As the semester wraps up and finals loom in the distance, I decided that my life wasn’t busy enough and recently began my quest to secure a post-undergraduate future in this (oh how do I put it nicely…) “volatile” job market (read: FUBAR).

While some of my peers are, and rightfully so, incredibly stressed out about searching for jobs, I’ve actually found it to be a pretty interesting process. I think discovering, in the next few weeks/months, where I will be and what I will do there is inherently exciting.

It helps that I have a sense of what I want to do in the next few years, but ultimately am very open to any opportunity; moreover, I really have no overwhelming preference regarding location (Be a lion tamer at a zoo in Tashkent, Uzbekistan? Yes, please!).

Yet, there are minor speed bumps.

For example, browsing through various job search resources such as PennLink, Idealist.org, and SimplyHired.com, I’ve noticed the trend that job descriptions are increasingly becoming more and more complicated.

No, I don’t understand what it is to “provide clients with design guidance and project management focused on VoIP, trading floors or contact centers, IP network design, Data center planning, Cabling/infrastructure and Wireless Networks, Audio / Visual Systems”. Nor do I want to take the time to decipher what it means to “assist the actuarial consulting staff in a variety of actuarial applications, including financial modeling, loss reserving, financial and regulatory reporting…”

Yawn.

I’m tired of reading hours upon hours of job summaries and, in the end, not having the faintest clue as to what some of these positions even entail.

Whatever happened to the good ol’ days when job descriptions were so simple that you could ask someone’s last name and find out what their occupation was? In the middle ages, you could walk the streets of the Holy Roman Empire and say hello to Becker (baker), Fischer (fisher) Wagner (wagon maker), and of course, Schumacher (shoemaker).

Sigh. I miss simplicity.

Signed,

Taehoon K. Blahgher

Photo via Flickr

Tags: Holy Roman Empire, Idealist.org, Jobs, PennLink, SimplyHired.com

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.