I met yesterday with a family friend who just finished up a stint interning and is now on the job search in DC. She’s doing all the right things—talking with everyone she knows, getting the word out that she’s looking for a job. You know, networking. But she’s also not exactly sure what she wants to do or where she might want to work. She has ideas, she has passions, but where she’d like to end up is much harder for her to visualize right now.
I suggested she try searching to better be able to visualize. What I meant is: spend some time on Indeed.com and other large job search engines, just searching. “Seeing what is out there,” for lack of less hackneyed phrase. It is much easier to visualize how you can turn your interests and passions into an actual job if you have a heightened awareness of what jobs and organizations exist that you might want to do or join.
Joanne Tay gave an idea of how to do this in her comment to a previous post: she found the Working World blog, along with other international exchange resources, by Googling [international education and exchange + blog]. She’s got the right idea. Try any number of different search term combos in Google or Indeed.com, based on what you’re interested in and might want to do, and see what comes up. You never know what you might find.
The downside of this kind of blind searching is that you’ll be forced to sift through a lot of crap, and that it’s easy to become overwhelmed very quickly. However, the upside is that you’ll probably discover interesting organizations and positions you had no idea existed—and you might actually get a job (I found my job at Georgetown, the one I’m leaving tomorrow [single tear], by this kind of random searching on Indeed.com, hence my fondness for this particular search engine).
Check out this post on JibberJobber for ten of the best job search resources where you might give “seeing what’s out there” a try.
