Are you looking for job search organization tips? Wonderful. In this post, you will discover excellent strategies relevant to your 2023 job hunt to be one step ahead of the competition.
The rewards associated with organizing your teacher job search are valuable and necessary to reach your goal quickly.
After all – searching for a new teaching position is a job in itself that requires persistence, determination, and a stellar resume and cover letter!
Adding structure to your job search will decrease the time it takes to get the desired education job. You need to have a job-search system, whether employed or unemployed. It’s essential, even if you are not ready to move on to a new job immediately. The system is the same whether you seek full- or part-time employment, consulting, casual, or contract work.
Why? Because searching for a job in a changing economy means constantly being aware of the market, the opportunities inside and outside your present situation, and what you have to offer.
The time to become aware of your opportunities is not when you are pressured to find a new job. Ensure you are always looking around so you are not overwhelmed if and when finding a new teaching job.
Organization Tips and Strategies You Need to Try
Narrow Down Your Target Position
Choose your job target(s) before writing your resume and cover letter. A targeted, laser-focused resume will get better results than overly generalized ones. A targeted resume will allow you to choose and target potential schools that fit better with your experience, talents, and teaching philosophy.
Select a city or town where you’d be willing to work, a specific school district, a school type or size, and a teaching job or area. For example, you may want to be an Elementary Special Education Teacher in a small charter school outside of Chicago. That’s your target market.
Then it’s time to embark on the dozens of steps to seek a job. There are resumes, cover letters, philosophy of education statements, follow-up letters, and thank-you notes to compose—the network by contacting personal friends, colleagues, and recruitment firms. Answer teaching job ads and regularly follow up. It is easy to lose sight of what is most critical – so be careful to keep your goal in mind.
National Education Association has an article on six steps to land your first teaching job. An essential point in the article is, don’t wait for the phone to ring.
Four Important Aspects of a Job Search
They include: targeting job opportunities, getting interviews, the interview process, and following up. Every step of your teacher job search develops from your objectives, leading to discussions and job offers (The beautiful words you are waiting for, “We would like to make you an offer”). Don’t accept just any offer. Learn to negotiate a mutually beneficial proposal.
Organization Tips to Develop a Job Search Plan
Once you’ve figured out what you are looking for, develop your education job search plan. Your job search will be more effective if you map out your strategy. If you do it correctly, you can quickly answer teaching job postings, which is critical to a successful job hunt.
Set daily and weekly objectives to have a concrete way to evaluate your progress and determine the amount of time you will spend on each job search activity, like research, targeting teaching jobs, and making contacts.
Your schedule should be built around tasks you know need to be completed. For instance, updating or creating a strong LinkedIn profile, updating your resume and cover letter, targeting your resume and cover letter for specific education postings, conducting networking activities, and the actual act of job searching all need to be factored into your schedule.
Before you even begin your job search, you should be able to plan the first week’s schedule based on what you know will need to be done – like updating your resume and cover letter. Once you create your job search schedule – stick with it! Don’t pick and choose which items to complete, as this is the perfect recipe for an unorganized job search disaster.
Aim to organize your job searching days like an ordinary workday if you are unemployed. And if you are currently employed, you must schedule a substantial amount of time for job searching.
Even when organized, job searching is a time-consuming process and will require your regular attention. Schedule at least an hour or two of time specific to your job search each day.
How Long Should a Job Search Take?
Many job seekers wonder how long their hunt will take – that’s a tricky question.
If you follow these job search organization tips, you will have better results, provided you have an excellent resume and cover letter to submit.
Each phase of your search can vary significantly, depending on your needs and desires and the number of available opportunities in your area. For example, selecting where you want to work can be as simple as saying, “I want to be an elementary teacher in a large well-ranked school.” It could be as detailed as, “I want a 5th-grade teaching position in a new charter school in any major city, where I can help to develop the school philosophy and work with team players who will collaborate to produce data-driven instruction that produces high student achievement. The position needs to lead to advancement.”
It helps to be well-connected and to know people in hiring positions. It also helps if you and the interviewer hit it off quickly. Your teacher job search could take a few months from beginning to end. The average job hunt takes longer. Statistics show that professionals and middle managers, such as educators, take an average of five to six months, sometimes longer, to find the desired position.
Job seekers seeking a career change outside of education will take longer to secure a new post because they lack direct experience. People currently employed may take longer, too – they don’t have as much time to devote to their search.
Your job search length will depend on how you present your relevant skills and accomplishments on your resume and cover letter for those who wish to make teaching a second career. Communicating your value to a potential school district is critical to secure job interviews and an offer.
Don’t forget how important keywords are in an education resume too. To pass the Applicant Tracking Systems, your resume must include these vital industry keywords.
If you are employed, though, you will be more desirable. It is estimated that your job search will take one month for every $10K you want to earn. These are joint statements, not necessarily valid for all job seekers, as each experience differs.
There are many reasons a job search can take longer than this. For example, you may not be clear about what you want, or what you want may not be practical. Maybe your goal is realistic, but there are no immediate openings. Perhaps there are openings, but you don’t know where. Maybe you hear about an opportunity but don’t know the person in a position to hire you. Perhaps you meet someone in a position to hire you, but the two of you don’t hit it off.
Dedicate plenty of time and energy to your job hunt if you intend to find an appropriate position. A thorough teacher job search is so much work that the teaching job you finally land will seem easy by comparison.
On the other hand, job hunting is like any other skill: you’ll get better at it with practice. You’ll study the techniques and learn more about what’s right for you. You’ll become aware of what’s happening in the education field, so it won’t take as long when you start a formal search. And you’ll know how to keep organized in your job search!
Keep Logs or Folders of Job Contacts and Positions You’ve Applied for.
Staying organized is the key to a successful job search. Keeping a log/folder of all the contacts you have made and a log/folder of individuals you plan to contact will help you stay organized. When applying to a whole school pile, you must keep them all straight.
It can be embarrassing to cold call the same school twice.
Along the same lines, you don’t want to potentially ruin your chance of an interview if you are on the phone with one of the many schools you’ve applied to and confuse one school for another.
Staying organized is essential for keeping your sanity and smoothing your job search. It will also help you to track your success and progress. Keep your hard copy job search folders close by or your electronic files in a familiar place on your device. This is especially helpful when you are applying for numerous jobs.
Organize your education job search further by keeping detailed notes on each school you’ve contacted or applied to so you can keep them all straight. When using dozens of schools, you don’t want to worry about remembering ‘which one is which’ in conjunction with your usual job search worries.
Your log/folder will be your best, most reliable job search companion. It will be an invaluable tool to organize your job search to help land your next teaching job quickly, more accessible, and with less stress.
Brush up on teaching job interview tips and strategies to land a job offer.
Set Job Search Goals
Organizing and structuring your job search will make it much more comfortable and pleasurable and give you greater accomplishment each day. Setting yourself goals each day will make you less likely to get discouraged.
Securing a rewarding teaching job starts with being proactive and using modern organization tips. By creating and following the necessary job search steps to obtain your employment goals, you will find yourself in a new position much more quickly.
Being consistent with your job search goals day in and day out will produce excellent results. If possible, get out and network in person daily, and get known for your story and aspirations on social media channels. Start by caring, sharing, and giving without expecting something in return; this means not getting instant gratification. Consistency will get you noticed. People get to know you, and that will pay huge dividends in the end. The skill of being consistent will never let you down.
If you found these job search organization tips helpful, please share this post on your social channels or via email with a friend or colleague.
Do you need help with your teacher job search? Contact me, Candace, today to get started on a job search plan that will quickly get you into a new teaching position with less stress.
Contact Candace by email at candoco@telus.net or call toll-free: 1-877-738-8052
