In this episode, Kitty offers some more of the suggestions that are included in her Checklist of the "10 Things You Need to Know and Do If You Want to Change Your Job or Career. "She talks about the importance of understanding how the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) works, how important it is to tweak your resume for every job you apply for, and the importance of writing a personalized cover letter that is compelling and not just a regurgitation of your resume.
If you would like to download the checklist, click here: https://teachersintransition.com/checklist.
If you have questions for Kitty, please email her at kttyboitnott@gmail.com.
And if you would like to chat with Kitty about the possibility of changing your job or career, make an appointment for a 20-minute complimentary Discovery Session at https://teachersintransition.com/calendar.
In this episode, Kitty offers some more of the suggestions that are included in her Checklist of the "10 Things You Need to Know and Do If You Want to Change Your Job or Career. "She talks about the importance of understanding how the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) works, how important it is to tweak your resume for every job you apply for, and the importance of writing a personalized cover letter that is compelling and not just a regurgitation of your resume.
If you would like to download the checklist, click here: https://teachersintransition.com/checklist.
If you have questions for Kitty, please email her at kttyboitnott@gmail.com.
And if you would like to chat with Kitty about the possibility of changing your job or career, make an appointment for a 20-minute complimentary Discovery Session at https://teachersintransition.com/calendar.
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 burn out teachers disliking 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 to 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 k itty. B oitnott welcome to teachers and transition.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to episode 84 of teachers in transition the podcast and the YouTube channel. My name is kitty Boitnott. I am the owner and founder of teachers in transition a specialist in working with teachers who are burnt out and ready to make a career change or need help with their stress. If you've ever listened to me before you know that I alternate topics each week, one week, I talk about stress management strategies because I am a certified stress management coach, and I have a number of resources that are available, including an e book and a checklist and distress assessment tool that you may download from, u m, a number of places online. And I also talk on alternating weeks about career transition strategies, because I have been working as a h eart-centered career transition and job search coach specializing in working with teachers who are ready to transition from the classroom into another career, hopefully the career of their dreams for the last seven years today, I'm going to go back to the checklist that I introduced to listeners two weeks ago. When I offered that I have created a checklist of 10 things you need to know and do if you are ready for a career change. And I talked about the first, because with 10, 10 items on the list, there's no way in a short podcast to cover all 10 of them. So today I'm going to talk about a few more. Last time I touched on the need for, uh, deciding what it was that you wanted to do instead. Um, the thinking in terms of, you know, what kinds of jobs would you be able to do that I would take advantage of your strengths and your skills and your education and your experience, and then to consider how you would become laser focused on what it is that you're looking for. Next, you need to do those two things before you actually start writing a resume. And even before the resume, you need to learn whatever you need to know. If you, if you don't know anything, you need to learn a lot about how the applicant tracking system works because the applicant tracking system is going to be the first gatekeeper that you run up against when you are applying for a job. Now, if you've never heard of the applicant tracking system before, it's a software program that just about any company or organization uses to manage and sort all of the applicants who come through its portal, you know, these days you can't just send in a resume, a hard copy of your resume. You have to upload it through an electronic portal and you can upload the resume and your application from a variety of job boards and from the company's website and even through LinkedIn, but in every case, you're going to be asked to upload a document that includes your resume and the cover letter and the application. And once you've hit the send button or the submit button, your application immediately gets tagged and sorted, according to the job you've applied for. And then the ju the applicant tracking system will scan your resume, your application and your cover letter for key words that are related to the job opening that you've applied for. And if it doesn't determine that you have a high enough percentage of those specific keywords from the job description, you will be tossed out of the running. You'll be thrown into the black hole of resumes, never to be seen by human being. And then you'll be left, wondering quieted. I applied for that job and not ever even get a thank you for your interest. And don't expect to thank you for your interest these days, because companies don't offer those small courtesies anymore. So it's unlikely that you will ever hear from anyone inside of the company, unless yes, you are. One of the people who made it through broke through the applicant tracking system and y ou, o r application actually landed on the desk of a hiring manager and HR professional. Some a re recruiter, o r perhaps someone who is in a position to determine as a human being, are you a candidate that they are interested in? If you are, then t hey may pick up the phone or send you an email asking if you were available, h orrible for a chat. Usually these days, they start with a short telephone interview as a screening mechanism to make sure that you're actually a viable candidate for the job that they're looking to feel. But back to t he applicant tracking system, if you don't understand how it works, and you're not paying attention to the language that's being used in the job description, chances are that you will mess up by not targeting your resume to that job description. A lot of people think that they should write their resume based on their work experience. And that is only partially yes, of course, you include your work history that you need to also be very targeted, did toward the job description, the words that are used in the specific job description, and you need to tweak your resume every single time you apply for it job so that you make yourself a stronger fit with every tweaking that you do a one, a nd t hen d one resume that you use to apply for multiple jobs. Without doing that tweaking in advance is not going to be a winning strategy. U h, people are looking for very specific things, and if they don't find those specific things in your application and in your resume, they're not going to consider you a viable c andidate. So on the checklist that I t alked t o a little bit about two weeks ago, 10 things you need to know and do, if you want to change your job or career, I offer that as nu mber, u h, t hree, you need to clay create clarity and focus about what it is that you want to do in your job search an d y our next job. And then number four, you need to determine how to work with and around the applicant tracking system. So you need to have enough understanding of the applicant tracking system that you can hopefully make it through, but then you need to also learn some strategies for working around the applicant tracking system. You work around the applicant tracking system by networking with people who are inside the company or organization that you're interested in working for. Hopefully you establish, if you haven't already have personal relationship with them, or at least a professional relationship so that you don't feel too awkward about asking them if they would willing to offer your resume to the HR department and for four go, or at least in a day addition to applying through the applicant tracking system, you get your application and your resume in front of a human being. That's the workaround. And you can use your LinkedIn network, can use people that, you know, through your personal network, people that you go to church with, or, uh, the husbands or wives of people that you've worked with, who work inside the company, and you can ask them, you know, I'm interested in job XYZ. Uh, I don't want to depend on the applicant tracking system. Would you be willing to offer my resume and a good word to the HR director? If you have that kind of relationship with someone they should be able to. So to do that for you, that is the work around now. You also want to make sure that you write your resume with, and I toward what exactly is it that the job application is asking you to be able to do? And no, if you can't offer that in the resume, then regardless of whether you're trying to make it through the applicant tracking system, or you've worked around the applicant tracking system to get your application in front of someone, you're not going to be considered a viable candidate. You just aren't. So your resume is not just about your work experience. It's also about what it is that you can do that you've learned to do as a result of your current or past position and how you can translate that experience to this new job that you happen to be applying for. And as I said earlier, you need to tweak your, for every single job that you are applying for. If you don't do that, you're just asking for trouble. And then the final tip that I'm going to offer for today is the importance of the cover letter. And many people think that the cover letter is just, you know, a throw away. It's like, nobody's going to read it anyway. So why bother to write one? But you can convince someone in your cover letter that you are a good candidate, a viable candidate in spite of any apparent missing experience in your resume, because, and then you fill in the blank with why are you a great fit for this job, even though you may not have worked in this specific industry or specifically for this kind of company before, y ou k now, I worked with a client a number of years ago, who was interested in a job for a sporting goods company. U m, he wanted to be the sales rep for the school districts that offered, u m, uniforms and equipment for the baseball and football and wrestling teams. All of, all of the different sports offered by the schools in the district and his I nn was that he had been a coach and he was familiar with the company and their merchandise. And so he wrote his cover letter with an eye toward making the point that as a coach, he had appreciated high quality equipment and uniforms that made the team feel good about themselves, and that he felt comfortable that he would be an excellent fit for that particular job. It was a terrific cover letter because he didn't regurgitate his resume, which is what people too often do. And he made the case, and it was a solid case for why he should be considered a candidate for the position. So keep that in mind, the importance of a cover letter do not simply regurgitate there's or always make your cover letter personal, by the way, find the name of someone to send the letter to whether it's the person, maybe the contact person on the job description or the HR directory that you can find the name of on the website, but don't overlook the importance of a personal touch. Dear mrs. Jones, dear mr. Smith, not dear sir, not dear Madam, not to whom it may concern. There's just no excuse in this day and age, not to be able to find a name and you're better off to use the wrong name than to not use a name at all know if all else fails, send the letter and your application to the president of the company. He or she will make sure it gets to the HR department that do address it to a person. So dear mr. Jones, and then instead of simply, phew, please find my resume included in this letter or this packet. You'll find that I am XYZ one, two, three, regurgitating what's in the resume, give them a compelling reason. And with some kind of hook, a personal anecdote, like the coach who was looking for the position as the sales rep for the merchandising company, some, some personal connection that you might have with the company or with the product or with the service that that company offers and hook them in, make it personal enough, different enough from the regular run of the mill cover letter, that you actually have someone interested enough to actually read the cover letter because too often cover le tters, simply regurgitate what's in the resume and the person reading it, glances at it and decides to toss it. You've got to sell yourself in your cover letter and your resume as someone who can do this job that you've applied for. If you don't, you will apply for a job after job after job. And you'll never hear from anyone and you'll get discouraged and you'll give up. But if you target your resume toward a specific job and you make your cover letter compelling, and you, you offer a reason why you want this job and you you're, you know, in your gut that you would be an excellent person for this position, then that's what you need to send in. And that will get someone's attention. So that's it for today. That's, that's where I'm going to stop from the list. We had a few more things in the checklist that I'll cover perhaps in a future episode, but for now that's it. If you would like the checklist, you'll find the link to it in the show notes below. And if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me@kittyboitnottatgmail.com. If you would please review this podcast and write a review to let me know how you, uh, if you, if you're getting value so that it helps other people to find the podcast. If you're finding value, someone else might find value as well. And, uh, check me out over on the YouTube channel as well. You'll find the same content that you'll just get to see me as opposed to listening to my voice on the podcast. And, uh, if there's anything that I can do to help you in your own career, transition from the classroom, to the job of your dreams, please, please don't hesitate to reach out. I'd love to help. If I can have a wonderful week, stay well, stay safe, and I'll be talking again to you sing.
Speaker 1:So there you have it, an episode of teachers in transition. I hope you enjoy 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 kitty boy, not at boys, not coaching.com. If you are interested in finding a new career or just enjoying your life more, this is the place to start. I'm Katie Boitnott and this is teachers and transition.