Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Job seekers Mary Johnson, 29, of Dayton, and Cherretta Taylor-Hankerson, 53, of Dayton, recently decided to seize the opportunity for new careers. Both are former home health care aides who attended a Sept. 29 Dayton Public Schools jobs fair at Gorman School, looking for jobs in nutrition services.
Johnson said she has worked at a local distribution facility through a temporary staffing company for several months after leaving the health care job over concerns about catching COVID-19. She said she has no benefits, no paid leave and no chance for advancement.
Credit: JIM NOELKER
Credit: JIM NOELKER
Johnson’s looking for a change, and said she’s optimistic the school district will hire her.
“I’m going to be the lunch lady,” Johnson said.
Taylor-Hankerson said she took care of her husband as his home health aide until his death.
“Since he passed it has sent me back out into the work world,” Taylor-Hankerson said “(The home health company) has clients that I can get, but I’m kind of going to opt out going into a home right now.”
She has worked since she was a teenager and knows how to get a job.
“Keep going. Be persistent,” Taylor-Hankerson said. “Don’t give up. Because eventually you’re going to hit the bullhorn.”
Chamot has worked since he was 15 in his hometown of Rochester, New York, at Palmer Food Services, where he did the “normal teenager stuff” of stocking shelves and running the cash register. Next summer he will do a for-credit internship at the company’s corporate offices.
“They finally saw I was in college and that I do solid work at my university, and they wanted to give me a shot in their corporate office,” he said.
This year Chamot won a spot at the Goldman Sachs Undergrad Virtual Insight Series, a multiday interactive program where he learned about daily life at the firm, technical skills, resume tips and the world of investment banking. That experience will help him on his job hunt, he said, as will networking at career fairs.
“I know you may not want to spend time going to career fairs when all your friends want to play Xbox,” Chamot said.
He said job seekers may sometimes have unrealistic expectations about how much money they’ll make or what kind of job they will do.
“That’s absolutely a problem. I think I’m guilty of it myself,” Chamot said. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have dreams. I want to be rich, too. But at some point everybody has to realize that you have to start somewhere and a lot of those starts don’t involve six figures.”
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