. The recession lasted 18 months, and during that time, millennials did our best to find work in a market that simply wasn't hiring.
Those early post-grad years were a grind, but I didn't leave empty-handed — and neither will you, Gen Z, as you navigate the coronavirus pandemic and the economic downturn that's come with it. The 2008 crisis forced me to become creative and agile and I'm still grateful for the work habits I formed and realizations I came to during that period. My generation survived, and I believe yours is even better equipped than ours was.
The temporary jobs I worked in my early twenties were weird but they were also fun and flexible. Free yourself from the idea you need to find something permanent fast, and devote the time and mental energy you save to figuring out what you want to do in the long term and how to get there, even if it takes a little longer.Of course, not every temporary gig was a winner. My first post-college job was at a daycare center inside a Chicago gym.
"The only recession-proof career," Breen said, "is one that is resilient and ever-changing." And the best way to build resilience is to exercise your tolerance for risk. Making an active decision to leave that job in a horrible economy was terrifying. But it also allowed me to set a personal boundary for what I was willing to tolerate from an employer and showed me I could recover from bad situations.