Don't be afraid to take on low-skill / low-pay "menial" jobs.

I went from a highly technical (Engineering) job to being unemployed for quite some time, due to a bust in my industry. This led to months of being unemployed, and a metric TON of job searching.

In the meanwhile, I also called temp agencies, and agreed to take "anything" that came my way, just to do something, really.

This led to a string of "shitty" jobs, often one-time assignments. And even though I was highly educated, with good work experience, it was mostly manual labor, or quite menial jobs.

Did I feel like a failure? Sure. I had imagined something else. But I always do my best, no mater how boring or uninteresting the job is. I was also sending out applications during the evening, so I figured something would come along, sooner or later.

But there's one thing I had not foreseen: The sheer number of "There HAS to be a better way of doing this!" moments.

A ton of these jobs are being done the same way they were done 20-30-40 years ago. Minimal digitalization. "Process optimization" is foreign.

For example: I worked at one warehouse, which was part of a leading big box electronics store, where 90% of registration and data tracking was done manually, by paper. Employees registering data with their one phones, sending important information over snapchat or FB chat.

One time we had to manually count a whole truckload twice, because the guy in charge had lost his checked inventory list (paper), but before he got to enter the data on the computer.

Or the fact that expensive cargo (cellphones) would get shipped in one large box, then "hid" in the rest of the cargo. These boxes would sometimes contain hundreds of phones, and be worth hundreds of thousands.

They contained no tracking systems. No anti-theft systems. No-nothing. And it's still like that.

So, if you're really struggling to come up with ideas, I highly recommend to just dive into some jobs, and see what pops up.

It's easy to get accustomed to always having cutting-edge tech at your fingertips, if you work in tech - but huge parts of large industries are still very primitive, and ripe for change.

And you won't really discover those things, unless you actually work there (or happen to be a consultant, trying to identify all these things).

EDIT: In case someone misunderstood my post - I'm not advocating people to pursue these jobs, but rather that if you find yourself in the position of taking jobs like that, you absolutely should look around for things that can be improved. There's always some potential for improvement to be found

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