Diary of a Resume: How I Found Some Great Jobs

A relative of mine tells me she’s amazed by the jobs I find.  Part of the job hunt includes lots of preparation.  It’s not just the search for employment but the specialized training to make yourself a necessary hire in any economy.  For example, I’m a teacher.  There are thousands of teachers. Therefore to make my specialized niche in the education field, I became certified as a bilingual instructor.

Of course this is due in part to my work and language training in the Peace Corps in Honduras.  However, many Peace Corps volunteers lose their acquired second language if they don’t use it.  I’ve made a concentrated effort to keep my second language and build on it.  Now in today’s job market being bilingual is not enough since you may be forced to move to an area that doesn’t have a need for a bilingual educator.  This was my situation, so  last year, I decided to add certification in online teaching.

Technical skills are in high demand, and I found that learning about technology is like learning a new language.  Luckily, it’s a language that I can speak now.   I would say that I’m at a high-intermediate level in technology on a proficiency scale.  I will finish my online teaching certification in the fall and already have two online teaching jobs lined-up.  Consequently, I currently have an online scoring job for a professional nonprofit in the educational testing field.

I wanted to share this information with you to help you focus on your job niche.  Whatever your profession, think about how you can train for a high-need, or specialized area of need in your field.  Definitely include in your plan-of-action, your desires and interests.  What motivates you to get up and go to work everyday?  Or would you like to have a work-from-home job environment?  I’m always strategizing my next job move.

When I was young, I didn’t think much about the effect of becoming bilingual; I simply volunteered for the Peace Corps after college.  It was a consequence of my wanting to help others in the Peace Corps.  Becoming bilingual spurred me to want to teach languages, so I got a masters in Teaching English as a Second Language.  Basically, what I’m saying is to follow your heart, as well as, the needs of your career outlook.

Your interests can add layers to your job specialty.  As for myself, besides adding technology skills to my resume, I have a compassion for learning more about adaptive technology to help those with disabilities. I already took a class and have been conducting a lot of self-study on the topic.  Self-study is critical and cost-free for delving into a new area of interest.  For example, it helped me conduct a self-study to get this nonprofit started.

This will be a series of diary-like entries about my job history.  There are a lot of articles on the Internet about where to find work and how to go about the job hunt.  However, there aren’t many anecdotal, real-life experiences on building your career.  I hope that my Broke Blog diary series can address that vacuum.  The next resume diary entry will detail all the places where I found work throughout my life!  This blog post is my 20th, and I’d like to close with a great big thank you to my followers!  If you liked this article, then read Part 2: http://blog.brokebutnotforlong.org/diary-of-a-resume-part-2/.

Sandra Annette Rogers,

sandra@brokebutnotforlong.org

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This entry was posted on July 27, 2010 at 10:58 and is filed under Job Hunt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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