Discomfiting is a word I used yesterday and I like it so much--I’ll use it again today. After twenty years of reading resumes for a living, it is discomfiting to try to write my own. Hmmm, maybe discomfiting isn’t the right word after all. Perhaps I should use demoralizing?
All right, that’s my little whine and it’s over. Actually, I had an old resume I had written in order to be considered for a previous promotion but never heeded my own advice to job applicants and hadn’t updated it in years. Lazy? Perhaps. Idealistic? Maybe. Unmotivated? Probably. Uninterested in pursuing anything resembling my current, oops, most recent career? Exactly. But that said it will probably be better to show up at my outplacement meeting today with something. So I got a draft written while mulling the same thought that I had while clothes shopping. How do you go about writing a resume when you don’t know what kind of job you’re looking for? Or better yet, what do you do when the experience on your resume looks nothing like what you want to do in the future? I think I used the word conundrum yesterday too.
When I finally got down to it, it wasn’t that hard to write this resume that I may never use, because I stole my own profile from LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com) and cobbled together a draft. For those who don’t know, and I’m guessing that few don’t because it is becoming so mainstream, LinkedIn is an online professional networking site. The “About Us” section of their website states the following: “LinkedIn exists to help you make better use of your professional network and help the people you trust in return.”
I was probably later to the LinkedIn game then I should be in that the “trust” component in that network was pretty critical. In my job as Recruitment Manager I was a bulls-eye for third party recruitment firms. I had to be careful of who I invited into my network, because anyone I linked with could find the professionals from my company with whom I was already networked, and entice them away. But in the last few weeks, when I suspected that there could be a networking need in my immediate future, I invited a lot more people to be my connections. So far, I have 41 professional contacts. What gets fun is when you look at their networks. It’s like the game “Six Degrees of Separation.” Through my connections’ connections, if you will, I am linked to 2800 individuals and through my connections’ connection’s connections; I’m attached to over 300,000. I’m feeling better already. There must be someone out there who has a creative idea for a young-middle-aged former professional, looking to reinvent herself.
And with any luck, along the way, I might even stumble over Kevin Bacon.
1 comment:
Sounds like you are off and running! If it were me? I'd procrastinate until the weather got nice, and then I'd procrastinate some more until the summer was over whereas I would have surprisingly discovered I had magically morphed into a golden bronze beach bum. Then and ONLY then would I think, "ok, I've read every book in the library, nothing left to do in the garden and I've cooked my way through 26 countries; it's time to hit the pavement." :) Of course, you could always take a page from my book...become a substitute Nutritional Provider for your local school system. The pay is great--you get to wear all kinds of cool baseball caps while you work, and you're back in your humble abode when the kids get home!
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