Make your job hunt for a teaching position more effective by mapping out your strategy in advance and developing a written education job search plan. When conducting your job search, clearly define the type of school community and position you wish to secure.
Understand your priorities, your desired activities, your likes and dislikes, and the teaching abilities you possess.
One of the biggest blunders to avoid is not having a clear job target.
Creating and following a plan will be preferable to applying haphazardly to available jobs. Only you know what type of work you want and what you are qualified to perform.
Map Out Your Education Job Search Plan
Develop a simple job search plan once you know what you want. Your job search will be more effective if you map out a strategy. Create a checklist to keep your sanity.
Set daily and weekly objectives to provide a concrete way to evaluate your progress and determine the amount of time you will spend on each job search activity, including research, targeting education jobs, and making contacts.
Job search objectives will help you stay accountable for your actions. If you plan on doing something, you are more likely to make it happen if you write it down. Aim to organize your job-search days like ordinary work days.
Next, you should determine the amount of time you are willing to allocate to identifying target school districts, researching job openings, making contacts, and following up. Scheduling time to conduct all these job search steps will keep you organized and help you land a job more quickly.
Incorporate Temporary Work Into Your Plan
Remember that you will need support while undertaking your search. You will need financial and moral support to help you through your job search.
If you lack sufficient financial resources, you may want to consider part-time, freelance, or contract work. Seek out something with a flexible schedule that will allow you to attend job fairs, interviews, and networking events.
Options to consider pursuing include:
- Jobs through a temporary employment agency allow you to take on short-term work assignments that will enable you to choose the days you want to work.
- Substitute teaching – you might meet your next school principal if you pick up a few days each week in classrooms across several campuses.
- Flexible contract work, such as Uber, Lyft, or consulting – with roles like these, you have a lot of flexibility to set your schedule and vary your hours around interviews, job fairs, and other job search activities.
- Freelancing through UpWork or Elance – this can be a great way to put your ability as a writer or coder to work. If you have skills such as repairing small appliances, doing yard work, fixing computers, or even if you’ve got a truck that you could use to help someone move something, you can put those abilities to work at your convenience.
These are just a few ways to take on a flexible interim education role until your search for full-time employment comes to fruition. This employment will allow you to broaden your qualifications and develop contacts in your areas of interest.
Even if you don’t think that your temporary work connects directly to your teaching job, you are still building your skills with things like customer service, problem-solving skills, and meeting different people where they are.
Those are skills potential hiring districts may want to see in a teacher, and you can relate your experience in your part-time work back to these qualities in an interview or cover letter if needed.
Find Supportive People and Resources
When you are on the job hunt, a sad fact is that you will hear “no” more frequently than “yes.” You’ll need a strong support network to persevere when you hear more bad news than you’d like.
Besides friends and family, another significant potential source of moral support can come from past professional colleagues, friends in the teaching field, and new contacts you make each week.
If you keep in touch with all these groups, you will notice the dual benefits of having a network of contacts. Supportive connections will give you the moral support you need to keep going. Plus, the network of professionals you plugged into will help you stay current on education trends, potential upcoming teaching or school administrator vacancies, and other valuable tools you can use as you deploy your job search strategy.
Keep Organized and Focused
Lastly, organize your job search days like a regular workday. Keep it professional and organized, and you will notice that you accomplish more. Schedule at least one job search activity away from home daily to energize you in your community. And remember to record your appointments, events, and results.
Create a spreadsheet to track the positions to which you’ve applied, as well as phone, Zoom, MS Teams, Skype, and in-person interviews—document when you’ve reached out to contacts at different schools and which campuses you’ve cold-called.
This will help you see your progress and prevent missteps, such as applying twice to the same teaching posting or calling a school again.
Organizing and structuring your job search will make it much easier and more pleasurable, giving you more extraordinary daily accomplishments.
Setting realistic job search goals daily will help you avoid getting discouraged. Finding a rewarding teaching job takes time. If you create and execute the necessary steps to complete the process, you will find yourself in a new teaching position quicker than without an education job search plan.
