Are you a teacher who is 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 something different or a new job or perhaps pursuing an entirely different career - but you don't know what else you're qualified to do? You don't know how to start a job search and you just feel stuck. if that sounds like you, I promise you are not alone. my name is Vanessa Jackson; and I am a career transition and job search coach and I specialize in helping burnt out teachers just like you deal with the overwhelmingly stressful nature of your day-to-day job and to consider what other careers might be out there waiting for you. You might ask yourself, What tools do I need to find a new career? Are my skills valuable outside the classroom? How and where do I even get started? These are all questions you deserve answers to, and I can help you find them. I’m Vanessa Jackson. Come and join me for Teachers in Transition.
***Hi! And Welcome back to another episode of Teachers in Transition. I am your host, Vanessa Jackson - a compassionate Career transition and job search coach who specializes in working with burnt out teachers who are ready for a career change but are not sure where to begin or who need a little extra assistance in reaching their goals. Today on the pod we are going to talk about battling imposter syndrome, a clothing hack to save time and decisions, and finally we are going to talk about the importance of using The Everything Resume to have a better chance when applying for jobs.
In our first segment about stress management and health today, I was want to talk a little bit about impostor syndrome. A comic strip which lives rent-free in my head is one by the brilliant Gary Larson who wrote The Far Side comic strip. It’s called The Elephant’s Nightmare. You see an elephant in a tuxedo sitting at a piano. He’s clearly onstage, the curtains are up, and you see rows of people looking at the stage implying that it is a packed house. He is looking down at the piano keys with shock and terror. The thought bubble over his head says “What am I doing here? I can’t play this thing! I’m a FLUTIST for crying-out-loud!” I have a link to the Far Side page where you can see this in the show notes.
That’s what a lot of teachers feel when they think about leaving the classroom. They worry that they can’t do anything but teach. (buzzer sound) Thank you for playing, but no. I hear it all the time. I am going to spend some time debunking this. Teachers are some of the most amazing people on the planet who regularly put big pots into little ones and are dragging mountains over to meet students where they are.
Why do so many teachers feel this way? I suspect it has a lot to do with months and years of being told that no matter how much you do, it wasn’t enough. You’re told that everything is always your fault. If you emailed, texted and called a parent, someone will be upset that snail mail or a personal visit wasn’t involved. Most of us remember how validating it felt at the beginning of the pandemic to hear people talk about how amazing teachers were once they had to spend an entire day trying to get their kids to do what we do. Shonda Rimes, executive producer and showrunner for Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and Bridgerton infamously tweeted, “Been homeschooling a 6-year old and 8-year old for one hour and 11 minutes. Teachers deserve to make a billion dollars a year. Or a week.” And how quickly everyone turned and suddenly teachers were being blamed as the reason the world couldn’t move on (as if…).
You are not an imposter. Say it with me: I am not an imposter. I am good. I can do this.
You have real skills – a few off the top of my head are managing chaos, data analysis, accurate record keeping, mentoring, training, and you regularly juggle competing priorities. This list goes on forever, but probably the biggest single thing that guarantees that you are not an imposter is this: You are a learning professional. You are a pro at learning. Consider how many new things you learn every year: You learn new programs, new apps or software, you learn how to work with large numbers of new personalities every year.
When I left teaching, the one thing I knew most about myself is that I could learn anything. I could learn anything I needed to do whatever came along. That knowledge that we **can** learn is what separates us from other applicants. We are excellent at the process of learning and doing what it takes to get the job done. You are excellent at the process of learning and doing.
I love this quote from the book, Dune, by Frank Herbert:
"Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson."
I have always found that quote to ring true. Not everyone has that basic trust in themselves to be able to learn new things. Not everyone knows how to learn from their experiences.
I saw a TikTok or a Reel of something recently about a young adult who was complaining about being let go FIVE days into the new job. This young adult said that all they did was watch some training videos and no one showed them what to do, so they sat there and did hardly anything at all. My teacher instincts immediately screamed – there’s a child who did not do a lot of their own homework and needed a lot of hand-holding and guidance. My manager instincts screamed – why wasn’t this person able to start work from the training videos? And the passionate learner in me screamed – haven’t you ever heard of GOOGLE? Or BING?
In my first job outside of teaching, I’d run into things I didn’t know. Since the job was remote, it wasn’t like I could ask the person sitting next to me. The person next to me was my dog and she had no clue! But I asked the question to Google and the answers poured in. There would be YouTube videos, step-by-step instructions, images of what I was trying to do. I picked up a reputation of being way more versed in a couple of programs than I really felt - but the ability to figure things out without being told is GOLD for a company. And looking something up or learning how to do something on the fly doesn’t make you an imposter. It makes you VALUABLE
Our next segment is our teacher hack. Our Teacher Hacks are tips and tricks designed to help you save time and brain space so that you can spend it on you – upskilling for a new career or applying to jobs. Today’s hack is designed to help with decision fatigue, and it has to do with wardrobe. Design a personal uniform. Steve Jobs has one. Mark Zuckerberg has one. Some people design a capsule wardrobe – which is where you have just a few items of clothes that combine into several outfits. The happiest I ever was in teaching in this regard was the year we were allowed to wear scrub bottoms and spirit tops during the pandemic. I made scrub tops into spirit tops with a little crafty magic and BOOM. 5 nearly identical outfits. I just changed the spirit design slightly so everyone could tell I was wearing different shirts. I had an AP ask me once while I was on duty “How many of those do you have?” My only response was a triumphant “Five.” They hung in a row in my closet, and I grabbed the first one. That year, I made the decision to also wear the same hairstyle every day and it was nice to have that settled in advance too, although that was for the more practical reason of making sure that all my pandemic teaching videos were uniform. It was all pre-decided. If the idea of the same color every day doesn’t do it for you, you could alternatively pick all the clothes out on the weekend. Or if you’re bold, this seems like it might be the sort of job a small child would like – picking out Mom’s or Dad’s shirts for the week.
Or back to the capsule wardrobe idea: Steve Harvey, of Family Feud fame, has a great Youtube video where he talks about how to make 5 suits turn into 75 outfits. It is easy enough to adapt for a woman’s wardrobe, AND a bonus to that solution is that you are dressing for the job you WANT and you have a snazzy interview clothes too! I have a link to Steve’s YouTube Video in the show notes. It comes with a bit of bonus dress-for-interview-success at the end.
These days, when I go out to do talks, my uniform is black pants – with pockets! And a blue shirt with black socks and black low-cut boots that quickly slip on. If I need to be really dressy, a black blazer quickly completes the look.
So, consider a capsule wardrobe or a personal uniform that you can use to eliminate decisions and make mornings easier for YOU.
And in our segment on job hunting, I am going to talk a little bit about resume templates. I’m not talking about the ones that you download from Microsoft Word. Last week we talked about Resume do’s and don’ts – that one is episode 187. In that, I talked at length about the ATS – applicant tracking system. I highly encourage you to check that out, but for the moment, let’s just call it a Computer Gatekeeper. It sifts through the tens, hundreds, thousands of resumes that come in and it decides if your resume is close enough to that job description or not. If not, a human will probably never see it. If it’s a nice company and the ATS has a strong enough AI, there might be an automatic ‘Thanks-for-trying-but-no-thanks’ sort of email reply. More likely, you just won’t hear anything ever again, which jobhunters find very frustrating.
So we want YOUR resume to be seen and to make it past the Computer Gatekeeper. The answer to this is CUSTOMIZATION. It is necessary to really dig into job descriptions and see what they are asking for. There are tools you can use for this. You can load it into a word cloud generator and see what words pop up the most often. There is a website called Jobscan.co which scans the job description and your resume, provides a match percentage, and gives you tips on what you need to increase that. Then - tweak your resume to match. I am not saying to make things up. That isn’t honest, and that isn’t going to help. This is why I advocate you to have a resume template, or as I like to call it: The Everything Resume. It is a little closer to a CV because you put EVERYTHING in it. This becomes your template. Your Everything Resume is there to make things easier for customization.
You take that job description and your template. Save that template as a resume for that job and start customizing. As an example – if I were applying to Amazing Things, Inc, my Vanessa Jackson Everything Resume Template 2024 would then save as VJackson Resume Amazing Things. No dashes. Many ATSs don’t like those. Eliminate things that have nothing to do with the job.
Look for things that you KNOW matches something similar on your resume and the job description and you look to match the verbiage. Some ATSs have AI that is smart enough to tell the difference between “manage” and “managed’ and “managing,” but some don’t. It’s almost impossible to tell when you are applying for a job which is which. When in doubt, make the verb tenses match. AI is developing at a rapid pace, so I’d expect the percentage of more intelligent ATSs to increase.
As you apply to jobs, keep track of them somehow. A spreadsheet is a good idea. You have probably figured out that I love a good Excel Spreadsheet. This way you know how many jobs you have applied to, if you were rejected, ghosted, or moved to an interview, and anything other notes that help you in the future.
Bonus tip:
As soon as you’ve landed the new job, start that ta-da list and a new entry on your Everything Resume. No job is guaranteed forever. All jobs are temporary even if employers don’t make them sound that way. And when the NEXT job hunt rolls around, you’ll have that template ready to roll without having to try to think of things in the aftershock of being let go.
If you are listening to this close to when it dropped, I’d like to announce that I am hosting a Resume workshop to go over these things on Saturday, February 17, 2024 at 4:00 PM. This is Central time, so check the show notes for your specific time zone time. Join me as I go through ways to make a top-notch resume to increase the odds of landing those job interviews. We’ll learn how to create the Everything Resume, how to get your resume past the ATS, the importance of customization, and how to edit your resume so errors do not stop you before you can really get started. There is a limited enrollment available, and links to the workshop will be sent to the first ones who register. There is a Google Form that I have linked in the show notes that you can use to sign up.
This is a FREE workshop. You will not be pressured into buying anything, and the only emails you will get when you sign up is one with a link to workshop and one with a survey afterwards to help me know what went well, and where there are opportunities to improve. This is a one-hour workshop.
If you are listening to this AFTER I did the workshop, never fear! You can wait until the next one rolls around OR you can send me an email and we’ll connect. My email address is at the end of the podcast.
I also want to encourage you to join our Facebook group – Teachers in Transition Podcast Club to talk with other teachers looking to leave teaching - share tips, get ideas, and find support. Talk with teachers who have left teaching. Just search for Teachers in Transition Podcast Club and answer the quick questions that ensure you aren’t a bot.
If you are stuck in your job search, or are having trouble getting started, please feel free to reach out to me to schedule a complimentary discovery call to see how I can help you pivot careers and find the job of your dreams.
That’s the podcast for today! If you liked this podcast, tell a friend, and don’t forget to rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tune in weekly to Teachers in Transition where we discuss Job Search strategies as well as stress management techniques. And I want to hear from you! Please reach out and leave me a message at Teacher in transition coaching at gmail dot com. You can also leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099.
I’ll see you here again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!
