Many students who graduated from San Jose State remotely in spring said they are experiencing a tough job market amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“I definitely am nervous about searching for jobs,” SJSU alumna Shelley Lin said. “I actually had a plan to work with the Apple
Wellness Center [after I graduated] but unfortunately they’re not even open due to COVID.”
With a public health major and minor in biology, Lin said she hasn’t been looking for jobs because there’s too much anxiety searching during a time where few are available.
Even though Lin is currently completing her six-month post-graduate internship at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center while receiving a viable income, she said she feels uncertain about her chances of obtaining a job after she’s finished.
Like Lin, music education graduate Arnie Co said he has faced a turbulent time during the pandemic because finding paying-opportunities has been complicated.
“For performances you generally get a lot of work by word of mouth,” Co said. “I’ve gone from maybe four gigs minimum before the pandemic per month, to at the most one and it’s been online, like playing Zoom concerts.”
Co said he used to depend heavily on live performances for income and his instrumental teaching job, but with the current social distancing guidelines in place, he and many other performance-based artists are finding themselves in a financial bind.
“I’ve gone from 15 to 20 students, all the way down to seven students because not a lot of students like to learn online and music is hard to learn online,” Co said.
He said that because of the pandemic, he had to cancel enrolling for graduate school. His back-up plan of getting a job in the public school realm also fell through because of budget cuts.
SJSU economics lecturer Ninh Nguyen weighed in on the difficulty of finding employment during the pandemic, saying that it might cause long term effects for many recent graduates.
“You have a lot of mid- and upper-tier skilled workers entering the unemployment ranks,” Nguyen said. “So now you’ll have the new grads [and] as they’re graduating they have no skill . . . and you’ll have more people piling into the workforce while employers are keeping a very low absorption rate of these potential employees.”
He added that while graduates are educated, they are competing with those who have the same degree and 5 to 7 years of experience. “The entry level jobs will now be overwhelmed with those who have experience,” Nguyen said.
He also said there is a pattern of people reeducating themselves to find jobs in areas of work that grow during recessions, such as the Great Recession in 2008 when people had to transition out of being realtors, loan officers, escrow officers and occupations of that nature.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the 2008 housing crisis took 665,000 jobs while the coronavirus pandemic has cost nearly 40 million jobs as of Aug. 15. SJSU’s Career Center is hosting virtual job fairs and providing aid through SJSU Cares to assist current students.
The SJSU website states that “SJSU Cares assists students who are facing an unforeseen economic crisis by providing direct support and referrals around basic needs including food, housing, emergency assistance and more.”
While SJSU Cares is not available for past graduates, they still have access to the Career Center’s job fairs and networking resources such as Handshake and the SJSU Alumni Association.
Career Center Director Catherine Voss Plaxton said she encourages current students as well as recent graduates to utilize the Career Center virtually, even if it is difficult.
“It’s definitely a challenging time in terms of employer engagement but we keep doing outreach and we’re hosting the same events as last year,” Voss Plaxton said. “We got tons of information on our website about all of this.”
Voss Plaxton said she is aware of the differences in the remote interview process and urges applicants to adjust themselves in order to maintain professionalism, such as wearing interview attire, having a quiet background and treating the interview as if it were in-person.
