Your job is on the line. Unemployment figures released this week were nothing short of awful. What job advice can be given without serious worker growth? And as usual, providing personal finance advice, real estate advice and consumer advice on the Ilyce Glink Show May 6, 2012 on WSB Radio.

Your job is on the line. That’s the only conclusion I can draw after this week’s disastrous unemployment numbers. It turns out that in April 2012 we added just 115,000 new jobs, way below expectations. I guess it’s better than going negative but it’s clearly just not good enough.

We seem to be following the pattern of the last three years: big job growth in January followed by less in February and then in April/May/June we start to fall off a cliff. The unemployment rate in April fell to 8.1 percent and that sounds nice until you confront the fact that the actual number is closer to 15 percent. 385,000 people simply gave up hope of working again and left the workforce. Some other nasty numbers:

  1. If you are 25 years or younger, the unemployment rate is nearing 25 percent.
  2. We are now “enjoying” the lowest percentage of work aged people employed since 1981 – 63 percent.
  3. We are still missing six million jobs just to get back to where we were five years ago.

 

Many people have now been out of work for years. How can you give job advice when there’s no jobs to be had? Construction workers, local government employees, teachers – there has never been a recession where it took this long to get back the jobs.

So what do we do? Callers and I discuss.

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