heh. This is so totally true it ain't funny. In white collar employment, it's about "networking" for jobs more than anything else. And that means being inoffensive but not so unmemorable that no one pays attention.
In this state, the system of claiming unemployment benefits is ridiculously antiquated, completely geared toward manual labor and barely cognizant of, if not outright hostile to, online applications, the concept of networking for a job, or the use of headhunters and recruiting agencies. For example, in IT, you get jobs mostly via headhunters. But a headhunter contact is not considered an acceptable method of contacting an employer. It's also not good enough to apply to an employer's online application site. (NB: the survey doesn't ask the questions this way, but if you live in this state, the state defines what adequate job searching is, and it's easy, in this state, not to meet their requirements and, thus, to think that you should answer that you didn't seek employment during that week - or whatever - even if you applied online for a job at Target. In this state, that online application doesn't, technically, count. You need the name of a person, their phone number, the address, and/or an email address.)
Also, I've been thinking a lot about employer's claims that people aren't skilled or lose their skills if they've been unemployed. This is complete bullshit. For example, I've been spending time boning up on some of the latest developments that I've NOT been able to engage in at my job. Often, IT jobs are about maintenance of legacy systems, with stable (non-startups) companies afraid to invest in newer technologies. Waitressing? Cooking? Working a factory line? Running a cash register? Dusting endcaps? Sweeping a floor. using Excel? None of those skills erode by that much that I couldn't easily go back to doing them within a day or less.
Lately, getting my portfolio online again, I've also used some tools I've not used in years. I fired up Indesign, Illustrator, and my hand coding skills in HTML, CSS. I thought... crap, I haven't done this in 18 months. dang. Hope I'm not that rusty. Well, it's muscle memory. It just comes back to you, the same way playing tennis just came back to me after years of not playing. There's a way in which your hands just remember how to hit the right combination of keys to create an effect in Photoshop or the way writing a line of CSS just spills out of you. And if the software changes, it's not that hard to look up the new combination of shortcut keys to use.
I can't fathom that it is any different for someone who's in inside sales: how on earth can you get rusty at picking up the phone, glad handing at a manufacturer's showcase conference, yakking up customers for contacts?
Or an administrative assistant. Really? S/he spends her 2 years of unemployment never using Word or Excel? Or her organizational skills? Her phone skills or ability to put off people who want to see her boss? These skills don't erode to a degree that the degree that it would matter to performance. It takes 6 months for most employees in white collar jobs to get up to speed on par with the person who had been doing the job previously.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)