Today’s strong job market makes it hard to believe it was just a few years ago that college graduates were emptying into a recession-weary economy with few job prospects. Unemployment lines were long, and stories of recent graduates taking very low-paying jobs just to get hired somewhere abounded.
Certainly, the climate is better today. But what about those Generation Xers who hit the job market in the early 1990s? Are they making up for lost time now? For many, the answer is yes. But for most, the experience has profoundly changed the way a segment of workers thinks about the job market.
“There were a lot of folks who had a difficult time in the early `90s. For a while it was unadulterated chaos because the rules of the game changed at that time,” says Dave Bechtel, career services director for the University of Illinois’ Urbana campus. It was then that companies stopped recruiting so heavily on campus, when downsizing became de rigueur and when firms simply quit answering all the job inquiries that came pouring in. “Kids were no longer naive about corporate America because of what happened to them, their parents and their friends,” Bechtel says.
That in turn led to a large number of job candidates accepting several job offers, then deciding in June which one to show up for, he says. “Corporate America is saying to us this is so terrible, but we’re saying this is the world you taught them.”
When Christa Moon graduated in 1993 from Western Michigan University with a degree in public relations, she waited tables before “taking the first job that came along,” as an assistant, answering phones for a sales firm in Atlanta. But as the economy improved, so has Moon’s lot. Today she sells biomedical equipment to hospitals in Illinois and Wisconsin for St. Paul-based Empi Inc. Her salary has improved dramatically, and she loves the flexibility of working from her Lincoln Park home. “I’m watching this happen to my friends too. A lot of them are just now getting out of their first jobs and taking a much bigger step in their careers.”
Still, Moon hasn’t forgotten the economic climate that surrounded her first few years in the job market. “It was humbling, and I think it’s given me a stronger work ethic. I appreciate what I have now because I had to start at a much lower level than I expected.”
Edward Shuman, now a Chicago resident, left Western Michigan University in 1993 for a low-level customer service job making $17,000 a year. Today, after 18 months as an account executive with telecommunications firm Nextel, he says he has more than tripled that figure and is on his way toward reaching his goal of making a six-figure salary by next year, five years out of school. Hardly the slacker image of Generation X. “In some ways the economy made me want to work harder,” he says.
Job success stories like these are becoming more common as the market improves, notes Megan Liberman, executive editor of Swing magazine, the New York-based publication for people in their 20s. “It was certainly rocky going,” says Liberman, who entered the job market in 1990, just as the recession was hitting. “I had a lot of friends who took part-time or temp jobs and a lot of them got laid off.” Many of her contemporaries opted for alternative tracks, working as free-lancers or with tiny startup companies to get by, she says. Today, a lot of those self-starters are getting snapped up by growing companies desperately seeking workers in the low unemployment rate economy, but some of the young workers are jittery about potential layoffs and about giving up a degree of control over their work to fit into a corporate culture.
“Some of the entrepreneurs have learned the financial and social perils of being on their own, and they’re happy to go back into a company,” the magazine editor says. “But their expectations are lower. They don’t expect much from the job market. We all know it’s here today, gone tomorrow.” Liberman says that despite the negative outlook about employers, the group is individually very optimistic. “They have no faith in the job market as a whole, but they personally expect to do very well.”
Martha Conlon, another refugee from the graduating classes of the early 1990s, took a customer service job with no benefits and salary below $19,000 a year. The Loyola University graduate lost the job when the company closed during the recession. Today, the former liberal arts major is a public relations associate at Morningstar, the fast-growing financial publishing house in Chicago. “I feel like I’ve caught up,” she says. “The job market is better now, and I’m getting paid better.”
