Taking the Leap: Transitioning from Teaching to Freelance ID
When I decided to leave teaching, I had a mix of emotions. What else could I really do? Teaching had been my life for seven years. I knew teaching like I knew how to take care of my children or like I knew how to drive. I could do it really well with minimal effort, and I loved it. I loved the excitement my students had for learning, and I loved creating lesson plans. Lesson plans gave me the opportunity to bring learning to life, whether I was teaching financial literacy or marketing concepts.
There came a time I became mentally exhausted. Professionals call it "teacher burnout," and it is real. Teacher burnout usually happens around year five, but I made it to year seven. So, wasn't that an accomplishment? I asked myself often to justify staying. But what I realized is once my heart wasn’t there anymore, I had to leave because I’d lost my passion. When you lose your passion, everyone suffers, from your family to your students, the community and the parents. I...
5 Strategies to be Successful with Recruiters
I left public education for the corporate world. Once I updated my LinkedIn page and toggled on the switch “open for opportunities,” I was inundated with messages from recruiters who thought I would be the “perfect fit” for their opportunity. I was so excited! They were already knocking down my door to offer me a job. I will land my coveted IDOL role in no time I thought. I quickly learned that was not the case. I had become part of the very competitive world of recruiting. The recruiting process is more about helping the hiring company and recruiting firm than it is about helping a candidate land her dream job.
Companies often hire external recruiters to find viable candidates to fill open positions. Recruiters search for those candidates in places such as LinkedIn, Indeed, and other job...
5 Lessons I Learned Building My Portfolio
Are you a perfectionist?
Are you struggling to build your first portfolio?
Do you feel like you're spinning your wheels and not getting anywhere?
STOP! Right where you are. Save yourself wasted time and effort by learning from my mistakes.
Here are some revelations I had while working on my portfolio:
Set realistic expectations for what your portfolio should look like based on your current abilities and experience as an instructional designer. If you are new to the field, aim to demonstrate your proficiency and understanding, instead of skill and expertise.
While the portfolios of experts and leading industry practitioners are great sources of inspiration, your portfolio will likely not look like theirs. As a novice, you do not have the experience to create a portfolio equivalent to the portfolios that took others years and sometimes a decade-plus to work up to.
Here are some examples of what your first portfolio website might look like:
The Resume Game: An Engineer’s Approach
Anyone who has been in an active job search recently knows how frustrating it can be. As job seekers, we are playing a very serious game, against thousands of other seekers, and we don’t really know the rules the companies are playing by. We look for – we need – ways to ensure that every resume we send reaches the audience and makes an impact.
The Gatekeeper
Long ago, at the beginning of my career, the job search process was straightforward: you found a job listing in a newspaper classified ads, typed a resume to give your qualifications and appeal to the hiring manager, sent it to the address in the ad, and waited.
The significant shift came with the rise of internet job sites . These sites made it so easy to apply for jobs that companies were overwhelmed with the response. The same technology that caused the overwhelm was harnessed to filter applications so that only the most relevant or most qualified applications reached the humans.
This technology...
