Squeezed by Alissa Quart

Author:Alissa Quart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

7

The Second Act Industry

Or the Midlife Do-Over Myth

In a Boston classroom in autumn, rows of students were dressed up in the corporate equivalent of their Sunday best, a patchwork of different epochs of business wear: flats and beige hose, a mustard-yellow dress suit with embroidery, white dress shirts, and reading glasses. These students were not in their teens or twenties, though, but in middle age. They weren’t learning a traditional curriculum either. Instead, a passel of women who called themselves “career navigators” were instructing them in the art of job interviews. If a job interview didn’t land them a job, exhorted one bespectacled navigator, flashing a warm toothy smile and clad in a pencil skirt, “don’t blame yourselves!”

Each attendee had paid $20 to learn things that might sound self-evident on first blush: crafting a LinkedIn profile, mastering interview techniques, and fighting the blues at mini-workshops with titles like “Battling Negativity.” In the other rooms, a professional photographer was taking corporate headshots of the participants. They sat somewhat awkwardly, one by one, under the hyper-lit white umbrellas. These were middle-aged and middle-class people, a mix of white, Asian American, and black. Most were battle-hardened by job loss and underemployment. They were asking the career navigators how to get—and keep—jobs. They believed that maybe they still had a chance for a do-over, a new start. They had to have another career or they’d fall into penury. That many of them were parents made their quests even more urgent.

We were all at the RE:Launch conference, held by the Boston-based nonprofit JVS, or Jewish Vocational Services.

What hurdles were they trying to overcome, the career navigators asked.

“The world has evolved beyond me,” answered Tamara Spencer, a former aeronautics engineer in her early fifties who was dressed, like the others, in a job-interview-ready cotton jacket. “I don’t know any technical engineering for this millennium.”

“I haven’t worked in seventeen years,” said another woman, in a reedy voice. She looked at her hands. “I’ve taken care of my family, but I am a trained lawyer. I am anticipating rejection from employers.” A pre-K teacher, gray-haired and soft-spoken, confessed that she kept losing teaching jobs within a year. A computer programmer said that he was a negative person whose inner voice was murmuring, This is never going to work out. (I had assumed that coding is an entirely safe profession, but I soon realized that it’s one that pushes out older people, fixated as it is on youth and the latest in technological know-how.) A former restaurant general manager and sommelier was also out of work: he confessed that he had just lost the lease to his apartment and was homeless.

The career navigator said that she could help all of them. “We promise not to just tell you to just be happy or to smile,” she said.

The restaurant general manager had managed to maintain an exquisite appearance; wearing a blazer and striped European designer socks, he reminded me of the central character in a French film I had seen

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