Evaluating the 1980s, And The Major Aspects Of The Workplace That Have Transformed Since That Time

Some of us longer in the tooth who have lived through the 1980s may have mixed views about the decade, and a lot of things come to mind about it. We were fortunate to have some top-class pop music at that time. There was a certain female PM, of course. Unfortunately for some of us that was not such a happy period, with critical levels of joblessness. There was, in the eighties, no Internet business and no online jobs as exist these days. However, openings were available for people who were willing to take them. If you were happy to do whatever you could, it was possible to find short-term work in an office, work from home, or move around to find seasonal placements.

After graduating with a degree in Geography and discovering there was no great call in the workplace for geographers, I was left among the large numbers of people out of work. However, I signed up with an agency that was recommended to me. After a short while the agency contacted me about a short-term opening. In this post I was operating a printing machine in an engineering works, and after that I served as a clerk at the Tax Office (needs must, as the saying goes!). In the following years I did short term work as a stock clerk, and typing data into a computer. The positionswere as a whole pretty humdrum, and I was unlikely to become rich working in these roles, but they were work nonetheless. Within a short time from the conclusion of one job, the telephone would ring, and I would get given work with a different company.

Much has changed since those times. The World Wide Web has transformed the way jobs are advertised, due to online jobs boards competing with agencies. We are currently dealing with a joblessness crisis as bad as in the eighties. However, Internet business creates the ability to work from home instead of in a normal workplace in newly created online jobs that did not exist before.

In 1988 I was offered a permanent job and worked without interruption up to the present recession. While I became one of the thousands of workers who were made redundant over the past year or so, I did not feel pessimistic, since I thought I could again resort to taking up short-term employment. As before I signed up with the jobs agencies. However, the offers did not come. I could not find even the variety of casual jobs that I was able to do back in the eighties. As for finding my next permanent job, I reckon I have a better chance of being chosen to play for England in the 2014 World Cup.

It would not be before I learned of online jobs and was offered the chance to work from home as a self-employed consultant, that I could find a way out of indefinite joblessness. Following a modest payment for a distance learning course, I was able to establish my own Internet business giving guidance to website owners on raising their website’s search engine profile. Remuneration is on the basis of results, verifiable proof that a website has been raised to the top page of a Web search. However with the appropriate ethical techniques, this is possible within a reasonable timescale.

The benefit of running your own Internet business is that you are free to choose your own hours, and your own work methods. It is an engaging as well as inspiring area of work, and definitely better than adding up stock at the factory or punching data on a keyboard from Monday to Friday, as I did in the past. Once I was given the chance to work from home in the search engine field, I never regretted it. I don’t even think I’d want to go back to my former permanent job, if if they asked me to go back. And as for my recollection of the 1980s, well it wasn’t all gloomy: the great music of that time will remain with me always.