Make yourself more marketable this summer: advice from Seth Godin
June 11, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
For many teachers, summer vacation is the Super Bowl of job perks. You’ve worked hard at a demanding job, and now get some well-earned time to relax.
This year, though, the economy has become the fingernail in teachers’ bowls of soup. A lot of educators have lost their jobs, and many worry that more cuts are on the way. While you can’t control who gets laid off, you can use your summer months to make yourself as valuable an employee as possible.
Marketing guru Seth Godin wrote a great blog post on how to effectively use down time to make yourself marketable to potential employers. A few of his suggestions:
- Spend twenty hours a week running a project for a non-profit.
- Teach yourself Java, HTML, Flash, PHP and SQL. Not a little, but mastery…
- Volunteer to coach or assistant coach a kids sports team.
- Start, run and grow an online community…
There are plenty more ideas, and all of them would be great avenues to personal growth. Godin is aiming his advice at recent college grads without jobs. Depending on each person’s family and financial situation, this list isn’t doable for everyone. However, as a teacher, you’ve now got between three weeks and three months (or for some less-fortunate educators, a lot longer) of time you can spend on self improvement.
“If you wake up every morning at 6, give up TV and treat this list like a job,” Godin says, “you’ll have no trouble accomplishing everything on [this list]. Everything! When you do, what happens to your job prospects?”
Are you planning on doing any career development this summer? What would you add to Godin’s list that would benefit teachers? Share your plans in the comments!
Graduate school for unemployed college students
Related stuff:
Certification Map - Where do you want to teach?
Teaching English abroad: what to know
Photo credit: Giorgio Montersino on Flickr.
