What Tarmacking Teaches You (And When to Stop Doing It)

Graduation happens in November. By January, the gown is at the dry cleaner and you are in a suit, walking. Moi Avenue. Kenyatta Avenue. Haile Selassie Avenue. Into lobbies with security guards who have seen a thousand brown envelopes this week alone.

"I would like to drop my CV for any available positions."

The receptionist takes it without looking. It joins a pile. You walk out and cross the street to the next building. Repeat.

This is tarmacking. The Kenyan word for the post-graduation job hunt, named after the tarmac roads you walk while doing it. It is a rite of passage. A test of character. A thing your parents did and their parents before them. It is also, in 2026, an increasingly broken strategy that produces diminishing returns.

This is not to say tarmacking is useless. It teaches you things. Real things. But like any lesson, there is a point where the lesson ends and you are just repeating the same exam without studying for a different one.

1. How to handle rejection. The first ten rejections hurt. The next fifty sting. After a hundred, you develop a thick skin that nothing else in Kenya gives you. That skin is useful. It carries you through job interviews, client pitches, business failures, and every other moment in life where someone says no and you have to keep going. Tarmacking builds rejection tolerance that a campus education never touches.

2. How the job market actually works. You learn that most jobs are not advertised. You learn that who you know matters as much as what you know. You learn that your CV looks identical to 500 others. You learn that the job description says "degree required" but the person who got hired had a referral from inside. These are painful lessons, but they are accurate. And once you know how the game is played, you can choose to play it differently.

3. What your degree is actually worth. On campus, your degree felt like a golden ticket. After three months of tarmacking, you realise it is more like a bus ticket. It gets you on the bus, but so does everyone else's. What determines your seat is what you can do that the other 499 passengers cannot.

There is a line. On one side, tarmacking is uncomfortable but educational. On the other side, it is destructive.

The line usually appears around month 3 to 6. You have sent out 200 CVs. You have attended a handful of interviews. You have heard nothing back from most applications. The phone stays silent. Your M-Pesa balance drops. Your confidence drops faster.

Signs you have crossed the line:

• You are doing the same thing you did in month 1 but expecting different results.
• You avoid social gatherings because you do not want to answer questions about your job search.
• You wake up without a plan for the day because every plan feels pointless.
• You have stopped applying altogether but still tell people you are "looking."
• You feel shame, not just frustration. Shame is the sign that tarmacking has moved from challenge to crisis.

If you recognise yourself in two or more of those signs, the strategy has failed. Not you. The strategy. There is an important difference. You are not broken. Your approach needs changing.

Pivoting does not mean giving up on employment. It means changing what you bring to the table so that your next application looks different from the stack.

Option 1: Learn a hard skill. Coding, data analysis, graphic design, video editing. Pick one. Commit to it for 3 to 6 months. When you apply for jobs again, your CV has a skills section that most competitors do not have. A coding bootcamp like McTaba (26 weeks, KES 120,000 with M-Pesa instalments) turns you from "BCom graduate" into "BCom graduate who can build web applications." That distinction gets callbacks.

Option 2: Freelance while hunting. Stop waiting for someone to hire you. Start doing paid work, even small work. Build a website for KES 10,000. Manage a small business's social media for KES 5,000 per month. Do data entry on Upwork. Freelance income does two things: it keeps you alive financially, and it adds experience to your CV that "unemployed since graduation" does not.

Option 3: Volunteer strategically. Find an organisation whose work aligns with your target industry. Offer to work for free for three months. This is not exploitation if you choose it deliberately. You are buying access: access to professionals, to references, to experience, and to the network where real job openings circulate before they hit job boards.

Option 4: Go back to structured learning. A short course at KES 2,999 to KES 10,000 is not a failure. It is a reset. McTaba's Tech Foundations at KES 2,999 teaches you coding basics in weeks. That is cheaper than two months of matatu fare and printing costs for CVs that nobody reads.

Extended unemployment affects your mental health. This is not soft talk. It is data. Studies across Africa show that prolonged unemployment among graduates is associated with increased rates of anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal.

In Kenya, the stigma is doubled because the culture equates your worth with your productivity. "What are you doing?" is the most common greeting, and when the answer is "still looking," the conversation dies.

If you are deep in the tarmacking phase and feeling genuinely low, not just frustrated but hopeless, here are things that help:

• Talk to someone. A friend, a sibling, a counsellor. Befrienders Kenya (722 178 177) offers free listening support.
• Set a daily structure even if you are not employed. Wake at the same time. Exercise. Work on a skill. Structure fights the drift that makes depression worse.
• Stop comparing your timeline to others. Social media is a highlight reel. The classmate who posted about their new job did not post about the eight months of silence before it.
• Do one productive thing per day. Not ten. One. Build a small project. Apply for one job. Take one lesson. Small actions are medicine against the paralysis of unemployment.

You are not lazy. You are not a failure. You are dealing with a structural problem in a job market that produces more graduates than it has positions for. That is not your fault. How you respond to it is your responsibility, but the situation is not your fault.