Hi all,
I'm helping create a short documentary on what it's like looking for work in Australia.
What happens when you have a guy like me apply for 1000 jobs?
We hired ten local participants to help us and, using my own details (rip future career prospects) they each applied for 100 jobs ranging from dishwasher with a dumbed down version of my resume, to executive with a gilded version. We also interviewed them about their own experiences and this is where the scope of our project changed...
We very quickly realised that this was a human centered story. Their experiences gave us hope but also were heart breaking, and so we set out to research, interview, and apply to see and feel what it's truly like for Australia's youth and older Australians.
Underemployment and unemployment is an endemic, systemic problem well beyond an individual's capacity to fix. Can people get work? Sure. But what kind, and at what cost? Has the nature of work and what we define as "a job" changed? If so, how and what does that mean for our collective future? And is just applying as required in Mutual Obligations really that useful for the individual, or even business?
The director and I have been working on this for the past four months. We've interviewed everyone from participants to politicians across the spectrum, and as we're wrapping up filming shortly, but just thought I'd give one last heads-up to anyone interested in having their say via a short interview over Zoom or if you'd rather a write up of your experiences.
We want to hear your stories.
Hopefully as we finish this later this year, we'll do an AMA (if I figure out how to run one fml), so stay tuned for that.
Of course, once it's all tickety-boo we'll be realising it for free for you all to enjoy[?]. And who knows, maybe when someone tells you to "Just get a job!" you can link them the video...
