20190418.0430

I've noted before that LinkedIn puts advertisements for courses it offers in my feed on the platform. Some of them are sensible offerings for me, things I might consider sitting for it time and resources allow. (They do not currently do so.) Not all of them are; one that showed up for me recently was a course called "Customer Service at Your First Retail Job." Why it appeared for me, I do not know; I do know that it shows a remarkable misunderstanding of my career trajectory, unless it is trying to tell me something about which I ought to be profoundly worried.
My first retail job was some twenty years ago, now. I worked in a grocery store that catered to the elderly population of my hometown--one that even now gets described as a retirement community (with the swift pushback against it by those who do the work of taking care of the elderly). I did so under the tutelage of others who had long been in such jobs, and I did relatively well in the work. (Of course it did not result in much monetary advancement; I started at $6/hr and ended at $6.25 several years later. Yay.) And I've worked other, similar jobs since; I spent most of my undergraduate years working in foodservice, and, even now, I do a lot of customer service in my work, though the circumstances are slightly different because the power dynamics are different, as I believe I have noted in this webspace before. But the recitation of experience is meant to note that I am far past my first retail job, making a course in it seem like a poor fit for me.
To be fair, LinkedIn is offering to let me view the course for free. Perhaps it is an acknowledgement that the system's algorithms are able to anticipate that I will be hiring entry-level people, which is not untrue. If matters proceed as I expect them to do, I will be hiring and training an administrative assistant, and such positions are usually considered entry-level. Mine was. So it may simply be that the platform is overgeneralizing with me in the same way a child who is learning verb tenses in modern English will say a person "eated" rather than "ate" lunch; it may be that the platform is trying to help me and simply has not figured out the best way to do it with the resources it has (or maybe it is the best, and I expect more from it than it can deliver).
But there is another possibility. Not too many years ago as I write this, there was a bit of a flap when the purchase-tracking and marketing software at Target stores determined from a particular person's purchases that she was pregnant--and sent mailers to the address she shared with her parents, who were surprised at the (ultimately correct) revelation. I have to wonder--my paranoiac tendencies demand it--if I am getting a similar message, if the information I have on the platform and other materials it aggregates (I am somewhat prolific online, as might be guessed) have concluded that my time in my present position is soon to be done and I will need to start again.
It is not a comforting thought. But maybe I need to sit for the course, after all...