However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

Stephen Hawking
Story 1: Abhinav was educated by his family with great difficulty and sacrifice. In 2020, he wanted to start earning for the family as he wanted to lift his family's financial status. Now due to coronavirus, this cannot happen.

Story 2: Palak wanted to start her job in the year of 2020 but fulfil her financial goals but unable to do so due to coronavirus.

There are endless stories of the people who have started their first job within a period of 3 months down the line but now this seems to be full of uncertainty. We all are worried about the economy, labours and other some affected communities of India but nobody is mentioning about the students who were about to get the graduation degrees this year of 2020. This is the year for them to get their first job. These are the people whom we would call FRESHERS in the office.

Entire Media and society are more concerned about the layoffs and the working professionals losing their jobs (which is also important to solve) but the Fresh Graduates or Freshers are the least discussed community around us.

We should not see them as mere students. They are the future of India who are into a very difficult puzzle to solve: Job Search. They are really in a difficult spot to start preparing for their future. Looking into the current scenario, they will find it very difficult to build strategies to start their first job. We should look into the areas which they need to deal with this year.

Tougher and bigger competition

Competition for the graduates of 2020 will be versatile as compared to last year. This year you have to compete with more fellow students because:

1 Lack of campus placements and competitive exams

2 Lack of students opting for higher education due to health and economic reasons.

Along with this you need to compete with professionals who unfortunately lost their jobs and are desperate to go back to work. This amount of competition is itself a very difficult part of the equation to solve which can not be skipped. Companies will also prefer a laid off professional over a fresher because of less requirements of initial training.

Delayed Final and competition exams

Most of the finals exams for the graduation scores would happen in the same period of the year. Due to coronavirus, almost all the exams are delayed including the competitive exams. Eligibility criteria for the competitive exams where graduation is mandatory, you won’t be able to apply due to delay in final exams of graduation. This creates a gap of time in the preparation of competitive exams due to non availability of books to prepare. 

Negligible or No Hiring

When you look at the competition and see very few companies hiring freshers for the position, the difficult puzzle gets even more difficult. Few industries that have taken a massive hit are aviation, hospitality, Leisure Facilities, tourism,automobile, automobile parts and luggage industry. These are the common industries which would require a large junk of freshers every year but this year they may do a very low number of fresher hiring this year. 

No Certainty of Improvement

We all are eagerly waiting for the situation to get better. Lockdowns to go away. The situation for freshers will not change overnight. This bad phase of the economy can take a year or two to come to the normal. This is my assumption.  We all can hope that I am wrong and things come to normal very early than this period. Still some situations which are mentioned above will persist as the coronavirus phase continues.

Solution?

Stop setting goals. Goals are pure fantasy unless you have a specific plan to achieve them.

Stephen Covey

After discussing all the bad aspects of the coronavirus crisis for freshers or fresher graduates, if I say that this is an opportunity for all the freshers. Yes, you heard it right. This is an opportunity where you can get ahead of the competition and even the fellow student whom you are very scared to compete with, because today you both are standing at the same juncture. Due to this coronavirus, you have got a good time to prepare and strategize your job search techniques which make stand out and above the average freshers.

We will discuss the strategies and techniques of job search for freshers in the next post.

What do you think of this coronavirus crisis? How does it impact you?

Advertisement