California: The Worst Place to Look For a Job

If you are looking for a job, DON’T come to California unless you absolutely must have good weather and the best selection of fresh produce. It has been 6 months since I graduated with my MBA from Cornell University and I find myself still looking for a job. I will admit that things have been more challenging than I had originally anticipated and I think a major factor is because of my unwavering desire to live in San Francisco.

California, with a jobless rate of 12.3%, is tied for the 3rd highest unemployment rate in the country. However, once you factor in total population, California kicks everyone else’s butt in terms of number of unemployed people living in the state. There are more jobless bums (roughly 4.5 million) living in California than there are total people living in the state of South Carolina. Ultimately, this means that the amount of competition that I am facing for new jobs is that much more intense than anywhere else in the country.

All you 2010 MBAs who are still unemployed at graduation:  take heed and choose wisely when you decide where you want to live after B-school. Many companies right now will not consider you if you are out-of-state because they don’t want to pay for relocation. And as you can see, there is a huge variance in unemployment across the country. If I could do it again, I still would have moved to San Francisco because the avocados and tomatoes alone make it all worthwhile.

Comments

[Meytal B]

Hey, who asked you nicely to stay in NYC? Although avocado is a good enough reason to move...

Miss you!

[sean Neri]

While you come from a highly regarded school.. I don't think it necessarily means your intelligent. The most important thing is not your degree or the school you went to, but ultimately your drive and dicispline, creativity to get what you want. Also as far as these statistics are concerned, you are not looking at the types of people that are unemployed. Many homeless people come to California because it is a great state to be homeless, because of the great weather. If you were homeless, wouldn't you come to California? I would. I would try and look in the data what percentage of people with higher level degrees are unemployed. looking at general statistics is useless.. also many of them are discouraged, which messages up the data. You should have learned that in your MBA program.

[Alexander Pan]

I agree that the most important thing about getting a job is not your degree. It is often about WHO you know rather than WHAT you know.

That being said, the unemployment rates that I used from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) do not include homeless people and in hindsight I should have listed my data source in case people wanted to dig deeper into my tongue-in-cheek analysis.

According to the BLS, unemployed people do not have a job and attempted to find a job during the prior 4 weeks, and are available for work. Therefore, discouraged people also would not be included in the data that I used. Lastly, I used the unemployment rates to provide comparative statistics between states, not to provide exact figures of how many people are unemployed in each region.