Teachers in Transition

Teachers in Transition - Episode 115 - Keep Your Job Skills Up to Date

June 09, 2021 Kitty Boitnott
Teachers in Transition
Teachers in Transition - Episode 115 - Keep Your Job Skills Up to Date
Show Notes Transcript

Teachers are well educated and are required to keep up their certificates with ongoing professional development courses and college credits. But sometimes, those courses don't provide the kind of training you might need if you were to start looking for a new job outside of education.

Whether you are job hunting or not, it's a good idea to keep your skills updated and stay current with the technology which is always changing. If you want to be marketable, you have to have skills that make you competitive.

In this episode, Kitty offers some suggestions on how to keep current without getting a new degree or another Master's degree.

If you are ready to look for a new job or career direction and need help, Kitty can provide that help. Talk to her to see if her program is the right fit for you.

Make an appointment for a complimentary Discovery Session at https://teachersintransition.com/calendar.


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 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. 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:

Welcome back to episode 115 of teachers in transition the podcast and the YouTube channel. My name is Katie Boitnott. I am the owner of[inaudible] coaching and the founder of teachers in transition. If you've listened to me on the podcast or watch the YouTube channel at all, you know that on alternating weeks, I talk about different topics. One week I'll talk about career transition strategies because I'm a career transition and job search coach. I work with burnout teachers who are ready to make a career change, and I am also a certified stress management coach. So I'm alternating weeks. I talk about stress and how to get a handle on the stress that may be keeping you feeling anxious or uncertain or not performing at your ultimate best this week. The topic is job search. And what I want to talk about just very briefly today is the importance of keeping your skills up today. You know, sometimes especially for teachers, we are required to do so much schoolwork, uh, and I mean, going back to school to keep our certifications in, um, active, active. Um, and so we've, we are often enrolled in a program or taking a course here and there. We maybe even have beyond our bachelor's degrees and degree or two. And so it's not that we're not well-educated as teachers because we certainly are, but you know, the world is a fast changing place. And many of the skills that are required in a, uh, job of today are different from the skills that you might've needed even five years ago. And just take a moment to think about all of the jobs that you might've known about, or maybe even prepared yourself for 20 years ago that have, that have disappeared because the technology has taken over and more and more people companies are relying on robots and artificial intelligence to help them get work done faster, more efficient, um, and humans need to work to keep up. So that's what I want to talk about today. And honestly, I very rarely, I don't, I don't remember a single time that I have ever recommended to a client that they go back to school for another degree. Certainly I don't recommend that you start all over. If you're a teacher and you've reached the point of burnout and you're looking for something new to do, there are plenty of things that you can translate your skills to, but you might need to be some other skills. So I would recommend that you try to find a place where you can get those skills at a relatively low. Now, I often recommend to my clients website called or platform, and I apologize. I'm not quite sure how you say it. It's either you to me or it's you and me. I've heard people say it both ways. U D E M y.com. I am not an affiliate, so I don't get any payback or commission for recommending it, but I have used it myself to learn YouTube skills, to learn about, uh, Blackboard, to learn about copywriting. And I recommend it to my clients is that as they are exploring different kinds of work, that they might be interested in pursuing it is possible that they don't know enough about a particular job and you to meet, or you didn't meet, gives them a chance to try it out, to see if it's okay, job that you might enjoy. You know, I remember getting, uh, an email, a very excited sounding email from a client a while back. And she was, oh, she was over the moon. She was thrilled. She had had a breakthrough. She said she had decided that job for her would be copywriting. And she was so excited. And you could tell from the tone of the email, she was absolutely thrilled. She did feel like she had made a breakthrough. Well, then a couple of weeks went by and I heard from her again and she didn't mention copywriting. And it sounded like she was back to looking for what it was that she was wanting to do next. So I, I wrote her, I said, so whatever happened to the copywriting idea and she wrote back, oh yeah, that turned out not to be what I thought it was. I don't think it's for me after all, but I don't know how she discovered that what, what she did that might've helped her come to that conclusion that isn't it better to know upfront. And, and before you commit to much of your self and your time to the wrong path. So if you have an idea of something you might be interested in, uh, you go to you to me or you Demi and check out their different courses. You can get them as a new user. You can get them for as little as$10 and 99 cents out courses that would ordinarily go for a couple hundred. At least they are taught by credible, uh, experts in individual fields. So check it out. I think you might be pleasantly surprised at how much information you can get there, how much you can learn from taking a few of their courses and how most of all, the best of all is it taking. Some of those courses will help you to beef up your skills, update your scales and give you something fresh and new to put on your resume that you've been in. And you can say in your cover letter, I just recently completed a course in, in fill in the blank. So whatever avenue thinking you might be interested in pursuing check out. Now you to me is probably the only one of a thousand different resources out there that you can check out. Uh, lynda.com is a possibility if you have access to it, uh, L Y N D a.com that company started out only teaching technology skills, but I think they've broadened their scope and they teach a whole bunch of different things. And the kinds of skills that you might need to update are related to technology. You might find yourself looking at a job where you need to know how to do a YouTube video or YouTube editing, because YouTube is becoming more and more a part of our every day lives or even Tik TOK and other, other video platforms. There are all sorts of things. Some of my clients are interested in going into work, uh, freelancing as virtual assistants. Well, if you're going to be a virtual assistant, you're going to need really there and refine your business office skills. Some teachers come to me and say, oh yeah, I think I'd like to manage an office. Well, that's nice. But the problem is they don't have any experience managing an office, managing an office takes more than what it looks like me. It's kind of like everybody thinks they can be a teacher because they've seen teachers and they think, well, that doesn't look so hard. And I'm afraid that some people think that office managers sounds like an interesting job. I really don't know enough about what goes into it, all of the scheduling and the keeping of the calendar and, and all of the people management that you might have to do as an office manager. Sure. So it's probably a more complex job than you think. Not that you can't do it because you've certainly, if you manage a classroom, you can manage an office, but you might need to update your skills. That's all I'm saying to during this time of the transition between being a locked down and opening things back up, companies are going to be hiring, but the competition's going to be very, very stiff. I can promise you that. And what you're going to need to do is to make sure that you're up to date on your technology skills and that you know how to present those skills so that you are a viable candidate right off the bat. And you don't have to promise that you'll learn something. If you get the job, you'll have already learned what you need to know, so that you're qualified for the job. So check out some various platforms, try to find some courses that would be interesting to you. I mean, you can even go back to, uh, uh, perhaps a community college and take a course there that I'm not suggesting that you go back to school and start from scratch or that you even get another master's degree, unless you are absolutely sure that another master's degree is going to move you in the direction that you want. Um, that there were other training courses that you can take. I have one client who just recently got hired as a human resource officer. She was taking a course a year long course on how to become the human resource officer. And, and she was so lucky that when she interviewed for what she thought was going to be an internship because of the work we had done to prepare her for her interview, she knocked their socks off and they offered her a job, not just an internship. She's still not finished with her program. She's got until December to finish your program, but she's glitter teaching job and is now working full-time as an HR director or assistant HR director, I guess you never know what possibilities are out there, unless you take a risk, put yourself out there, learn some new skills and then start looking for new work that would light you up, make you excited about going back to work again and give, give you a challenge that perhaps you're not feeling about your teaching career anymore. So that's my advice for today. I hope that you'll take it into consideration if you're thinking about making a change in your career. Now, if you are, and you'd like to talk to me about how I might help you, you need to make an appointment with me for a complimentary discovery session so that we can talk about how might I help you trans transition from the classroom for being a teacher into a new career that better suits your needs and wants at this point in your life. I can help you with that, but we start by having a conversation. I'll put the link to my calendar in the show notes so that you can find it. Basically it's teachers in transition.com forward slash calendar that's teachers in transition.com forward slash calendar. I'd love to chat with you to see if the help that I can offer will be the help that you can use. That's it for this week, have a wonderful week. Enjoy the beautiful summer weather that's coming our way stay cool. It's hot where I am here today, but, uh, I'll, I'll be seeing you again next week.

Speaker 1:

So there you have it, an episode of teachers and 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 Boitnott 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.