Finding Yourself Unemployed…What to do?

Bump in the Road…

You’ve been unemployed going on three months…five months…maybe even nine months. The resumes have been going out, you’ve been networking, asking friends and contacts to keep an eye out for job openings—waiting for that one ray of hope of being employed again. But so far, nothing. The gap from when you last worked to now is increasing at an uneasy pace, and you ask yourself, how is this going to look good to potential employers? The truth is, it may not, but you can alleviate this—dare I say it—black hole.

There is the oft used statement that a six month gap will automatically send your resume to the trash, even if the job seeker is a fantastic candidate. However, as your unemployed period continues to extend, there are still many things you can do to ‘pad’ that resume. With the recent economic downturn, more and more people are becoming unemployed and are turning to other opportunities to better themselves and their skills. It’s not quite ‘funemployment’—that newly developed term describing the unemployed spending their days at the beach and traveling—but depending how you define the word fun, it certainly can be. Instead of waking up at 10am every morning, applying to a few jobs online, and then being lazy the rest of the day, get out and do stuff!

Give yourself an upgrade

Build on your current skills or develop new ones. Many community colleges and city community centers provide classes for affordable prices. A quick search on my city’s website shows, among others, classes for “Chinese Business Culture” and “Digital Photo: Intro to Adobe Lightroom 2.0.” Less technical classes also exist that can help you network, such as fitness, cooking, ballroom dancing, and painting classes. Go out and try a few, and when you’ve completed them, add it to your resume if it’s related to the job you’re seeking.

Or, if your line of career requires specific credentials or certifications, buy the study guides and take classes if they are available. When you’re ready, take the test and add that to your resume if you pass.

Help out with what you already know

If your current knowledge and skills can be useful to others, provide some consulting, freelance work, or volunteer. You can be well versed in almost anything that someone else can find useful, whether it be for advice, technical help, or freelance contributions. For example, people with an accounting/finance background can offer advice to friends for their personal finances or businesses. Are you a writer? See if a local newspaper, website, or blog will let you freelance for them.

Ask around. It doesn’t matter if it’s for free or paid, it’s still ‘work’ and will show that your skills are valuable. Add it to your resume, but also make sure your ‘clients’ will acknowledge your work should a prospective employer reach out to them. Not only will this fill in space between employment, but it also shows that you’re proactive.

Sabbatical—not just for the college professor

We’ve all heard it: that college professor is taking a sabbatical for a semester. If it seems that your unemployment has dragged on and will continue to drag on, there’s no harm in saying you took a sabbatical. Whether it be to spend more time with family, accomplish a goal you’ve had, or to travel and research other areas (both domestically or internationally). Maybe you have a skill or knowledge about a specific topic, research and see if you can teach it for a few months to a small class. Or maybe you’ve always had a genuine interest in cooking and decided to travel to Spain to learn more about their culture and took a cooking class.

However, you’ll need to use your judgment about whether or not to include this on your resume. You don’t want it to seem like you’d rather be doing something else than working. A spin you might want to take is to say I needed some time to reenergize and focus on some personal goals, but now that that’s done, I’m ready to go back to work. And who knows, maybe this sabbatical will open your eyes to an entirely different career path.

These are just a few ideas of how to fill in the gap between work. All of them focus on your skills and making yourself a better candidate for the positions you apply for. Take advantage of being unemployed by developing and making yourself more marketable. If you can do this while not losing your persistency, a job offer will come to the table sooner than later.

Tagged as: candidates, workplace

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