Getting a Job: 11 Things I Learned When Made Redundant
By: S. Mitchell
Tags: Job Hunting, Job Search, Career Advice, Careers

Image by <a href=”https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=1915348">Gerd Altmann</a> from <a href=”https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=1915348">Pixabay</a>

At the end of October I was given three weeks’ notice I was being made redundant. I’m in my late fifties, jobs are scarce, coronavirus restrictions and a second lockdown are hitting business hard — things looked bleak.

Five weeks later I secured another job. I made mistakes and learned lessons in that time. Hopefully, this article will benefit those seeking work, saving them time and preventing them making the same errors.

1. Pin down your skills and experience.

My first task was to consider what I could do. I know there’s plenty of work for plumbers because you can never get one, but that’s hardly my skill set.

Think about everything you’ve done, and that includes voluntary work, clubs or hobbies. If, for example, you’re the treasurer for your local swimming club, your financial expertise could sway a potential employer. Working in a charity shop, even if only for a couple of hours a month, shows you have customer service skills.

Give concrete instances when you have used your skills. I needed to not only say I could use DTP software but also list examples of publications I had produced.

The National Careers Service has an online skills health check. You answer questions and take timed tests — some of which I found challenging — to assess your strengths and weaknesses. The check takes at least two hours to complete and produces a report at the end. It covers things like working with numbers, verbal reasoning and solving mechanical problems. The twenty-three-page report helped to clarity my thinking. It was time well spent.

2. Work out what you like doing.

This sounds obvious but I had to go through the process. I was a secondary school teacher for over thirty years and then worked for a religious organisation for fifteen months. What gave me a buzz? And what did I do in my spare time?

I figured out I liked helping people. That is the primary criteria for hundreds of vacancies. However, I don’t want to do personal or intimate care. That knocks out 99.9% of those vacancies.

I also love writing so I investigated jobs in that field. Without experience in particular industries, which I didn’t have, and because I don’t live in London, the only route was freelancing. (See below.)

3. Work out your budget and your financial goals.

Getting my finances pinned down kept the panic at bay. It gave me some control.

My wife still has a job and I have a pension, but that isn’t enough to pay the mortgage and university fees while maintaining our lifestyle. By looking carefully at our outgoings we identified places we could cut costs and how we could offset university fees against savings. We also found out the minimum I had to earn.

With online banking, you only need a piece of paper and a calculator to take control here.

4. Find the right job sites for you.

Not all vacancy boards are created equal. Some specialise in particular types of careers. For example, I wanted something in the voluntary sector so I kept the CharityJob tab open. It only had a few vacancies but they were much more relevant than those on most sites. Another charities board produced reams of irrelevant ads.

Surprisingly, most sites didn’t allow me to search for remote-only jobs. Indeed does.

Try a variety of keywords and filters. The search engines work differently on different sites. What produces nothing on one site will produce hundreds of hits on another.

I got frustrated by how badly the filters worked. Be prepared to spend hours scrolling through ads. Also, vacancies are not just posted on multiple sites, they are duplicated within sites.

5. Part-time jobs are rare.

In the run up to Christmas you would think there would be hundreds of casual vacancies. There aren’t. At least not on job boards. Recruitment firms can’t make enough money from them.

Instead, I looked at the equivalent of local newspapers where a company with a job will pay for an ad. You can also try the vacancy sections of the websites of large businesses.

6. A CV is not what it used to be.

Job sites and recruitment agencies have changed resumes completely. Talking to an employment coach had me completely re-writing mine.

Personal details come first, as you’d expect, but not the ones I’d been used to including. I deleted my middle name and my address, putting only the town I lived in, to try to reduce the chance of identity theft. I also substituted my mobile phone number for my home one because it is easier to change. Apparently, job sites, recruitment agencies and other companies aren’t always as careful with your data as you’d like them to be.

Then I added a profile. This is three or four paragraphs telling the reader about you. It’s what they read first. If it makes them like you, they’ll read the rest. It says concisely what qualifications, skills, experience and qualities you have.

Next comes your present (or most recent) job and a list of your main duties. I included here training courses I attended and the reason for leaving. (I was made redundant because of a financial shortfall caused by the pandemic.)

I summarised my employment history as a teacher into a couple of pages. (I have worked in eight different schools in two different countries so it was hard to be more concise.)

To keep the length down, I left out other jobs I’ve had, such as being an emergency tutor at a university hall of residence. If I was applying for a particular job, I might include these if they were relevant.

Finally, I deleted the name and addresses of my referees. Nowadays, most companies only contact them after you have been offered a job. Recruitment companies hang onto email addresses and phone numbers for people they think might be valuable, I’m told.

I also learned that references can be very bland and simply state information with no evaluation. This is to avoid the referee being sued if you don’t turn out to be suitable.

7. Spend time on your LinkedIn profile.

I hadn’t ever used LinkedIn before. I hadn’t needed to, so I had no idea how it worked. It takes time, but setting up your profile and job alerts may get you the position you want.

Try different keywords for alerts. If your search terms are too broad or popular, you get notifications of hundreds of positions, and I wish it was easier to filter them, but it is better than most job boards.

Also, recruiters search the site and so you might get headhunted.

8. Freelancing is tough to break into at the moment.

Thousands of others have had the same thought I had: I could try freelancing. I’d looked at it before, but only superficially. With the prospect of no income on the horizon, I looked at it very seriously.

I tried Fiverr but the competition is tough and the rates of pay low. For example, people will edit and proofread 1,000 words for less than £4. There are over 900 ‘gigs’ in the editing and proofreading section. You can make a reasonable amount once you get established, but how do you get started? (It does make me wonder when I see ads like: ‘I will profread your english.’)

I signed up to Upwork and did their test. I haven’t found anything I can do that pays a reasonable amount of money and hasn’t had a pile of people apply for it already. (What do I consider reasonable? More than £5 per hour, so well below the minimum wage.)

I did find an American content mill that accepted me after I did a grammar and punctuation test. However, to then qualify to bid for work you have to do another test which involves writing several short pieces, including a description of a storage company using on a website, and answering more grammar questions. My American English isn’t bad, but having to check things like hyphenation, which is significantly different, is a right pain. Because I got another job and because the work on that site was pretty low level, I didn’t pursue it. I will if I’m unemployed again.

Most content mills seem to be American. I found three that weren’t. One now only takes applications for specific jobs such as French to English technical documents translator. The application page on the second one is broken. They know about it because I emailed them and they replied, but they haven’t fixed it.

The third, Textbroker, required a test followed by a piece of writing. This was a review which had to have a very specific structure. Your writing skills are rated from one to four stars. They are only taking on four-star writers at the moment. Also, once I had completed everything, I got a message saying they will take several weeks to process my application.

Obviously, people are making money out of freelance work. I’m not one of them.

9. Download the details.

I put in an application. Two weeks later I was invited for an interview. Great. I went back to the places I’d seen it advertised. It was gone. I felt like a right idiot. I could easily have taken screenshots or highlighted the text, copied it and pasted it into a word processing document.

The takeaway? If you apply for a job, download the details.

10. Write everything in a document first.

Many applications are online forms. They ask a question. You write your answer in the box.

I write everything in Word and read over it carefully before checking it with Grammarly, Language Tool and Hemingway. Then I copy and paste the text into the boxes. Of course, these tools don’t always get it right but they do pick up some errors.

11. Don’t give up.

This is the hardest one but it’s important. I wrote my successful application on the afternoon I found out I didn’t get another job I’d been interviewed for. I didn’t give up and it paid off.

There are jobs out there. One of them has your name on it. Keep trying.