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Step 1
I have heard that there are recession proof industries out there so let's look for one of them. Everyone who is born eventually dies so death must be a recession proof growth industry! Go to careerbuilder.com and type the word "death" into the keyword box. Then push the Find Jobs button. I go 70 pages of jobs or 1,736 jobs. Looks like a lot of death related jobs out there. And since I did not choose a particular location, there's death work all over the country.
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Step 2
If there's anything folks like more than death, it's putting off death as long as possible. Let's look for jobs in the health field. At the top of the page make sure you are at the Search Again tab and then replace the word "death" with "health." Push the Find Jobs button again. Now we're cooking with gas! 160 pages or 89,880 jobs. We have quickly found through this exercise that if you have a choice between working on CSI or Grey's Anatomy, stick with Grey's. Yes there are a lot of television shows dealing with coroners and murders but if you want a real world job your chances are much better among the living.
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Step 3
Now that we've decided to live, we can look around careerbuilder and see what it's doing with the bounty of jobs it brought back for us. If you look down the screen under the search box you will find an area labeled Narrow Search. Basically the health related jobs are sliced and diced in ways that might be useful to you. For instance, if you are only interested in jobs in the nursing field look under the Category column for the word Nurse and click on it. All the Nurse jobs will come up. Let's say you always wanted to be a nurse in Dallas Texas. Then find the City column and click on the Dallas link. Now you are looking at all the Nursing jobs in Dallas. If you want to turn either the Nurse filter or the Dallas filter off, look back at the Narrow Search area and find the tiny word "off". If you click on the "off" button, the filter is removed and you can once again see the unfiltered results of your search.
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Step 4
Lets suppose that you want more control over your search. You either don't want to drill down to find the jobs you are looking for or you know some specifics about where you want work and in what field. Look near the top of the page for the Advanced Search tab and click on it. Now you have much more control over your search.
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Step 5
It may have occurred to you that in this brave new world of ours that your previous skills, whatever they were, are now obsolete. You will have to take a job that you know little or nothing about. We have words for job like that. The words are "trainee" and "entry level."
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Step 6
Let's stay on the Advance Search screen and replace the word "health" with the word "trainee." Under job category we use the drop down box to pick "Health Care." Using the Degree drop down box we pick "none." We are only interested in a full time job so we unselect the check boxes that indicate things like seasonal and contract jobs. We kinda want to know that we are gonna get paid--this ain't no hobby- so on the far right we check the checkbox that excludes jobs that have no salary information. Then we push the Find Jobs button at the bottom of the screen.
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Step 7
Uh oh. I see only 13 jobs in the past 30 days. If your dream jobs is there and nobody else in the country wants it--bubonic plague inspector for fresh road kill in Toad Suck, Arkansas (yes Virginia, there is a Toad Suck Arkansas, deal with it)--your ship has come in! The rest of us have a problem. There aren't enough jobs to choose from. This can be the difficulty with doing a search that is too detailed-too specific. It might not be easy to figure out which of our criteria are filtering out the jobs that we want. Fortunately for you I'm running this circus so I have an idea of how to open things up.
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Step 8
Let's replace "trainee" with "entry level." Now I get 130 jobs. Nothing spectacular but most of us aren't really going to be able digest more than 100 or so jobs at a sitting in any case. Let's open her up a little more. Use the tab at the top to return to the original advanced search screen. Beggars can't be choosers so we are going to remove the health care restriction and we are going to remove the check box that about showing salaries. Also, we are not working now so we will take any kind of job except intern--because it might not pay anything--so choose the Employment Type checkboxes accordingly. Also, we don't really care about the degree thing so we will deselect it. Deselecting involves choosing the first item on the drop down box. Leave the words "entry level" as is. Now push the find jobs button again. We are back to 160 pages or jobs or 20,102 jobs. Let's say that we only want to look at fresh new jobs that were listed in the past 24 hours. Then we choose 24 hours on the drop down box near the Find Jobs button and push the Find Jobs button again. Now I get 1,415 jobs around the country associated with the term entry level.
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Step 9
Drilling down through the entry level jobs and drilling further down through health care related entry level jobs I eventually come to some results we will take a look at. At the bottom of the screen is a list of jobs for something called Direct Support Associate. I click on the first phrase in the job listing and I get details of the job. Sometimes the details will be on the career builder site and sometimes you will click through to a staffing agency or employer site. I notice that the job we are looking at only requires a high school diploma. I also notice that they mention some skills that would be helpful in the job. Although they say they offer some training in the nice to have skills, a smart employee tries to get an edge wherever he can. For instance, some community colleges might offer very inexpensive courses in CPR. Most work places assume that you know Microsoft Office. If you don't or if your Word or Excel skills rusty, you might look to see if your local county and city libraries have computers loaded with software that you can practice on. As a last resort, you might attend a vocational school. I put this as a last resort because these schools can be a costly rip-off. Avoid the fly by night rip-offs by only going to a vocational school that has been around for a few years. Make sure that the vocational school is nationally certified and licensed to operate in your state. Use google and the Better Business Bureau websites to check for complaints against the school.
Comments
kayt9 said
on 10/12/2009 Another aspect of finding the right job fit is to determine if the compensation being offered is a match for you skills. This can be difficult to ascertain initially, but a new site called SalaryFor.com http://www.salaryfor.com/ helps to make this challenge much easier by offering free salary records from an incredible number of companies and positions.
ladyofthelake said
on 9/14/2009 You write with humor and style. Great information as well. Rec. and 5*
sktodd said
on 8/10/2009 I was a bit skeptical when you started out with the death example, but it kept me reading! Nice work.
alluringbeauty said
on 7/5/2009 Wonderful way to find employment. Thanks. 5*
constructionjob said
on 6/25/2009 There is a company which helps you to fax your resumes to organizations of your choice for few cents. www.find-construction-jobs.com give you the option to send your resume via fax or email to Construction, Architecture, Engineering and Manufacturing Companies. Seems pretty cool since, we have the choice to select the companies we would like to work with and the cost is just few cents.