Young Adults Find Employment Picture Hazy

Those looking for an example of the up-and-down nature of our bumpy economy need look no further than at what has transpired on the jobs front over the last two days.

On Thursday, a report came out that said 157,000 private-sector jobs were added in June, news that sparked optimism among many that the economic recovery was back on track.

On Friday morning, however, the government's official figures showed that the unemployment rate rose in June to 9.2 percent — the highest level since December. And only 18,000 new jobs were added last month.

Those conflicting numbers do nothing to quell the ongoing uncertainty over whether the U.S. economy is going to rebound soon.

And those who comprise those statistics have no clearer a picture of where things are headed.

Consider the plight of young adults, those leaving high school, military service and college with limited experience and sometimes limited education. For them the job market is … well, let them try to sort it out for you.

“It seems like a lot of my friends are struggling,” said 31-year-old Lucas Michals of Nashotah. “The ones that have had jobs have had their jobs the whole time. A lot of people who lost their jobs are doing other non-career function jobs.”

Michals is a student at Waukesha County Technical College. You wouldn’t describe the 13 years he has spent since high school as sloppy or lazy, but it hasn’t left him in good position for the new economy. He said he worked warehouse jobs, came up one class short of a degree from Herzing University in Madison, returned to warehouses and finally became a “displaced worker” in 2009.

That experience drove him back to school, and now he’s majoring in automated systems technology. Michals has about a year remaining in his program and expects to be prepared for a career — even if it doesn’t come right away.

“I’m going to cover everything,” he said. “I can get some kind of industrial machine position … starting at a decent wage. Or if I wanted to branch off into electrical engineering, I could do that too.”

Heard the 'horror stories'

Another WCTC student, 23-year-old Rachel Tonkin of Milwaukee, is a laid off worker who realized she needed some sort of training. She’s pursuing a business management degree, which she also sees as something versatile that could give her a lot of options after she graduates in two years.

Most of her friends are employed, she said, but primarily in just jobs, not careers. She knows one person who just graduated from a four-year school with two degrees, and the only job he landed was one that didn’t require any college at all.

“That hits me,” she said. “I just hear the horror stories of people trying to find jobs. I just hope it’s easy but I know it’s not going to be.”

Aron Canapa, 22, of Oak Creek has been back in Wisconsin since finishing his military duties in March 2010. But he is still unemployed.

He has applied for everything from fast-food restaurants to big-box retail stores to chain stores at the mall. Within the last two weeks, he has tried his luck with staffing agencies.

But everywhere he turns, he receives the “we’re not taking applications at this time” —or no answer whatsoever.

“I’m trying to stay positive, but it’s hard,” he said.

So, it’s really terrible out there for the sub-30 crowd.

Or maybe it isn’t.

Picture rosier for some

Twenty-nine-year-old Kori Larson of Franklin landed a job just two months after graduating from WCTC.

“Felt like forever,” she said.

Larson estimated she went through 10 or 15 interviews before being hired. Though young, she’s another “displaced worker” who was twice laid off from a Waukesha manufacturer, the second time for a year and a half. When called back, she was nearly finished with her degree and decided not to return.

After graduating in May she picked up an IT position through staffing company Corestaff, which is rolling soon into a more permanent position with IT outsourcing company CompuCom. She works at GE Healthcare, which contracts with CompuCom.

She started looking about two months before graduation, and said networking was essential.

“We have a lot of teachers who know people who know people,” she said.

Larson earning less than she did at the warehouse, and acknowledged it was an important fact to accept, if not always easy.

Pursue passion first; dollars next

That appreciation sometimes escapes young workers, said Carol Schneider, CEO of SEEK Inc., a Milwaukee-area human resources and staffing consulting service.

“There definitely is a disconnect with what (colleges) tell them they’re worth and what they’re worth,” she said.

“There are lots of people who shouldn’t have gone to college in the first place and did, and they’ve got this wonderful college degree and know how to think, and there are no jobs,” Schneider said.

She said people in that position should return to a technical college to learn a specific skill or work a temporary job to “see and be seen.”

It’s also important to know and understand your passion, Schneider said. Some young students want a job in “marketing,” for example, yet don’t grasp how diverse that field is.

But — here goes the roller coaster up again — Schneider said she is seeing a lot of positive news on the job front overall.

“We’re the first ones to feel the recession and we felt it big-time here,” said Schneider, who had to lay off people for the first time. “We are also in our industry the first ones to get back into the game, and we’ve been back in it for the last year, and now we’re doing it with a whole lot (fewer) people.”

Wisconsin picture is better than most

Wisconsin, as a whole, has stronger employment than the nation. Through the spring, the state’s overall unemployment rate hovered between 7.3 and 7.4 percent about 1.5 percent lower than the national figure. More affluent, smaller cities such as Caledonia (4.0 percent in May), Brookfield (5.9), Wauwatosa (6.2), Menomonee Falls (6.2) and Oak Creek (6.6) were even better.

And on Thursday, payroll processing company ADP said the country added 157,000 new private sector jobs in the last month, far above expectations.

That was followed by the disappointing numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor that the 18,000 jobs in June created was the lowest since September.

But those are all just numbers to 18-year-old Alicia Pavlopoulos of Oak Creek. She graduated a semester early from Oak Creek High School but is still trying to land full-time employment, which has proven elusive.

 “I need a full-time job in order to get more money to put towards a car, and it seems like if you don’t already have a job by now — good luck getting one,” she said. “I can only find a part-time job, which is barely anything, and the hours aren’t too great.

“It’s getting irritating and it’s hard.”