No matter where you live or what you do, the current health crisis which has turned into an economic calamity is impacting you. You have probably been asked to stay home from work unless you are a health professional, a government worker, or a first-responder. What does all this mean if you were in the midst of a job search or an effort to change your career?
The honest answer is that your job search or career change will now have to be delayed. No one is going to be hiring right now. Who knows when things will ever get back to "normal?"
With that said, I don't think you should just give up on your efforts. I advise that you use this time of social distancing and self-isolation to double down on some of the parts of your job search or career change that you might not otherwise have had time to do.
For example, research the job, company, or industry you are interested in entering. If you take this time now to study the challenges that will be facing the industry or company when this is all over, and you can offer possible solutions, when the time is right, they will want to grab you up as soon as possible.
As a job seeker, you want to present yourself as a problem solver. Can you help the company overcome a specific challenge that has had them stymied? Can you figure out ways to help them make more money? Can you help them see ways to save so they can save money?
These are essential questions for you to be able to answer. So while you are stuck at home, you can do the deep dive into research that you wouldn't have time for before now.
You could also use this time to beef up a skill or learn something new that would serve you well in your new job search. Use one of the online course providers (I personally think Udemy.com is the bomb) and learn a new skill or that you can add to your resume when the time is right.
I am offering a free webinar workshop on how to approach writing your resume. Join me this coming Saturday, March 21, 2020, at 2:00 PM EDT. To register, click here: https://event.webinarjam.com/register/3/37l4qax. It's FREE!
#jobsearch #careerchange #coronavirus #COVID19
Speaker 1:
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."
Speaker 2:
Hi, this is Kitty Boitnott ofTeachers in Transition, the YouTube channel and the podcast, and welcome back to Episode 51. If you listen to my podcast, you know that one week I talk about stress management strategies. The next week I talk about career transition and job search. Today's topic is career transition and the question that may be top of mind is what do you do as a job seeker, someone who's looking for a new job or a career change while we go through this restricting time caused by the COVID-19 or the novel coronavirus that's going around and how do we respond in light of all of the changes that are being made around us over which we have absolutely no control. So what I want to say to you is that you may need to look at this as a planning time as opposed to an action time. I don't want you to suspend your efforts, especially if you are already actively looking for work. I want you to continue to uh, scope out job openings. I want you to continue to tweak your resume, continue to learn how to write a compelling cover letter, continue to tweak your LinkedIn, continue to connect with people on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. You can't get together with them in person, but thankfully we live in a world where you don't have to be able to meet someone in person in order to communicate with them. You can send them a video message. You can create your own podcast if you like. You can, you can send a blog post, you can initiate correspondence. There are multiple ways for us to stay connected with one another and network virtually with one another. And I guarantee that the longer this sort of drawing down this, that being socially responsible, the longer this goes on, the more creative people are going to get about how they connect with one another. I just guarantee that somebody will come up with something. Watch parties, Facebook lives, LinkedIn live, you name it. There's going to be all kinds of things going on. And one of the things that occurred to me to think this morning was, you know, now that if you are one of the people who've been told to stay home and your job is on hold for now, like teachers, um, you don't know when you might be going back. Um, you're encouraged not to treat it like a snow day because nobody wants you to be going out to the store to shop or to the movies for entertainment or to Chuck E cheese or any of the places that you might normally try to go on a snow day. This is a stay at home time. This is a, let's just figure out how ways to entertain ourselves at home. And you can do lots of things for yourself at home. And I was thinking in particular, you don't have the community to deal with. For some people that's an extra hour or two in their day. You can get up at the same time and instead of commuting, you can use that time for researching a job you think you might be interested in or researching a company you think you might like to work for when things get back to normal or an industry. If you can look for ways to offer solutions to problems that are going to erupt because of this particular incident in our history. If you can come through this process with a solution to a problem that has presented itself as the of this, this slow down is pandemic, you will be considered gold. So study the industry, anticipate what kinds of strategies they may need to follow in order to get back up and running quicker than they would otherwise. Think of ways that you might be able to offer solutions to other and unanticipated problems that they may run into. And then when the time is right, you will be able to present yourself as a problem solver, someone with a solution to a challenge that they haven't yet figured out. So this is a time for you not to completely give up on your job search because then it'll be that much harder to get geared back up as you get ready to start it all over again. So just keep up the momentum. Keep at it. I'm not saying keep at it eight hours a day. You'll get burnout with it, but you know you use the hour or two that you would be commuting to work on a plan for when this is finally over, what kind of work is it that you want to be looking to plug yourself into? This is also a time when you could be doing some training. For example, if you need to improve your office skills. I've had had clients who were teachers who would say, Oh, I'd love just to be an office manager, but they don't have any, they don't have any skills for being an office manager. Take some courses you to meet you. D N Y is a great place to go for some inexpensive but high quality courses that you could take to get your skills up to speed. There are plenty of other online courses that you can take as well for not a whole lot of money. So you can be using this as a planning time and don't consider it wasted time. Consider it time for educating yourself for becoming more ready for the job that you want when all of this craziness passes because it will pass it. We're being asked to be socially responsible right now so that it will pass sooner rather than later and that it will pass with fewer fatalities than it would otherwise. Um, people who say this is just like the flu, I'm sorry you're wrong. People who've had it in other countries who've had a chance to recover from it or to share their experience of it will tell you it's worse than any flu. It's not just the flu and you can be carrying it around for up to 14 days before you start to feel the symptoms. So you may be carrying it to your grandmother when you go to visit her or to your parents who are over 60 when you, when you sit down with them for a visit. So if you feel inconvenienced during this time because you're being asked to self-isolate. If you're worried about being bored because you have nowhere else to go, find things, make things to do to keep yourself entertained. Creating your job search plan your your marketing plan. That might be one activity you could take up to to use some of this time for and then otherwise we'd some books that you've been putting off reading for all this time, however long because you didn't have time to do it. Watch a movie that you never got around to seeing at the theater and now it's on streaming. Live for free somewhere. Make good use of your time and don't let yourself give into feelings of resentment that you aren't being allowed to do things that you would otherwise be doing or that this, this has interfered with your job search plan. Think about the people who've gotten sick and died that really interfered with their lives in a major way. Did that think of the people that have been left behind because a loved one came down with it and died. The deaths from this Corona virus are already into the hundreds and the experts are saying it could go into the thousands. Some are even estimating more than a million. This is not play time. This is not a time to under estimate or, uh, try to out. Guess what the experts are telling us to do. The socially responsible thing to do is to stay at home. What I'm suggesting is that you make good use of that time at home by continuing to plan for your dream job. Just know that the actual signing of the contract for that dream job may be delight a little while and that that just means it's going to take longer than you thought, but as long as you're healthy, as long as you're well, as long as you're being socially responsible so that you're doing your part to keep other people well. This is a time when you could use it as a gift of time to do things that you didn't have time to do before. Does it delay your job search? Yes. In the grand scheme of things, that's a minor inconvenience. Make use of this time. Make good use of this time. Don't give up. Just be realistic. This too shall pass eventually and you'll be able to get things back on track. Again, our country has been through lots of bad things before world Wars, not just recessions, but a great recession, a depression even. We'll make it through, but we've got to work together and we've got to realize that there's some things that are just beyond our control right now. What's going on in the world is outside of our personal control. The only thing we can control is following the rules, paying attention to the guidelines, staying home to the extent that you can. If you are a first responder, thank you for your service. If you're a nurse, a doctor who has to go into work, you just happen to be listening to this podcast or YouTube channel for some reason. Thank you for your sacrifices, but the rest of us need to stay home and stay out of their way so that they can do their work. That's it for today. I'll be back next week. Have a good week.
Speaker 1:
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."