Teachers in Transition - Episode 86 - The 3 Secrets of EVERY Successful Job Search or Career Change Masterclass Invitation

Note:  This is Episode 86 not 85 as Kitty said in the intro.

In this episode, Kitty offers an invitation to an upcoming Masterclass that she is offering the weekend of Thanksgiving.

The first presentation will be Friday, November 27, 2020, at 1:00 PM EST.
The second will be Saturday, November 28, 2020, at 11:00 AM EST.

To register for either presentation, click here:  https://event.webinarjam.com/register/19/47l41ao

This Masterclass will be offering what Kitty believes are the 3 "secrets" of every  job search or career change, regardless of the career you happen to be in at the moment.

If you are considering making a change in your job or career and want to be in place sometime in early 2021, now is the time to be getting your job search underway.

But before you begin your job search, you need to know the fundamentals. And that is what Kitty will be offering in this Masterclass.

So, sign up here if you would like to learn how to ensure your job search success:  https://event.webinarjam.com/register/19/47l41ao

To download your free "3 Secrets of EVERY Successful Job Search or Career Change" pdf, click here:  https://kittyboitnott.coachesconsole.com/uploads/supplements/3-secrets-of-every-successful-job-search-or-career-change_950cc00c6f13f.pdf

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

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 burnout 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 and transition.

Speaker 2: 1:27

Welcome to episode 85 of teachers in transition the podcast and the YouTube channel. My name is kitty Boitnott. I am a heart centered career transition and job search coach specializing in working with teachers who are suffering from overwhelm and burnout. And I'm also a stress management coach. I'm a certified stress management and sleep science coach with additional certifications in life strategies, coaching and holistic life coaching. I've also been trained by one of the top international career coaches and have been working in the career transition space for going on seven years. Now I share all of that by way of offering my credentials and my background so that if you don't know who I am, I do know a little bit about what I'm talking about and if you've listened to me in the past, you know, that I alternate topics between stress management strategies one week and career transition strategies on alternating weeks. And this week is career transition strategies. And I'm going to do something a little different from what I have done in the past, which is at least I hope I haven't been too self promotional in the past. I normally talk about the topic of the day and then offer something as a free gift to, um, allow you to have additional information that I hope will be helpful you, but I don't often promote stuff on my podcast and YouTube channel. And today I'm going to depart a little bit from that tradition and promote my masterclass, which is coming up the weekend after Thanksgiving. So I want to share a little bit about the information and I will offer a link in the show notes, along with a document entitled the three secrets of every successful job search or career change. And that is the topic of the masterclass that's coming up. And the dates and times are Friday the 27th of November, the Friday after Thanksgiving at one o'clock Eastern and then another same presentation with a different day in time, live on Saturday, the 28th of November at 11:00 AM Eastern standard time. I'm offering it twice because I want to offer it for as many people as possible. And I know that we can may be a little busy, uh, hopefully you're going to be safe, whatever you decide to do for Thanksgiving. But if you're interested in starting or continuing a successful career transition or job search during the holidays and into 2021, you may want to sign up for the masterclass to hear some of what I have to offer. This is a topic that I have dealt with in the past, and I'm offering it again because it has been really successful and helpful to people. So today I want to just touch on what the three secrets are, and then hopefully you'll be interested to sign up for the actual presentations on the 27th or the 28th of November or both. So the three secrets I decided years ago that there were certain things that people tended to overlook as they initiate a job search or career change. And that is natural perhaps because, you know, we don't stay in career change mode often. Um, in fact, we may only change a career once or twice in a lifetime. We change jobs more often, but we stick to the same career paths normally. And part of the reason for that is the level of education that's required for a specific career and teachers in particular are, you know, in order to, to be a first-year teacher, you have to have a four year degree. In some places you have to have a fifth year, you need to have completed residency or some other kind of, uh, internship or practicum in order to be fully prepared, to be hired as a teacher. Uh, many of the younger teachers that I work with have already gone ahead and gotten a master's degree in curriculum and instruction or elementary education or in their subject area. And that's because they've spent so much money and time and effort on there, their degrees, they feel like ID years ago when I got ready to make my own career change, which was over educated and under qualified to do a lot, the kinds of jobs that I thought I might be interested in. The other problem that I ran into is that I had spent 33, three years in one career in one little niche of my career and I didn't know anything else. So that's where people often find themselves stuck between not knowing what they want to do and not even knowing what might be out out there that's available to them. So my first secret for people who are thinking about making a career change, want to change their jobs, the first thing you must do, the secret, you may not have thought about or maybe thought about it, but you didn't give it as much attention as you could or should. And that is deciding what it is that you want to do. This doesn't just pertain to teachers by the way, this is for anybody who finds themselves at a career crossroads. And I used to do a lot of pro bono coaching for a group of job seekers who were mostly mid career after 10, 15, 20 years in the same job, they found themselves at a crossroads. Either their job had disappeared. Their company had closed. They had moved because of a spouse and therefore they needed a job. Things happen and people are constantly moving from one job to another. And it's not necessarily a bad thing. We've put a stigma. That's unnecessary on people who find themselves without work, whether it's through their own, um, choice or the choice of someone else, no one needs to feel stigmatized because they're between jobs. It is simply an interlude between one work activity and another work activity. But you do perhaps need to know how to make that transition and how to make it as smooth as possible with that, making a lot of the mistakes that often rookie job seekers frankly tend to make. So whether you are a teacher or someone who's never taught a day in your life, but you find yourself somehow listening to this podcast or watching this YouTube video and, and you're in between jobs or you're thinking about changing jobs. This pertains to everyone, take some time to really think about what is it that you want to do. And this takes some internal thoughts, some reflection on your part. It might require you to do some assessments so that you become more aware of what your strengths are, what your abilities are, what your aptitudes are, because some people don't know how to identify those. And an aptitude test might help to point to them. So spends a fair amount of time in the very beginning of your job search or your transition from one career to another really thinking about what is it that you want to do in your next career. And even to the point of visualizing the activities you would prefer to be engaged in, as opposed to what you're doing now, the kind of people that you would enjoy working with the type of environment you would prefer. Do you love working from home or has that gotten old in that now that many of you've had a chance to do it, it sounds great until you do it yourself for awhile, and then you can realize that and the people after all. So are you one of those people who have, have worked from home now because of COVID and you find that you would prefer to at least be with a small team where you have some synergy and brainstorming going on and you can be a participant in that these are things you need to know about yourself. And you also need to know about what kinds of jobs are out there that are available. And if you've only been doing one thing for the last five or 10 or 20 years, then you're not aware of all the new jobs that have cropped up in the last decade jobs that you don't even know exist, because why would you and a place that you can go for free to look at different occupations that are available. You can find out using this tool, what kind of training you might need if you wanted, if you were interested in transitioning from what you're doing now to a brand new endeavor, um, and the website is O net.org. No, I'm sorry. O net online.org. It, you used to be that the government would put out these little booklets about every kind of job or career that you might want to engage in. And those old booklets were distributed by and created by the people at the us department of labor. When I was in junior college and trying to figure out what I wanted to do next, I became a writer interested in the idea of becoming a librarian. And I went to the little booklet in the libraries reference that told me everything, anything I needed to know about all the different kinds of librarians that there were, who knew they're even librarians for cruise ships, metaphor, librarians, wall librarians, museum librarians, all sorts of specialists, teas that you can go into. And it told me what kind of training I would need and what kind of education I would need to go for. So I found that well, booklet to be extremely helpful. And today all of those were booklets have now been digitized and there are online still maintained by the U S department of labor@onetonline.org, not.com but.org. So take a look. You might be surprised Christ and all of the different kinds of occupations and jobs and careers that are listed there, that you can learn a lot about what kind of training you might need to make the transition. If you're interested in making a transition from what you're doing now, to, uh, something specific, um, taking a look at the, what color is your parachute book can also be useful in addition to owning online.org. So take look at the most recent version of the colors, your repairs shoot. There are many, many resources that you can find you can Google and what kinds of jobs can teachers do? That's not my approach. I don't offer up a prescribed list of things that teachers can do, because I believe that teachers and anybody who's looking to make a career change should go within and determine what it is that they feel drawn on to do nuts, something that's prescribed for them, because that can just add two more, more problems later if they're prescribed the wrong thing. So it's much that, or to leave the decision of what you want to do to each individual person. And I actually believe that each person that I've ever worked with knew in some capacity what they wanted, they just hadn't identified it yet because they hadn't.

Speaker 3: 15:02

I spent that time in doing the internal work,

Speaker 2: 15:07

Some things that you can do to help you to identify what you would love to do is to sit down and do some journaling,

Speaker 3: 15:16

Meditate,

Speaker 2: 15:17

Take some time to do some serious meditation and or use prayer. I used to have a very short prayer, which was, so me, what is mine to do? How can I be of service? Because the two things I knew for sure, when I was in the midst of my end career transition, was that I wanted to stay in connection with teachers because I know teachers, I love teachers. I know what drives them. I know their heart. I know what I know what their challenges are and I wanted to be

Speaker 3: 15:54

Service. And that's how this business cropped up.

Speaker 2: 15:59

Um, now, uh, a coach who helps teachers who are ready to make a change and don't know how or where to start. So think in terms of what is it that you want to do, that you are sure you would love to be able to do

Speaker 3: 16:18

And

Speaker 2: 16:19

Make a list of all the things you don't want to have to do again,

Speaker 3: 16:23

That list

Speaker 2: 16:24

Is actually probably going to be longer than the list of the things you do want to do, but

Speaker 3: 16:28

That's okay. Having the

Speaker 2: 16:30

List will help to clarify for you what it is that you want to do. So that is actually the number one challenge and the, probably the hardest part of the entire job search process, deciding what it is that you want to do

Speaker 3: 16:53

And

Speaker 2: 16:54

How can you make it happen? I don't recommend that people go back to college to start all over, to get a whole brand new degree. You've got a degree under your belt already. If you're a teacher, you've got lots of transferable skills. Surely we can figure out something that you could do with maybe some training, but not without having to go back for a whole new career. So don't think you have to start from scratch you. Don't. The second secret is understanding how to use the various job search tools that will land you, the job that you want. And that's, you don't even start to use any of those tools until you've decided on a sense of direction. You know what it is that you're looking for. That's when you start looking at job boards for specific job openings, and in order to make application you'll need a resume and a compelling cover letter, actually, I should have said a relevant resume because you want to make sure that the resume speaks to the job that you're applying for, not the job that you've had

Speaker 3: 18:10

In the past.

Speaker 2: 18:11

So a relevant resume means a job, a resume that speaks to the job that you were applying for a compelling cover letter speaks to why you believe

Speaker 3: 18:25

In spite of any evidence,

Speaker 2: 18:27

Events or appearances to the contrary, you would be a great candidate for this,

Speaker 3: 18:31

This job, why you're applying for the job, a stellar LinkedIn profile that speaks

Speaker 2: 18:40

To everything that you have to offer and is recruited,

Speaker 3: 18:44

Attracting, and how to interview a lot of people.

Speaker 2: 18:49

People don't know how to talk about themselves in terms of presenting, why they would be a great fit for a specific

Speaker 3: 18:57

Job. And

Speaker 2: 18:58

They put the emphasis more on themselves than on what they can do for their employees.

Speaker 3: 19:05

So you need to know how to interview well. And finally, the third secret

Speaker 2: 19:14

Is how to develop and practice the three PS

Speaker 3: 19:19

Of job search, practicing patience, practicing perseverance, and persistence.

Speaker 2: 19:30

Yeah. Job hunting is hard. I wish I could tell you that it was a piece of cake, but it's not. It takes time. And especially in these days of the pandemic, people are still hiring, but they're looking

Speaker 3: 19:44

Differently. And they're

Speaker 2: 19:47

Looking for people who can be resilient in the face of all of the massive change that we've all been going through in recent months.

Speaker 3: 19:57

So just

Speaker 2: 19:58

Because we're in the midst of a pandemic, doesn't mean that you can't make this change. I've had clients who got jobs in the midst of this pain

Speaker 3: 20:06

Endemic, but you do have to be prepared

Speaker 2: 20:12

That it may not. Your job search may not go as fast as you would like for

Speaker 3: 20:16

It to even before

Speaker 2: 20:18

The pandemic, the average job search would last four to nine months, and that was before the pandemic. So you have to be prepared to be patient and persistent

Speaker 3: 20:29

And persevering. Otherwise you're going to give up and then you're not going to be successful. And you're going to be

Speaker 2: 20:39

Right back where you started and happy in the job that you have.

Speaker 3: 20:43

Yes. On occasion. What happens that people decide,

Speaker 2: 20:48

You know, um, I thought I wasn't happy, but I'm happier doing this than I thought I was. Now that I've looked at what the options are. I know for me, that was, that was the case. Back around year 10 of my teaching career, I was restless. I was thinking that it was time to make a change. I was tired of all the negative rhetoric about how teachers were too dumb to be doing anything else or else they would be doing something else. I was sick of that. I was sick of the low pay. And I kept thinking there must be something out there that I would enjoy doing that would pay more. So I actually made an appointment with a career counseling agency and I went and I spoke with a lady who was very sour. And I think she thought I had it pretty good. And she didn't understand why I was looking to make a change. The only job she recommended that I might be a good fit for was, um, paper, supplier. I would, I would be taking paper goods into stores, grocery stores and drug stores. And the like, and I would be restocking the stores shelves with paper products. And that didn't sound like a very interesting job as she talked about it. And then she told me what the starting salary would be, and it was less than I was already making. So I went home that afternoon and I thought a lot about it. And I thought, you know, maybe I'm not so bad off where I am and maybe what I should do instead of relishing the idea of something else being out there that maybe I should make the most of what I have, because I did like the kids and maybe I needed to go back and get my masters so that I could get the extra stipend that my district offered for people who had a master's degree. And so that's what I did. And I committed to staying up for another little while, while I worked on the masters. And then later I was at another particular crossroads thinking about maybe the possibility of leaving. And then I got intrigued by the notion of the national board certification process. And I committed to sticking around to be a part of that. And 15 years later, I became national board certified because it took them that long to get around to doing the library media standards. But looking back, I'm glad I did what I did. And each time I made a conscious decision to stay, which made me happier when I was in the position of feeling like I had made the decision, instead of feeling stuck, because I just didn't know what else to do. So sometimes people do decide to stay after they've looked at their options and that's okay too. The main thing is to be happy, whether you're looking to make a change or you wind up staying, being happy in your work means being happier. You your whole life. It is because being unhappy, being dissatisfied, being constantly filled with regret and, and resentment about your job spill over into other aspects of your life, your health, your relationships, everything. Now I remind my clients when we get on our bi-monthly coaching calls work that feels fulfilling leads to a happier life. And I truly believe that. And I've dedicated myself to helping people find work, work that feels fulfilling for them, whatever that may be for them. So, yeah, if any of that sounds like something you'd like to learn more about how to decide what it is that you would like to do next. What, what you need to know about the tools that are, are related to a successful job search or how you can dedicate yourself to being patient and persevering and persistent in the face of rejection and the roller coaster of a job search. If you're interested in learning more or sign up to attend one or both of the masterclasses that are coming up the weekend after Thanksgiving, I would love for you to be there. I'd love for you to give me a shout out that you learned about the, the masterclass from the podcast and that's it for today. So before you go, if you would please review this podcast, let me know if you're getting value from it. And by giving me a review, you help other people find it. If you're finding it useful. Send me a message. If you have a question that kitty boy, not at Gmail com and as always stay safe, stay well, please have a wonderful, wonderful Thanksgiving. And I hope you will decide to join me for the master class. That's coming up on Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving. So that's it for today.

Speaker 3: 26:44

Have a wonderful week. Do stay well, stay safe. I'll see you soon.

Speaker 1: 26:50

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, not@boitnottcoaching.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

Speaker 3: 27:39

Transition.