We always welcome a Letter to the Editor to share with our readers. If you have something you’d like to share, get in touch. This one from ‘Devon’. Ed
I originally wrote the bulk of this as a response to OnTheWight’s post about the rise in job seekers allowance claims earlier this week. They got in touch to ask me to expand upon my comments for a discussion piece. I hope it gives you an insight into what myself and many of my peers face.
A little background
I graduated from university in the summer of 2012 with high 2:1. I almost immediately moved back home to Shanklin due to living costs and difficulty in finding work at such short notice.
At the beginning of 2013 I made the decision to start saving money from any employment I could find and make the jump back to the mainland come winter, in hopes of finding work and just generally progressing with life.
Now, I would like to point out that I am not one of those who feels that menial work is beneath them. I’ve worked whenever I haven’t been in education since 2005, and that has come to include work in retail, hospitality and the media.
Only every seasonal work
Despite this, almost all of the work my friends and myself managed to find has been seasonal.
We’d find employment with hotels and cafes, bars and tourist attractions. It’d pick up around March or April time and die out around September or October. We’d save money, relax on the beach because the beach is free and, come August time, start sending out applications for winter work.
It almost never worked which meant – you guessed it – signing on.
Never-ending cycle
Come the following March we’d all be five months older and just as poor as we were the previous year, having used most of the summer savings just to stay afloat.
This isn’t a plea for sympathy – it’s just how it is – but it was the straw that broke the camels back for most of us. We had to leave.
And so we left
Johnny B and his girlfriend left first. Both of them come from tightly knit families but she’d recently been made unemployed and he’d struggled to put his degree in engineering to use until receiving a graduate position on the south coast.
Well, with the Island losing so much of the manufacturing industry over the last few years, who could blame them moving? Danny left for similar reasons.
As for myself, I felt disconnected from my target audience and heavily demotivated by months of rejection. It’s easy to whittle away the years in that little cycle of seasonal work.
A world of difference
Since moving I’ve managed to find regular employment whilst progressing nicely with my own work which, if all goes well, will help me find employment in my desired field.
None of us would like to move away from our families and friends – especially when it costs so much to travel to and from the Island – but honestly, there isn’t much choice. Moving is fast becoming a necessity, not just a choice.
But is that really the way it should be?
