dirkmirk wrote:

Its hard to cry tears for lost Australian jobs when you look at the ridiculous wages that makes these jobs unsustainable, for instance I work in a menial factory job but made $432 for 8 hours on Sunday at double time rates, yesterday for the Queens birthday public holiday another $540 at double time and a half, only made $216 at normal rates today and will be another $648 for Wednesday,thursday,friday $1,846 for a weeks work probably about $1,700USD.

What do I do? Vaccume floors, scrub grime and grease off machinery check control points in the manufacturing process, though of late Ive been mostly cleaning toilets/offices & Lunchrooms really only work 7 hours a day with 1 hour paid lunch and I only live 5 minutes from work.

🤣 we do the same sh!t that Eminem was doing in 8 Mile except he was probably working twice the hours for a quarter of the money.

While it sounds like you might be a bit overpaid, you're welcome to come to the US where, as you said, you'd probably make $6-$8 an hour US for the same work (for non-union labor, at any rate). You might still make time and a half or double time on a major national holiday, though. Unlikely that you would be able to earn overtime any other time of the year.

I had a neighbor who I figure must have been pulling in north of 100k US given he regularly worked 80 hours of overtime every month. I'm not sure how he managed to get that much OT, it seems like his company would be trying to limit OT as much as possible. Maybe they just had that much work available? I don't begrudge him the wages, he was doing hard, menial labor but if I could increase my income that much you better believe I'd work an extra 4 hours a day and pull a 12 hour shift on Saturday as well.

Anyway, seems like there must be a happy medium between making so much money it is uneconomical for the employer to keep you and being paid so little you have to live with 4 other guys in a one bedroom apartment. From what I've observed, business leans toward solution number 2 every time.

PeterLI wrote:

That is good but I would strongly recommend you complete MBO4 / HBO / WO ASAP anyway. Better safe than sorry. 😀

Ah, everyone keeps saying that 🤣
and although I realize this might be a problem when I ever need to find a new job, I don't really care about that right now. Maybe later sometime.
It would be nice if I could get a diploma/degree just by doing my job, but I don't think you can get anything above MBO3 that way (which may be "something", but in practice is equivalent to having no education at all...)

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jwt27 wrote:

Ah, everyone keeps saying that XD and although I realize this might be a problem when I ever need to find a new job, I don't re […]
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PeterLI wrote:

That is good but I would strongly recommend you complete MBO4 / HBO / WO ASAP anyway. Better safe than sorry. 😀

Ah, everyone keeps saying that 🤣
and although I realize this might be a problem when I ever need to find a new job, I don't really care about that right now. Maybe later sometime.
It would be nice if I could get a diploma/degree just by doing my job, but I don't think you can get anything above MBO3 that way (which may be "something", but in practice is equivalent to having no education at all...)

What the hell is this gibberish language you guys are speaking? I don't have my "biz speak to English" rosetta stone handy. Can you translate? 😀

I am from that same country (The Netherlands), and even I don't know ANYTHING about different MBO grades. Just looked it up: MBO equals "upper secondary education (ISCED-3)".
It is right below the HBO bachelors degree, which is again a bit below a university Masters degree. AFAIK.

I had sorta sussed out that it must be some sort of licensing or professional cert but I'm glad you didn't know either, Gerwin 😁

I worked in the industry but my IT career never "took off". Looking back I just didn't have the combination of personality, ambition and commitment required. I was happy to "just work". My last IT role was in sales which I found very interesting. It helped me become more outgoing and learn how to interact with customers.

But every year our sales would go down. The products we sold got cheaper and cheaper and became available through large department stores. Our superior service and knowledge wasn't worth the premium in our customers' eyes. Luckily I did go to Uni straight after school, so I had lots of options. I decided to switch fields and went back to University for 1 year to complete a Diploma of Education. It's my third year now as a Computing and Maths teacher.

While it has its challenges, the job is very secure. I'm permanently employed with the department and chose a school in the country (a hard to staff region). Australia is very big, so "in the country" is a 10 hour drive from Perth. There are incentives such as higher pay and very cheap, tax-free housing. On the other hand the students are quite weak and come from backgrounds that don't value education very much. But I don't regret my decision, the place I left has gone from having 3 sales people to just 1.

In Australia blue collar workers can indeed earn very good money. It makes teaching tough as students don't see the point in education because they can just "drive a truck" and earn more than the teachers. But as has been pointed out, this can't continue forever. At some stage it will have to all come crashing down.

When young people ask me about IT career choices I really have a hard time. Many kids these days are "into computers", but that isn't going to get them work. Schools do not value Computing and often a Business or Arts teacher takes Computing classes and delivers content totally irrelevant to Computing. We are getting a new Australian Curriculum which could change things, but my school certainly isn't interested and neither are most kids. They prefer cooking because they get to eat pizzas and muffins or metal work because they want to end up with an apprenticeship in that field. Computing is often the "dumping ground" for difficult students who didn't get into other classes.

I recommend anyone young to get qualified in a regulated industry (an industry that requires specific qualifications or certificates for being allowed to work). More and more jobs are are disappearing from the face of the planet and it is a real worry. I see jobs related to health as good options for the future. We have a large ageing population that will need looking after. But it could also just mean that people will just become more efficient.

Maur1wurf1977: That explains why you've said the in past that you live in the middle of no-where 🤣

Kids today just know how to use the computer (or shall I say their touch device) for games and social applications. They have no idea how they actually work. They will still need to be though how to write a properly formatted letter in Word or text processor.

I don't have an education within IT, but my high skills have certainly opened alot of doors. That was my strategy from the beginning. IT savy people normally gravitate towards those specific career paths. I didn't want to make my hobby my work. Though it is kinda becoming it since I'm the guy out in the organization the IT guys always use for testing purposes and ask how applications could be improved. I speak their language (and I'm certainly better when it comes to hardware 🤣) so I guess it makes it easier than asking mrs. Olsen which has no clue.

Me and 2 other friends are neighborhood computer consultants, and something I decided to do a few months ago was take these old 386/486/Pentium/ect. machines off peoples hands and give them newer Pentium D/Celeron D machines with Windows 7 (because at the time our school was tossing those machines) and collecting just took off from their.

I still don't thing IT is a bad career, one guy in my TAFE course was a car mechanic and said he was sick of coming home filthy. You cant argue with that logic. Its just IT has become such a throughway industry. both in support, doesn't work? cheaper to buy a new one, or lets just off load it all into the "cloud" (I hate that marketing word cloud)
But I've seen the people getting into IT are different as well. Before it was mostly people who where genuinely interested in computers. Fair few of the students that come though where I work don't have any real interest in how something works. To them its just a job with good pay. Again you cant argue against that especially as a lot of the work is just basic troubleshooting, till its decided to simply replace it.

Armankordi, I like your business idea! The get what's potentially a more useful PC, and you get some sweet old machines! nice

jwt27 wrote:

Last year I quit my education early (for various reasons I don't want to discuss) so was left with no diplomas or degrees. Still, after being unemployed for a year I recently found a job as electronics repair technician where I have to troubleshoot, fix and test all sorts of proprietary systems ranging from 8086- to Pentium-class hardware. Needless to say I really love this work so far, it's fun, varied and challenging and you learn new things every day 😀

More correctly: "you learn OLD things every day" 😁