After over a year of banging my head against the wall, I turned in my two-week notice today. I’ve got some freelance clients I’m working for, and I’m going to focus on that for a bit. I hated to hand the letter in, but the low pay, the boredom, and the constant customer contact just stopped being worth it, if it ever was.
Check out Peter Bowerman’s The Well-Fed Writer and perhaps The Well-Fed Self-Publisher as well, if you have not already. They provide some good advice on making a career as a freelance writer or self-publisher, both for clients and for yourself.
Stranger
This. And, I suspect most companies won’t even check with anyone if you conjure up a diploma, which they will ask you for, if you get hired.
Apply at community colleges for adjunct positions. Make a good impression, make friends, kiss ass, and then apply for executive/admin/director positions that open up. That 1 term you adjunct is crucial. You have to make yourself stand out as someone who is dependable, reliable, and willing to go the extra mile. Get references from that school. Normally, this process takes 2 years but if you are in a rush, you have to make that one term count. Every fairly large college has director/exec/admin positions open constantly.
After you get the job, most likely you will hate it. There’s a reason that a particular school can’t hold on to a Student Services Director, for example. Just stick it out for a year, then use that as a jumping off point for a better job.
If you can’t stick out a job you hate for a year, then the problem is inwards, not outwards.
Just to underline the point: this is how you get the experience, references, and pre-req’s necessary to open doors. It doesn’t matter if you hate the school/job or not. Everyone who goes into academics has to do this process.
Glad to see you are at least making moves.
It may seem regressive, but temping can be a good way for a qualified person with an unusual career path to get their foot in the door. Talent is hard to find, and if a company has spots and you’ve performed well (even on mundane tasks) they will often try to keep you. That’s how I got my last position. There are high end temp agencies that specialize in skilled work.
Beyond that, you have to work on your narrative. “Planned poorly, wants any job” excites nobody. Figure out what it is that you actually want to do. Then go on LinkedIn and look at the profiles of the people doing that. Look at the companies they work for and the progression of positions they held. Look ah the organizations they belong to.
One last piece of advice is that a high demand industry might be a good match for you, as they are used to bringing in overqualified people to entry level jobs and then promoting them quickly. A masters in my industry (international stuff) qualifies you to be an administrative assistant or paid intern, but once you are in there is lots of room for growth and career switchers are common, so your age wouldn’t matter much.
Even high demand fields have jobs that are hard to recruit for. If you are fine with fundraising, grant writing, communications or statistical analysis, you’ll rocket up in the nonprofit world while everyone else is fighting for those few positions hugging orphans and planting trees.
And for finding those in demand positions, one thing I did was make a spreadsheet of about 50 organizations in my field that hire in my area. On this spreadsheet was a link to their jobs page. Every weekend in grad school, is spend a couple hours visiting those pages and getting an idea of what the hiring patterns were, what jobs came up often, and what types of people were getting them (thanks LinkedIn!). By the time I was ready to start the job search, I knew the job market like the back of my hand.
Good luck with the search, MsRobyn.
When I re-did my resume a few weeks ago, I took my graduate degrees off and only list them when the specific job requires a master’s degree. I will also start doing my homework in terms of the local job market. Since we live near the state capital, there are lots of opportunities for nonprofit and government jobs. I just have to find out who’s hiring.
Thanks, everyone, for the advice! Keep it coming!
You’d suspect wrong! Since the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley the background check vendor used by my company (and most other Fortune 500 type companies) checks all the way back to high school diploma regardless of position and regardless of graduation date. Potential hires who graduated from a high school in a foreign country or a high school that has since closed have had to wait several additional weeks to start while the diploma verfication process is completed. No verification, no job, no exceptions.
So even if you have a college degree, they’ll hold up your application to check a foreign high school certificate? What a colossal waste of everyone’s time.
Almost everyone we hire has a foreign high school degree - and very frequently a foreign college degree also. I think the companies can handle it. I’m certain that lying about having a degree when you don’t have one will show up. Not mentioning a degree you do have I don’t know about.
How good are they at dealing with the linguistic vagaries of foreign school systems? I never got a HS “diploma” and the point where I could have gotten one if I’d bothered to request it wouldn’t have been enough to enter college. And to complicate things further, the system has now moved to something resembling the British one ages-wise, with obligatory education until 16 but if you want to go to college you stay in secondary education for two more years.
I was once told that I couldn’t have gotten my degree because the University granting it was founded in 1992; the colleges that formed it were pre-existing ones (mine was founded in 1915). It’s kind of scary to think that someone may get denied a job because someone else didn’t do a background check correctly.
I completely understand not liking the hours and lack of benefits at your current job (yay for putting your notice in!) but apart from ‘better hours, with benefits’ what level position are you actually pursuing?
Are you wanting to take a lower level position with a view to quickly working your way up? Or are you happy to stick with a lower position it for a while, providing the hours and benefits are good?
I would test for any government jobs. They pretty much have to take you if you pass the test and then you can move on from there once your in the system.
I’m OK with any level position as long as I’m suited for it. Ideally, I’d like to move up, or at least around, but I’d be happy to stay with a lower position as long as I were treated fairly. And by “treated fairly”, I mean that the organization is willing to work with me to meet mutual goals. A BIG reason I’m leaving my current job is that once you’re hired for a position, you’re stuck in that position. The best you can do is transfer to the same position at another site (i.e. one office to another), but anything else is a competitive process. I tried to move to a similar position in a different department that my boss and I agreed I would be much more suited for and was told that that wasn’t possible and wasn’t given a reason why. I’m not OK with that. So a lot of experience and training is about to walk out the door.
For right now, I’m focusing on three areas: government, nonprofit, and self-employment. The first two are qualifiers for a federal student loan forgiveness program, the third would just be the best overall situation, even though it’s somewhat risky financially.
I’ve got about ten tests scheduled over the next month or so. In Pennsylvania, passing the test simply means that I move on to the next step in the process; it’s not automatic. I still have to meet the academic and experience criteria and pass the interview.
I’m in the same boat. I’m working part time in my field, delivering pizzas, and running my own business.
Working in my field is the most fulfilling, pizzas bring a TON of money, but I think the only long term hope is the business.
/commiseration
Superhal’s depressing advice is also good. Around here teachers work at three different colleges as instructors during any given semester. Lots don’t make it back the next semester. Lots of openings.
Thanks to government regulations, specifically SOX, yes. The regs are written so loosely that companies, especially any financial/insurance/related company, have to bend over backward to cover themselves or risk huge fines.
It depends on the country. I have no direct experience hiring some one who went to high school in Spain, but getting HS graduation info from the Virgin Islands takes 4-6 weeks. We can’t do the background check until our offer is acccepted, but the new associate can’t start (not even training) until it is complete.
Well then take whatever you can get. Even if it means being a janitor, at least your foot is in the door. Many companies have these set of crappy basic jobs where one must work for sometimes a year before moving up.
We’ve never had any issues, but since we outsource this to a company who does it all the time, I suspect they are good about it. Especially since we hire tons of people with foreign diplomas - probably 90%. Someone in HR at a small company doing it for the first time is a different story.
I don’t know about there, but here all companies have their janitorial services outsourced, so if it is a foot in the door it is the wrong door. They do it to not have to pay benefits to the cleaning staff.