 90 degree angled metal thing maybe?
It’s that little 90 degree angled metal thing.
ok so thats not to bad. really everything discocactus listed is pretty common in any job except for the pencil, tape measure, and speed square. The speed square is then the only not common thing.
Yeah. “Bring your own tools” is a pretty common policy in a lot of blue collar work. The company might technically provide the tools you need - but they will typically provide the cheapest, shittiest versions. So the workers will bring their own tools, which are higher quality. And since they are personally owned, they are less likely to get broken or “walk away”. And since everyone is bringing their own tools, the guy at the job site who is supposed to bring the tools gets lackadaisical about that part of his job.
So you show up as the new guy, first day on the job, and they say
“where’s your hammer?”
“I dunno, I thought you guys had hammers”
“Joe, we have any hammers?”
“We got some at the office”
And now you’re just gonna stand around all day not doing shit, feeling embarassed that you don’t have a hammer. And then you go to the hardware store and buy a hammer after work that day, so Joe is able to continue slacking off at his job of remembering to bring the hammers.
- Unless you’re in Europe. Having to bring your own tools is a north american thing. Here all tools are provided, even pencils and tape measures. Hell, my last construction job even provided clothes and work boots, but that might be company specific. Also, generally north american construction companies require you to have your own hand tools, but not expensive power tools like large drills and saws. Cordless power tools can go either way but I always had my own.
Source: worked 15+ years construction in NA, and did a year in Europe before changing careers.
Depends on the trade but tape measure and pencil+sharpie is standard. Framers will need hammer and speed square, electrician will need strippers, lineman pliers, etc.
Most stuff will be provided by whoever youre working with but you’ll be expected to invest in your tools periodically. If you have to borrow something twice, you should pick it up.
Also, good protective shoes. Im a big fan of my Keens.
I was going to recommend this as well. Or going the apprentice -> journeyman route.
I worked retail and retail adjacent for almost 20 years. I just started a corporate job for a very big electronics company. The answer?
Know people.
I know it sucks to hear, but it really truly is who you know. I got lucky once but it’s seriously all about the connections you make. Your best bets are from informal friends. People who know you well enough to say you’d be good for a job, but they’re not invested in you either being there or not.
The only reason I am where I am now is because I made connections. Read the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” if you’re an introvert. It helped me understand how people view each other’s interactions better.
There’s a lot of remote jobs too that you can start looking into. Use your retail planning and selling experience for remote sales roles or remote account management.
This sucks sooo fucking much, but it’s true. I don’t network, and the only way I’ve had decent jobs is by the people in the company getting to know me and moving up. My current job is at the place I did security for, for 3 years while getting my degree.
My first job was pizza delivery for a local shop. My mom knew someone who worked there, and I got the job through her. They weren’t exactly hiring for the position yet, but they knew they were going to need someone seen because their current delivery guy was going back to college in a couple months. She knew I was looking for a job, floated my name to the owner, and he called me.
Second job was a warehouse shipping/receiving position. Again, got it through a family friend who was their accountant or something. He mentioned they were looking for someone, I said I might be interested, and he basically set everything up for me to come in and interview and I was basically hired on the spot.
Now I work in 911 dispatch. This is basically the only job I actually found and applied for myself, I saw they were doing some sort of hiring event and I thought it was something I could do. Still though, I worked my connections, my brother in law is a firefighter, and knows a lot of people in local public safety/first responder circles, so I got him to ask someone he knows who works here to put in a good word for me. It could be that I just really impressed them, but I only had one interview and a lot of people who got hired at the same time as me, some arguably with more impressive resumes, had to go through an additional round or two of interviews.
So as the old saying goes, it’s not so much what you know as who you know.
When I was applying for jobs on my own back at 16-18 years old, even shitty retail gigs, I never seemed to get anywhere, online, paper applications, etc. never seemed to go anywhere, occasionally I got an interview but they never panned out. But when I know someone, or know someone who knows someone, I have a 100% success rate of getting hired and I’ve gotten to skip some of the bureaucracy to boot, and they’ve turned out to be pretty stable, reasonably well-paying jobs given my level of experience and such.
Know people.
This aspect cannot be overstated. I landed my biggest* jobs because of my professional network. Moreover, I landed those roles during some serious labor market carnage: Dotcom Bust, Great Recession, and the current knowledge career uncertainty.
*Highest salary, longest running, best environment, most career growth, or some combination thereof.
You need education. Either a college degree or a licensed trade skill. You also need experience in a related field.
You also need to know what you want to do. You can’t just magically walk into a high paying job with good pay without paying your dues.
This is good. But “need” is perhaps too strong. Lots of highly successful people without education. Lots of highly educated people who couldn’t cut it. Plus it too has barriers of it own (costs, loansharking student loans)
It’s good, but isn’t the only way.
Statistically, no there aren’t. Just because you know some people who did well in life, doesn’t mean they exist in abundance. And many of them, it’s usually because they had some inherent advantage in life, like their parent getting them a career. If your dad is a CEO is pretty easy for him to get you a high income job w/o any education or experience, yeah, but that isn’t most people. It’s a visible minority.
The vast majority of people with median or higher incomes are educated, or skilled, and those who high incomes are highly educated and highly skilled.
unless OP is gifted in manipulation and/or amoral, and willing to fleece scam and exploit other people, it’s very unlikely they will have a great job without education and skills or connections. And many people with education and skills and connections, are still underemployed, often by choice though.
None of what you say is wrong. Statistically speaking you’re making two mistakes:
You are overemphasizing what is the primary path for most and concluding that everything else should be excluded. Why cut someone struggling from 31.46% of the jobs that don’t fit the optimal 1st standard distribution?
It literally isn’t as rare as you think. I know a great many overeducated and unemployed as well as a great many high-school dropouts that are Entrepreneurs, Sr Consulting Software Architects and Successful Artists.
When someone is struggling, consider the normal path might be why. A broader approach that doesn’t prejudice viable alternatives for the crime of being “not the most popular option” is prefferrable.
Oh totally. I mean, if OP is only 5’9" they should just magically grow 6 inches, that will surely solve their employment! So easy!
It is rare, and your ‘argument’ here is self-defeating. As you are trying to argue from the margins to say the margins don’t exist… lol
why would you assume that OP is some ‘unknown’ genius? maybe probably because you yourself are projecting that persona? like every other poster on lemmy… you too could have been Bill Gates if only you had tried harder in life!
If you stoped repeating the same mistakes over and over again and tried to think “where could I be right” instead of “can you find a wrong and disprove” you would be a more reasonable person to talk to.
E.g. (cause you clearly need it)
You think the rarity of Bill Gates disproves my point. I say a friend who is neurodivergent and a high school drop out literally just bought cleaning supplies and started going door to door to businesses on a strip asking if they needed a good scrubbing. He did a few gigs on the spot for pocket change, but quickly found several of the 2nd story offices were displeased with their after-hours cleaning contractors. A few offered a trial to prove my dude could do a good job. Once proven they offered annual contracts. Boom! Entrepreneur. Today he has 3 vans and 7 employees. Still doesn’t know what standard deviation is.
This type of opportunity is everywhere. I could go on all day. But why? The point is made and you’ll either get it, or not.
Cool story. Why aren’t you a billionaire then, if it’s so easy?
Clearly I am just a stupid fool if I’m not. But I mean, that criteria doesn’t apply to you though, does it? You’re so smart!
Bad faith. Grow up.
Statistically it’s rare for an adult to be 120cm tall, therefore there exist no adults who are 120cm tall. Statistically it’s rare for someone to be in government, therefore there are no politicians in the world. Statistically it’s rare to be an astronaut, therefore astronauts don’t exist.
And all the examples I mentioned are far more rare than simply self-taught people working in the field they taught themselves. Majority of the friends I have in programming jobs are self-taught with no formal education beyond high school (if that). It’s of course highly dependent on field, and the market is saturated enough with CS graduates now that getting a programming job without a degree is going to be pretty hard, but my point is that it depends on the labour market. Some labour markets don’t care about a piece of paper declaring you went to school. There’s other ways to fill your CV and prove you have a skill.
Hmmm. Almost everyone I know has worked their way up to being successful. I guess it’s the company you keep.
This right here.
Annecdotal, but I have never worked for a company nor in a team that did not have a fair share of people that took the work experience route instead of the school route. It took them longer to get to the jobs fresh college grads were applying for and they had to work some shit jobs on the way, but that real-world experience gave them a perspective that college never could and it was a valued resource that provided immense benefits to the teams they worked with.
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Have you considered the “other” economy?
- Prostitution or pimping
- Drug selling (B2B naturally, not retail lol)
- Drug manufacturing
- Panhandling
- Arms Trafficking
- Terrorism (eco, political, religious,)
- Religion (start your own church. There is a low barrier to entry here as a street preacher, plus you can combine this with some of the others, but you can work your way up to megachurch pastor with your own jets.)
- Mugging/Home Invader/Burglary
- Crime Enforcer a.k.a. the kneecapper
- Politician
- Spy/snitch (private/corporate/government)
It’s really about understanding yourself. What are your needs? What are your natural strengths? When you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.
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If you like working with your hands, look into education for the trades. Trade jobs are only getting more and more rare these days so theres a good chance you can get a job that way and it pays waaay better than retail in a lot of cases.
Also like others said, knowing someone is also ideal.
This right here. I know so many people who got into the trades and made $100-250k per year here in the Midwestern US. That’s after just 5-10 years in a trade. Starting out it might be half that, but you get raises as you advance in the trade and if it’s a union trade you usually also get good yearly raises. So some trades will advance your pay every 6-12 months as you step up through the apprenticeship. So you move up quickly and you’re getting paid for nearly all your training (minus some studying you do in your personal hours).
If you’re willing to work overtime, plenty is available. As others have said, there’s a large demand for people in the trades.
Check local union halls. Many of them will even help you with job shadowing people in the different trades so you can check the jobs out beforehand.
I just paid someone $500 to do a simple water line to my dishwasher. Huge rip off. But they get paid well. $200/hr.
Its only gonna go up. Fewer and fewer folks know how to do real work.
Exactly. I’d recommend everyone try and fix things themselves at least sometimes. I try and fix small things I don’t want to have to buy again if I can.
Sometimes it makes sense to pay someone, but its a good skill to have.
I stay away from plumbing and gas in my house because I don’t want to blow up or get flooded. But I do all my own electrical because I know what I’m doing!
I’m with you there. Plumbing I would avoid. I could do it, but like you said, flooding or just water damage in general makes me think twice. Gas I would be more ok with but even then I’d be wary of it.
The union trades are run by white supremisist gangs.
It’s been decades now, but when I was still in school I worked for a temporary employment agency for a couple summers. I had an interview with them so they could get a feel for my qualifications, then they would line me up with random office jobs that could last anywhere from one or two days to a month or more. For most of one summer I worked in the mailroom of a law office.
If you can find an employment agency like that near you it might be a good way to get your foot in the door. Keep your eyes open wherever they send you and see if there might be chances for longer term jobs. The experience of being a temp with a good work ethic can also look good on a resume.
Temporary agencies was always how my wife always found work. She had old school office training in high school, so she could always get a temp job, and sooner later she’d find one that would last a few months, and eventually they’d just want her to stay on permanently. It never failed to get her job somewhere.
Landscaper, tree worker, construction.
I see “hiring” signs for these jobs all over the place.
Go to EMT school. It’s a fairly short program. Shouldn’t be terribly expensive.
Do you know any EMTs? I do, and it sounds like you might also. In the US at least, this seems the opposite direction of what OP is asking. Long hours, low pay when amortized over hours on call, high stress, but potentially great personal satisfaction. Also potential career track to other first responder/medical roles, which can be another plus, e.g. wilderness SAR, marine emergency SAR, trauma nurse*, etc.
If I have any of that wrong, I sincerely would enjoy additional context and discourse.
*A close friend from high school went the EMT->trauma nurse route. He has the temperament for it and absolutely rocks it. He is doing waaaaay better financially and spiritually than most of our social circle. His hours aren’t consistent per se, 3 days on, 3 days off plus any additional shifts he wants. He could have retired about 5 years ago, but loves the work too much.
They said “no retail” and regular hours.
There certainly are standard EMT shifts. And pay varies a lot depending on area of the U.S.
OP didn’t indicate where they were looking.
If you’re reasonably good at using computers (you probably are if you’re posting here?), you should be able to find office jobs where your job is to enter information into computers or do similar “secretary”-like tasks. But I don’t know what it’s like in your area.
Well, you can either start a small business or find a small business that does something and is willing to train you. As degrees have become worthless in comparison to other people recommending you for the position.
It has been stated a few times already but the correct answer is “know people”. This applies to all workers, regardless of education. You need to expand and strengthen your personal network. This is the best way to exercise some control over your situation, otherwise you are at the whim of luck.
Try some sort of construction or electrical installations.
Then you learn useful skills, AND youll likely be one of the smarter people there (Lotta folks are the kind who drink a 30 pack of Busch and go to the strip club daily. Not exactly geniuses). so eventually you can get into designing drafting or management.
Or just look into drafting. Read up on how factories work. We need smart engineer type people.
Otherwise , movie theater or bowling alley? Arcade? Those jobs are hell of a lot better than Walmart. Pays shit tho.
Or, janitor. We always need people to clean. Hell, even with my full time job, I cleaned offices on weekends because it was so easy and gave me extra cash. In my case I did it alone which was great, headphones in and just clean.
Nepotism. Who’s your daddy and what does he do?
My dad’s a gynecologist. He looks at vaginas all day long.
Retail will take anyone and train them which is why it is so easy.
Every other job needs someone with special skills and so they are selective and hard to get in. Even though most people don’t work retails, there is much more competition for these jobs, and a lot less job in any given specialty. The better the job the less competition there is - but there still is plenty of competition.
Which means you need to not ask for “a job”, but select the specific job and then set yourself up to be good at that on your own time. The more specialized you get, the better a chance you have a job in that specialty - but the worse chance you get at any other job! Which means choosing the right specialty is critically important. Good luck (usually it too bad though as most things have enough demand).
The worst part: once you get a job they start teaching you the skill for that. It is really hard to change latter because you go from an expert to beginner.
Remember what others have said though: who you know is more important that what you know! So figure out who you know! Figure out what they can maybe get you into, and apply the above in consideration of that. Sometimes people will tell you what they can help you with, sometimes they won’t know but you can guess.
