Job search strategies for career advancement are fundamental, especially if your teacher or administrator job search has hit a roadblock or hasn’t really seen any progress.
Why not take advantage of this extra time to take care of some important job hunting tasks? Give yourself the time to reflect on your performance throughout your job search until this point and figure out what areas you could improve on.
1. Take a step back.
If you’ve been living and breathing your job search for several weeks now, you may be feeling like you can’t think straight anymore. You and your job search may benefit greatly from a short timeout. Take a weekend trip or take a couple of days off from your job search to relax and re-group. Hopefully, taking a few days off, your job search you will get back into the zone with a renewed spirit and positive energy. You should also gain a new perspective and a few different job search strategies to try.
2. How effective are your resume and cover letter?
Take the time to re-examine your job search documents. Could your resume or cover letter use some touch-ups, or do they need to be updated? If you haven’t received many interviews, the problem may lie in your resume and cover letter.
Have a professional resume writing company, like A+ Resumes for Teachers (that’s us), review them and provide a few suggestions on how you can improve the content.
Reviewing sample teacher resumes will give you some ideas on how to create your own.
They will provide you with current resume formats, known to some as resume templates, and you will understand our writing style and quality. Ensure that your resume is full of your professional accomplishments, contains appropriate teaching keywords and that your teacher cover letter conveys relevant strengths and passion for teaching.
Even if you aren’t using LinkedIn or services like ZipRecruiter for your job search, you can test your resume and cover letter’s efficacy by posting them to the sites and seeing how many “hits” you get. A keyword-rich, well-formatted resume and cover letter will populate more interest online. Try making some tweaks and see if the inquiries from recruiters increase.
3. How diversified are your job search efforts?
Too often, job searchers focus on only one avenue to find potential job opportunities. Quite often nowadays, this means searching online job websites like Indeed or Monster for available teaching jobs. However, there are several different places to find career opportunities, so you shouldn’t limit your efforts to one area. Besides online job boards, you can also find teaching positions through school websites, cold calling, general recruiters or recruiters specializing in education positions, in person or social media networking, LinkedIn, classified ads, education job fairs, or local community events.
4. What feedback have you received from past teaching or administrator interviews?
Look carefully through all the feedback you have received after your past job interviews. This could contain valuable information and insight into your job interviewing skills. You can take this feedback and use it to improve your future job interview performance. You may also be able to use some of the information to improve the message in your resume and cover letter.
5. Revisit your career goals in education.
How focused is your teaching job target? How in-line with your professional skills and experience is your job target? These are important questions that you need to ask yourself to ensure your job search is on the right track. Ensure you have a specific job target; you need to make sure you aren’t just mass mailing out resumes out to any school district or just teaching posted positions.
Your resume and cover letter should be appropriately focused on your specific teaching niche so that when you apply to positions, your teaching skills and accomplishments concerning the position are evident to a principal. There are many cover letter writing mistakes you don’t want to make. This extra time can help provide you with some clarity and focus that can assist in bringing your job search to the next level.
Job searching for career advancement can be overwhelming. Take some help from a professional and reach out to Candace today to polish your resume and cover letter, develop a job search strategy, and even do a mock interview!
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