Hello Evil HR lady,
I need your expert advice. Should someone at age 52 go to college (online) to get an associates degree in HR? Is it unrealistic to think I have a good opportunity to gain employment in this field? I do value your opinion!
Thanks for listening.
Yes, and no. It depends on how much money it costs to go to the online college and what other experience you have.
I imagine that the online school will be fairly inexpensive in which case go for it! (If it’s Harvard online and you’re paying $30,000 for the privilege, forget it.)
HR is a great field, but it’s not a super high paying field. Entry level jobs are usually administrative assistants (don’t knock it people, you can learn a ton in such a job) or low level staffing jobs.
Many companies require a 4 year degree, but many don’t. Get your associates degree and find a good job. Then keep going in school.
I don’t think age should be a hindrance to your career. At 52 you have some experience (with life at least, if not a career)and (hopefully) some level of maturity. Even if you plan to retire right at 65, you’ve still got 13 years to work. (And many people are working well past 65 these days.) Why wouldn’t I hire someone under those conditions?
Good luck with school. Do your homework on time and be nice to your teachers.
More-education-to-get-a-job: This is often a bad idea. It delays actually looking for a job. It puts you in debt. It builds possible false expectations that you are doing something that will “inevitably” lead to work.
Good advice to go out and try to get a job, while going to school part time.
Field Experience is play a vital role to get a job. I mean to say More education required for getting higher position.
"I will tell you why I am afraid of hiring "overqualified" people.
1. You'll get bored. If you have a PhD in astro-physics and you tell me that you want to be my admin, I'm pretty sure that you'll be bored to tears."
I will tell you what you should be more afraid of, dear. The PhD in Physics who joins the rest of his friends and colleagues who've discovered that they have no hope of finding employment in this country, no way of knowing where their next meal is coming from, as they go overseas to find whatever employment they can. There's one technology above all others which is always being eagerly sought, and I think you know that it isn't the making of CAT scan equipment.
As 911 should have shown you, a pair of oceans no longer offers much defense from a very unfriendly world. Imagine what that day would have looked like had Al Quaeda had access to thermonuclear weaponry or worse, and there is far worse to be had. Picture your cities, every place you have ever known, maybe even every place you've ever heard of, vanishing in a blaze of light and a flash of fire, boiled off the surface of the planet as those survivors left in the more remote areas wonder who the lucky ones were.
Radiation poisoning is an interesting way to go. At first, you do no more than cough up blood and excrete it, because your intestinal lining is sloughing off. Your skin follows shortly thereafter, the cells dividing more slowly as they do. The real fun comes 48 hours later as dementia sets in. One might imagine that one couldn't be conscious of the experience of one's brain and spinal cord slowly dissolving, but one can.
The half-life of the best known components of the fallout produced by the fission device powering the fusion blasts that would be propelling the entire Germanic language family to extinction is on the order of 30 years, so the areas struck wouldn't be habitable again for centuries, even if those scientists, driven into exile by sheer despair, didn't tell their new employers about the wonders of casing one's devices in radiocobalt. Which, of course, those who went overseas probably would.
How interesting it would be to see what was left of most of the United States in those cleaner centuries to come. I wonder what the descendants of the survivors, in the unlikely case that there were any, would call the place. I wonder if they'd even still technically qualify as human. Centuries of mutation can work wonders, just not wonders that many people would want to look at before eating.
As your little daughter or niece looks at you through empty eye sockets, blood bursting out through as her burnt skin cracks with every attempt she makes to talk or even breath, and she asks you why, why did this happen, rest assured that you will have a good answer. While surely, you will say, it is a shame about American History being over and all that, and rather frustrating that the now destroyed country doesn't even have the satisfaction of hitting back, terrorist groups not really having homelands as such, one should remember one thing.
"What's that, mommy", she might ask, between spasms as she brings up something that you pray is vomit.
"Well, I might have been mildly inconvenienced had we not driven those folks into the waiting arms of the enemy, because you know, disappointment can be so contagious. Poor people can really bring my mood down, you know?"
Wonderful blog! I found it while searching on Yahoo News.
Do you have any suggestions on how to get listed in Yahoo News?
I’ve been trying for a while but I never seem to get there!
Cheers