Hi there,
Today I want to talk about something that I have thought about many times. In Venezuela, the goal was always to study as much as possible and have as many languages as possible, since it is the only thing that would guarantee you to get a good job and have a lot of money. If you didn’t go to university, it was thought that you would be nobody in life.
When I went to live in Spain, I realized that most of the people neither finished high school nor had foreign languages. How was that possible? The explanation that the Spaniards themselves gave me is that before the crisis, people went to work right away because there was a lot of work and because there was always someone to “plug you in” (term used in Spain) somewhere. It was also a time when anyone got a good salary, even if they didn’t even have a high school degree. In addition, it was easier and more comfortable to work than to get a university degree.
After the crisis, work began to be scarce and all these people without studies and without languages had to be trained. When I started doing the master’s degree, I began to study German and Portuguese, and I was surprised that there were so many older people taking the course and it turns out that they were all unemployed trying to learn a language to see if it would allow them to get a job.
In fact, it made a great impression on me that only a few of my classmates spoke English, when I spoke English since high school.
In Spain, after the crisis, courses of everything you could imagine proliferated and to do any basic job, they asked you for a thousand titles and as many languages. Imagine that, to work knocking on doors selling things or to be on the street handing out brochures, they asked you for a master’s degree. When in any normal country, a master’s degree guarantees you a managerial position.
I realized that in that country it was more important to have a “plug” than to have studies and experience.
After so much time looking for a job that could be called “normal”, I thought, what is the use of studying so much? if they then hire someone without education just because they have contacts.
I have a friend who went to Australia to take an English course, she liked the country and stayed trying to get permanent residence. As she says, this is the most difficult path because you must take a thousand homologation exams and, in the meantime, she could only work as a dental assistant or hygienist and not as a dentist.
Even so, with the few hours she could work a week and with that lower category, she earned much more and lived much better than me in Spain with my approved degrees, languages, and permanent residence.
Last year she had a conflict because the law changed, and she thought she would have to leave Australia. Due to language and nationality, she would have no other option than to go to Spain. She went on vacation and after seeing how that third world worked, she was depressed. I told her to do her best not to end up in Spain.
I remember that she told me that she had done everything wrong, that she should have devoted herself to “looking for a husband like everyone else” and she would have avoided all those years of studying, taking exams and spending money.
I understood that frustration so well.
A friend from Venezuela studied gastronomy and since she saw that she did not like the jobs she got, she studied advertising as a second career. Still, she has never found the job of her dreams. Even so, a high school classmate who never studied, repeated a few times, and never went to university, had set up a restaurant in Barcelona and was doing very well.
Many of those of us who ate our books, who studied several languages and who tried to prepare ourselves as much as possible, have not had the jobs or the opportunities that we would have liked. Therefore, the expectation of reaching 30 years of age, at least with their own home and with economic stability, has often not been fulfilled.
Sadly, what is worth more is that you are touched with the magic wand at birth, or that you have parents with a lot of money, or contacts that get you good jobs or a lot of wit to make the most of it with the least effort.
Even so, I am still proud of everything I have studied and what I continue to learn. In a normal country, this is an advantage over the rest. It is also true that I can move around the world and get a job wherever I want thanks to the languages and the training I have, something that a person without languages who did not even finish high school cannot do.