West Virginia Job & Career Market


West Virginia is a wonderful state, that I want to see prosper.  However, that's difficult whenever there aren't enough careers available. As someone who is currently attending college and has a job, I know this quite well first hand. I applied to dozens of jobs, on and off for months, before getting the best job I have ever had working with some of the best people I have ever known. We had a period where everywhere was looking for workers, but nowhere was hiring. 

And as a reminder this is for minimum wage to just above minimum wage work I am talking about right now. The kind of work that uses my future degree (business management with a marketing minor) is few and far between. In order to get a place of my own, in order to start a family, in order to survive the vast majority of my generation will be required to leave West Virginia for work. I'm sure previous generations struggled to find work, and had to work very, very hard; but the facts of the current economic status of the United States and West Virginia clearly show that there is a cost of living crisis in West Virginia made worse by lack of jobs.

Recently, many companies have made high profile investments into West Virginia. The problem is they are offering hundreds or thousands of jobs to a group of people 10 to 20 times that number. Not to mention the lack of job diversity, something that not only means certain degrees become useless, but that our economy is far more fragile than it should be.

This is a very chicken and the egg style issue: there needs to be people for there to be jobs, but there needs to be jobs for there to be people. Under the current economic system we have, built by decades of mismanagement by various political and economic actors, this will never improve. We need smart economic management to invest in our people and our job market in a way that actually works unlike those currently and formerly in charge.

I have more I want to say on this topic, but this gets the point across. Let's invest in the economy (the right way). For now, I thank you for reading & hope you will share my blog with someone you think might be interested. Please follow me on social media @Lopez4Change. 

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