Don't be so ridiculous I hear you cry! You MUST have a job!
I like so many twenty somethings was thoroughly encouraged to go to university (an easy and obvious choice for me as a linguist), took an extended gap year after my studies and approached the working world with gusto and enthusiasm.
5 years, 5 jobs later, I can tell you that my gusto and enthusiasm is seriously waning. I'll start from the beginning.....
The thing is, so many of us are graduates. We were the last year before tuition fees tripled or quadrupled or whatever it was, so that in turn has devalued my Bachelors degree in Languages and really a lot of people my age have Bachelors degrees and I'm no so special as I might have been/will be in the future.
I don't have a "vocation" as I'm not a lawyer, doctor, plumber, or shopkeeper which is both fantastic and terrible at the same time. Fantastic because I open to more possibilities, terrible because where does one start?
With this is mind, I started working in international education which I've enjoyed but just hadn't quite fit. Fixed term contract after contract, sales, recruitment, admissions, I have got myself a really broad knowledge of the education sector.
To get to the point - last year, I took an administrator role in education. I'd been travelling, had taken 5 months off and need money, surely this would be fine? I flew through the interview process (hindsight this should be a cause for concern) and started a few weeks later.
Within those first few weeks, I realised I'd made a horrible mistake. I was grossly underemployed for this role - my tasks including filing and printing things A LOT, and my opinion wasn't required for anything. I'm an extrovert and a people person and in many respects a terrible administrator as I am highly creative and like a fluid and flexible approach for Work.
I tried and tried and tried and spoke to my managers and took on more and it just didn't work, consequentially lowering my self-esteem and generally making me look back on the whole experience as more of a mistake than a learning experience.
So I sit here now having been unemployed for 4 months and still I don't regret leaving that job.
Now I'm applying for jobs more suited, yes its more challenging and I am having to exercise more patience and perseverance than ever but its exciting going for interviews and meeting people about roles that I believe to challenging and rewarding and much more suited to me as a professional. In my case, it really was much worse being underemployed than unemployed and I suggest that others who are under utilised and unhappy in their current do to the same.