Clearly I Have Made Some Bad Decisions

I'm becoming very depressed lately, and it feels very much as though I made a bad choice 18 years ago, when I took on my first ever job.

I'd been unemployed for most of a year since finishing my A-Levels, visiting the job centre every fortnight to collect my benefits. All my attempts to get the sort of job I wanted had failed so, in the end, I picked some jobs at random from their boards and applied for the ones that looked interesting.

Shortly thereafter, I got an interview at a printworks. They needed a junior for their pre-press section, outputting film, etc from an imagesetter. It sounded interesting, so I took the job when it was offered. It turned out there had only been a couple of other applicants, and one of them smelt like a chip shop.

I started small, but learned a lot very quickly and, within a couple of years, had become the go-to guy for just about every problem. I was forced to do overtime on one occasion, because of a particular problem, even though I was on the morning shift, and two other members of staff were otherwise pretty much unoccupied.

The printworks went down the tubes eventually, though, and another branch of the company bought the pre-press equipment and me - by that point the only member of staff left - and shipped us off to a new location, just down the road, to continue providing the same service and learn a whole load of new stuff so I could support my new colleagues when they got busy.

When I left that job, I spent about nine month unemployed because my confidence had been destroyed, and I hadn't a clue what I wanted to do next.

And now, after 11 years in 'the next job', I'm in the same position.

Add to that, while I have an impressive skill set, I am - and always have been - the kind of person no-one actually advertises for, no-one thinks they need until I've been there for a couple of months, by which point I've become indispensable.

But I look through job listings for the sector I've worked in for almost 20 years, and all anyone's looking for is Salespeople, or Designers with experience in areas I've never been near. Employers are laying off people with my background, or just not replacing them when they move on.

I've had one two-day job and one interview from one of the agencies I've signed up with, the other agency told me I'm not suitable for a job I know I could do, and so didn't put me forward for it. As galling as it is to be told I'm not suitable for the kind of job I turned down this time last year because it didn't sound busy enough, it's a huge blow to my already flagging confidence.

Trust me to decide to work in an industry that was only ever going to be downsizing...