Teachers in Transition

Teachers in Transition - Episode 30 - Why People Don't Change Careers Even When They Want To

October 17, 2019 Kitty Boitnott Season 1 Episode 30
Teachers in Transition
Teachers in Transition - Episode 30 - Why People Don't Change Careers Even When They Want To
Show Notes Transcript

There are many reasons why people hesitate or procrastinate when they want to change careers. They don't know how or where to start. They "hope" that an opportunity will find them or that someone will recognize what they have to offer and they will get tapped.

Rarely do those kinds of things happen, however. The Job Fairy is not likely going to come knocking at your door unless you are making some sort of effort on your own. And there is no Prince coming to "save" you like the Prince in the story of Cinderella.

You must be willing to take some sort of action on your own, but it cannot be any sort of action. It needs to be intentional and it needs to be based on understanding what goes into a successful job search.

There are many moving parts to every successful job search. You need a resume that speaks to the job you want not the job you have had. You need a compelling cover letter and a stellar LinkedIn profile. You need to understand the Applicant Tracking System and how to interview well.

And the list goes on. Kitty Boitnott is starting a new Group Coaching Cohort of her "Jumpstart Your Job Search" program soon. If you would like to know more about what is included in the program, check out the program components here:  https://teachersintransition.com/jumpstart-your-job-search-premium-program-for-job-seekers-and-career-changers. She is also offering a special price for the fall, so if you have questions about the program or the price, email her at kittyboitnott@gmail.com.

Kitty Boitnott:

Are you a teacher who's feeling stressed out and overwhelmed? Do you worry that you're feeling symptoms of burnout or are you sure you've already gotten there? Have you started to dream of doing some other kind of job or perhaps pursuing a whole different career, but you don't know what else you're even qualified to do? You don't know how to start a job search. You just feel stuck. If that sounds like you, I promise you're not alone. My name is Kitty Boitnott. I'm a career transition and job search coach and I specialize in helping burnt out teachers just like you deal not only with the stress and overwhelm of your day-to-day job, but to consider what other careers might be out there waiting for you. Join me for"Teachers in Transition." In some episodes I'll be speaking to stress management techniques and how you can manage your stress on a day to day basis. In other episodes I'll be talking about career transition. What tools do you need to be successful in a job search when you're moving from one career into a totally different track? These are questions that you need answers to and I can help you find those answers. My name is Kitty Boitnott. Welcome to"Teachers in Transition." Welcome back for Episode 30 of"Teachers in Transition," the podcast and the YouTube channel. Thirty episode. Wow! That feels like some sort of a milestone, so welcome. I'm happy that you're here listening or watching or however it is that you're hearing this message today. I want to talk a little bit about career transition and what stops people when they are miserable in their current job or career. What stops them from doing something about it? I've heard all sorts of reasons and rationales and excuses, frankly. And I'd like to share some of them with you today to see perhaps if you are on the fence about wanting to make a career transition or a job change and you're, you're not doing anything about it right now. Perhaps one of these reasons, rationales, excuses will resonate for you. And perhaps I can help you to make a decision one way or the other. For example, most people will start at not really having a full-fledged desire to make a change. It just had this sort of twinge of, you know, gosh, I'm all what this job, the way I thought I would or I don't love it the way I used to or I think I may have made the wrong career choice. Or in the case of my teacher peeps, they haven't changed but the career has, the profession has, frankly. Teachers are being treated less and less like they are professionals and more and more like they are just replaceable widgets. Capable of reading a script and keeping their class under control. If they can't do that, then they are moved out and replaced with someone else. And and frankly, and this isn't an indictment on of anybody in particular. What I'm hearing is that classes are larger and harder and harder to control--manage. It's not even about control, it's about classroom management issues because frankly we are stuffing too many kids in a classroom and expecting teachers to do miracles. And miracles often don't happen. They sometimes do. I mean we hear the occasional miracle story. But the fact of the matter is that teachers aren't being offered the resources, the support, and they're not being set up to succeed. Instead, many of them are being set up instead to fail. S, the profession is letting them down and it's, it's beginning to wear on them. I read recently that burnout may not be so much b urn"out" as"build up," which means more and more things are placed on your, your list of responsibilities. Y ou are asked to do more, more and more, and it's less and less manageable. And so while you begin to feel like maybe you're burning out, perhaps it would be possible just to delegate some of that work or to decide which work has to be done and which work can be delayed or avoided. A nd, and perhaps help to avoid t he burnout. But if you're feeling like there's something off here. I'm not as happy as I used to be, and you began to maybe daydream about, there must be something else"out there." I don't know what it is. I don't even know how to find it. But maybe there's something else that I could be doing. The thing is most people don't do anything about that feeling. They just sort of continue to plunge ahead. They're hunkered down trying to get through the week. They're too tired on the weekend to even think about it, frankly. And so week after week, month after month, year after year goes by and you don't take charge of your own life. You just continue to do something that doesn't feel 100% good for you, but isn't, isn't making you so miserable that you're sick yet. The key word there being"yet," because sometimes people come to me and it's already beyond the past. The point of them being sick, they've come down with some particular illness that's definitely stress related. Sometimes it's anxiety, depression. It might be something like fibromyalgia or even Lupus. Um, some auto immune disorder, arthritic, um, rheumatoid arthritis can be aggravated by stress. It can, that can be, uh, flares can be caused by stressful events. Diabetes can be aggravated by stress, high blood pressure, and the list goes on. Gastrointestinal issues. And when you've weighed it to that point, it becomes even more urgent that you find something to do differently and yet you don't really feel like looking and you don't have the energy to look for something new. So, I recommend that you'd be proactive and that if you are beginning to experience that feeling of, gosh, this just isn't what I thought it was going to be, it's not what I want anymore. Maybe it was okay in the beginning, but it's less and less okay with each passing week, month and year. Then it's time to do something about it. And, and what I hear people say is, I don't know what's out there. Even if I did, I don't know how to start a job search. I don't know where to begin other than I think I need a resume. The problem with a resume based on the work you've done in the past is that it's a chronological listing of work history and duties and responsibilities probably related to your previous job. And if you're wanting to make a complete break and change in your career, you don't have anything to support your viability as a candidate for the new job that you want if you're approaching your resume in the wrong way. You don't how to build a stellar LinkedIn profile. You may have started an account, but you haven't done anything with it really. You don't really know how to write a cover letter. You don't even understand what the Applicant Tracking System is or what it does. You don't know that you can use other social media platforms to help you find potential jobs out there. You're not aware that hiring managers are looking at your social media platform, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other places to see who you really are. What kind of persona do you demonstrate for your family and friends? Do you have strong religious or political opinions that might rub people the wrong way in their workplace? These are all things that new job seekers aren't really aware of and don't even know are potential landmines that can blow up even the best intentioned job search. So they don't have where to start. They don't know how to start. They're sometimes just hoping that something will come along. You know, perhaps you're hoping that someone will see what you have to offer and tap you. You know, offer you a promotion, offer you a, uh, an opportunity to break free of what you're doing now and you're just kind of waiting like Cinderella waiting for the Prince to come and rescue you. That's not likely to happen. Frankly, if you're not actively involved in your own job search, it's unlikely that the job fairy will come knocking at your door to ask you"would you like the career?" So you have to put some skin in the game, you have to be willing to do something on your own accord. Else those opportunities don't often just land in your lap. I mean, you may hear the occasional story of that happening, but that doesn't often happen. So in my line of work, I, you know, I've been through the career transition thing. I've told the story and if you're, if you're not familiar with my story, you can go to"teachers in transition dot com(http://teachersintransition.com) and read about how I started out seven years ago as a, as a former educator finishing up a 37-year career as a elementary school librarian and in my distant, distant as sixth grade language arts teacher and how I decided in the summer of 2012 that going back to a middle school to teach English was totally out of the question for me. I was not capable of taking that on. I didn't have the physical stamina, I didn't have the emotional resilience. I didn't have the desire to want to go back to dealing with middle schoolers. I just didn't have it in me. I was finishing up my fourth year and last year as president of the Virginia education association and I was exhausted on every possible level. So finding the inner resources that I needed to be able to deal with sixth, seventh and eighth graders. It wasn't going to happen. Learning as souls, not so interested being involved and testing at the middle school level. I don't believe in the testing. How could I be engaged fully and with integrity in a system that I no longer had any faith in? So I decided to take early, early retirement and I've since then we invented and we told myself completely. And it didn't happen overnight. It was a process. It took place over the course of a couple of years, frankly, but it started with that first decision. The decision of I can't do this anymore and once I committed to, I can't do this anymore. That met, okay, what else can I do? What's out there that I would be interested in doing? And that was elusive for me as well as it might feel for you. I didn't know what was"out there." I didn't know what I might be qualified to do besides being an educator and I've shared with my, my new friend, Suzanne Klein who's getting ready to do, she's ready, getting ready to host the Institute for Educators. It's an upcoming event that I'll be talking more about in the next couple of weeks. She, I told her when I was talking with her about my career transition that frankly I was over educated and under qualified to do anything outside of the world of education. And yet I didn't want to be involved in education anymore on any level. So I had to start from scratch and, and go inside of myself and get real with what was it that I wanted to do next and how did I want to contribute and who did I want to continue to work with and who did I not care if I ever worked with again. And out of all of those questions came this endeavor that I'm involved in now. Where I help teachers who are experiencing their own level of burnout, discover and re, rediscover their own passion, their own purpose, how to connect that passion and purpose with a new endeavor as far as work so that they can't leave teaching as something that they used to do something that's a part of their past and move into a brand new future. I've had one client tell me,"thank you for being my Harriet Tubman leading me out of this world of education." So, when you are on that fence and you're thinking about making a change, but you have more excuses and rationales for why you're not doing anything. Instead of biting bullet and deciding that it's time to do something, I want you to really think about how your life will be different a year from now based on what you decide to do today. You can decide to stay put and a year from now you'll be in the same or similar situation. Teaching a different class, different faces, pretty much the same routine. It might even get worse instead of better frankly. Mos, most of the time I hear from people, it's not getting any better. It's just progressively getting worse from one year to the next. More paperwork, more reports, more meetings, more fill in the blank. Never less than anything. And one of my biggest complaints with the board of education when I was President of the Virginia Education Association was they were constantly piling on more and more stuff for teachers to do. And they never, never, ever took anything away. It was ridiculous. Still is. So. You're in charge of your own life. You're in charge of your own career. Nobody. Nobody's forcing you to stay where you are. If you're not happy, that's on you frankly. And I, I'm, I don't mean to sound harsh about it. I'm just being real. I'm being frank. If you are unhappy in your job right now, it's because you've chosen to stay in an unhappy situation. Other people make the change all the time. Look around you. People who were there last year, no longer there. They've moved on. They found something else to do. Why not you? Because you didn't do anything to help move yourself in that direction. You're waiting for the job fair. You're waiting for the proverbial Prince to come along and tap you and say,"Hey, I think you'd be a great fit for this job." Just doesn't happen that way. Now there are people who are found passively through LinkedIn, but only after they've set themselves up for success on LinkedIn by promoting the achievements and the activities that they're involved in make them look like a viable candidate for a job that are recruiters looking to feel. So that can happen. But you're not intentionally setting up your LinkedIn profile if you haven't decided that that's something that needs to be done. You can waste all kinds of time sending out resumes. I've heard people tell me this. You know they sent out a hundred resumes. I haven't even gotten that single interview. Well, that's because you resume isn't the right fit for the job that you're applying for. You need to work on the resume. Sometimes people get the interviews, they get actually do manage to get invited for the interview and then they never hear anything. It's because you're not talking about yourself in the right way. You need some interview coaching. You need to be prepared for the kinds of questions that they're going to ask you, and frankly, too many people avoid or don't understand the need to research the company that they're going into interview with so that they go in blind. They go in thinking that all they need to do is talk about themselves. No. You need to be able to ask questions about the company at the end. The most important part of any interview or the questions you ask at the end. Did you know that maybe you did? Now you do. The most important part of any interview, not so much the questions that they ask you. The most important part of the interview was the questions you ask them based on research that you've done about what it is that they do, what program or product do they offer? What are some of the challenges that they're facing? What is a major promotion that they've got coming up and how could you fit yourself into that? What are some trends that you've recognized in that industry that you'd like to be a part of? If you don't prepare those questions before you go in for your interview, you're blowing a huge opportunity. And many people don't know that they're even supposed to do that. So there are so many different moving parts to a job search, and I also hear from people, I'd love, Kitty, I'd love to be part of your program. It sounds like you know what you're talking about. And one of these days I plan to sign up, but I right now don't have the money and I don't have the time or I have the money but I don't have the time or I have the time, but I don't have the money. You get it. And here's the thing. Until you are in enough pain, you probably won't ever have enough money. There's always something else you can be spending your money on. But if you wait until you're in so much pain, you don't have the brain bandwidth that you need to invest in a successful job search. So I don't recommend that you wait until you're in that much pain, frankly. And if money is an issue, well I work with people on their money issue. You need a payment plan? No problem. You don't have to plunk down a big chunk of cash right away. And I offer a money back guarantee. I, I'm mentioning this right now because I a brand new cohort that starting in the next week. So if you think you might be interested in making a change and you've been on the fence about signing up for my program or any program. Maybe you are not convinced that it will help you to find what it is that you're looking for. Well, if it's a, if there's a 60-day money back guarantee, what did you got to lose? And if there's a money problem, lack of money issue, if there's a payment plan, what have you got to lose? So if you think you're interested and ready, I mean he's more than just being interested and you wouldn't be listening to this podcast or watching this YouTube channel if you are interested in the idea of"teacher in transition." You are, you're listening either because you're stressed out teacher and you're looking for some help with your stress or your look. You're listening because you have an interest in becoming a teacher in transition to a new, more successful, happier career. So if, if you're, if you're ready, let's get started now. Do for yourself today what your future self will thank you for. And if you want to be in a different place a year from now, you need to start taking action today. Now. Because this is a process. You will not be able to flip a switch and decide,"oh. I want a new job." Boom. You have a new job. It doesn't work that way. If you're still on the fence and want to know more about the program that I offer, please do. Feel free to check out my website and check out the page called"jumpstart your job search program." That's where all of the benefits, all of the features of the program are listed. Ignore the prices at the bottom of the page because I am offering a Fall special. So if you're interested after you've looked at the page and you want to know what the Fall special prices, then you email me it kittyboitnott@gmail.com and ask me what is the Fall price for the"Jumpstart Your Job Search Program" and I'll be happy to share that with you or answer any other q uestion that you may have. Do y ou for yourself today, what it is that your future self will. Thank you for and that's it for today. Have a great week. See you next week. So there you have it, an episode of"Teachers in Transition." I hope you enjoyed the information and I hope you'll plan to come back. Please subscribe to"Teachers in Transition" so that you can be alerted of future episodes. And let me know if you have any questions or topics that you would like me to specifically cover in a future episode. I'm more than happy to help with individual questions as well. So email me at KittyBoitnott@BoitnottCoaching.com. If you are interested in finding a new career or just enjoying your life more, this is the place to start. Hi, I'm Kitty Boitnott and this is"Teachers in Transition."