Day: August 12, 2025

• Allyson Noonan struggled to find work after graduating around the beginning of the Great Recession.
• She said she eventually found a job and built a successful career — but not the one she dreamed of.
• She shared five pieces of advice for recent college graduates who are struggling to find work.

Allyson Noonan, 39, is a PR consultant and adjunct professor based in New York. In July, Business Insider wrote about how Allyson Noonan and seven other Americans who graduated around the Great Recession navigated early career challenges — and what Gen Z college grads can learn from them. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

It was 2008. The job market had taken a turn for the worse, and I was living off retail shifts and babysitting gigs.

But after more than 100 job applications, I finally caught a break — from someone who’d already told me no.

Now, I’m a PR consultant and an adjunct professor at the college I graduated from. Anxious students constantly ask me for my advice on finding a job in this tough market. Here’s what I tell them.

No one was hiring at the start of the recession

I had graduated from Marymount Manhattan College in December 2007 — the first official month of the Great Recession — with a degree in communication arts. While I had excellent internships, few companies were hiring when the recession started, so I worked part-time at Anthropologie and babysat.

I already lived in New York City because of college, and I spent seven months aggressively looking for a job. I hoped to land a public relations role.

I mostly used the popular job sites at the time — Media Bistro, Craigslist, and Entertainmentcareers.net. I got a handful of interviews from those applications, but struggled to land a job.

A rejected application eventually led to my first job

One day, someone who interviewed me for a job I didn’t get contacted me, saying she had a friend in the industry looking for an entry-level position that she thought I’d be a fit for. This position turned out to be my first full-time job at a PR agency, which I started in June 2008.

This experience taught me that it’s wise to take every interview you can — even if you’re not sure it’s a good fit.

While I was happy to be working, my first position was definitely not my dream job. All my college internships had been in the entertainment and the arts, including one at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

This agency specialized in wholesale technology, and their big client was a company that made deep-sea underwater cables — something I honestly didn’t really care much about. I also had to accept an annual salary of $28,000, much lower than the salaries of many of my peers who graduated just a couple of years ahead of me. I believe my lower pay was due to the recession.

However, the job helped me learn the foundational PR skills that have served me well in my career, including how to communicate with clients and run meetings. I also received good mentorship that turned out to be very valuable down the road.

I eventually built a successful PR career — but not the one I’d dreamed of

Despite the rough start, I’ve had a successful career in public relations that’s spanned more than a decade. However, I do think the Great Recession ruined my chance at my dream of working in PR in the entertainment industry.

That said, I think my experience allowed me to learn about other interests I didn’t realize I had. I now do a lot of healthcare public relations work, which I don’t think college-aged me realized I was interested in.

The experience of looking for my first full-time job during a recession also built resilience — and pushed me to explore other options besides work.

In the fall of 2009, I started a graduate program at University College Dublin. I decided to enroll because, even though I was employed, I thought it would be difficult to find a higher-paying job in the market at the time, and it was less expensive to attend graduate school in Ireland than in the US.

My advice for recent grads

While my first job paid little, I eventually caught up to the pre-recession market salaries when I returned to the workforce, though it took me a few years to do so.

I always tell my students to take a deep breath and that things will work out, even though it may take longer than usual to start their careers; the market will eventually swing back. I also suggest taking a job that might not be in their dream industry if they think they can learn valuable skills.

Additionally, I tell them that this could be a great time to have a life adventure, particularly if they’re interested in going to graduate school. I share my experience of studying in Ireland and how I am still close with many of the friends I made during that time.

For recent graduates who want to enter the workforce right away, keeping in touch with college professors — particularly adjunct professors and those currently working in the industry — could help them find work. Ask your past professors if they’d be open to introducing you to their industry friends; I’ve had students ask this of me in the past, and it’s helped some of them land roles.

My last piece of advice is to take every interview you can, even if the company isn’t looking for someone right away or if you aren’t sure you’re a fit. You never know what it might lead to.

• Sam Altman said if he were 22 right now, he would feel “like the luckiest kid in all of history.”
• Altman says he’s not as worried about entry level white collar jobs as some of his fellow tech CEOs.
• Instead, he’s concerned about how much late-career employees will want to adapt to AI.

When it comes to AI, Sam Altman says the kids will be all right.

Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said he’s more worried about how older employees will adapt to AI changing the workplace than college graduates. His view contrasts with how many of his competitors and others in tech think about the next five years.

“I’m more worried about what it means not for the 22-year-old, but for the 62-year-old that doesn’t want to go retrain or rescale or whatever the politicians call it that no one actually wants,” Altman said recently on Cleo Abram’s “Huge Conversations” YouTube show.

Altman said jobs will definitely go away because of AI, but young people are positioned to weather the changes better than others.

“If I were 22 right now and graduating college, I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history,” Altman said.

Overall, he said, the breadth of what AI can do makes this a powerful moment for those willing to seize the opportunity.

“There’s never been a more amazing time to go create something totally new, to go invent something, to start a company, whatever it is,” Altman said. ‘I think it is probably possible now to start a company that is a one-person company that will go on to be worth more than a billion dollars. And more importantly than that, deliver an amazing product and service to the world.”

Fellow tech CEOs, including those in AI, don’t share Altman’s optimism. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said earlier this summer that AI could wipe out as much as half of entry-level white collar jobs in the next five years. It’s a potential catastrophe that Amodei said the tech industry and policymakers are not doing enough to prepare society to handle.

Beyond five years, Altman said, it gets harder to predict what the world will look like due to the rapid changes his field is spurring.

“In 2035, that graduating college student, if they still go to college at all, could very well be leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some kind of completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job, and feeling so bad for you and I that we had to do this kind of really boring old kind of work and everything is just better,” he said.

• Mira Lane believes in the value of people with non-technical backgrounds in tech innovation roles.
• Lane, who founded Google’s Envisioning Studio, said you need to have success in your field first.
• She also suggests having an opinion on relevant issues and exposure to the industry.

If you know you want to work in tech, majoring in philosophy or art history might not be the most straightforward route to take — but it could still get you there.

Just ask, Mira Lane, founder of Google’s Envisioning Studio, an AI innovation prototyping lab that explores the impact of tech innovation on society. Her team includes a range of documentary filmmakers, philosophers, researchers, and product design, many of whom started their careers in completely different disciplines.

Lane, Google’s vice president of Tech and Society, said if you want to transition into tech from a different sector, you should first “be really confident and great in the space you’re in.” If you’re a philosopher, for example, that means having a strong foundation of the theory or domain that you study, she said.

You’ll likely need more than a liberal arts background though. Lane said those coming from a non-traditional background still need to have exposure to technology.

“You also have to have an opinion or a point of view on tech, and that means that you have to use it in some way so that you understand the nuance,” Lane said.

As a visual artist herself, Lane said that if you don’t use technology, “it’s really easy to be afraid” of it. Once you have experimented with technology, Lane said you can actually form an opinion on what it is and isn’t great at. That, she said, is what makes non-traditional people “really valuable” to tech companies.

“Not only are they bringing this other discipline, style of thinking, but now they’ve played with the technology. They have a point of view on it, and that becomes really interesting for us,” Lane said.

Others at Google have taken a similar path. Steven Johnson, now the editorial director of NotebookLM, began his career as an author. His interest in AI and technology eventually led him to write books on the topic and start a company before joining Google to help build its AI-powered note-taking tool.

Another leader at Google started with a background in journalism and filmmaking. He later transitioned into tech by earning technical certifications. Today, he applies his creative and technical expertise to lead AI sales in Google’s media, entertainment, and gaming sectors.

With a seemingly endless number of AI tools available — and many of them free — Lane said now is the perfect time to experiment with new technology. Anyone can create apps and build tools in a way that was previously difficult, she said.

“The barrier to entry, and the friction is so low at this time that it’s actually really easy just to get into the tech world,” the VP said.

Lane said that the people who thrive in these settings are those that deal well with ambiguity and change. She said that may mean picking up new technologies or going back and forth with a chatbot to learn new topics.

People with a growth mindset “do really, really well in a domain that’s always growing and learning and evolving,” Lane said.

As a tech giant with the resources to run experimental projects, Google likely has a larger number of non-traditional roles than typical at tech companies, Lane said. But she believes there should be more of these positions in general.

“There’s definitely a chance for this type of people, with these types of backgrounds, to be in the tech world,” Lane said.