Why now?

Being a full-time parent is the most rewarding, and most challenging, "job" I’ve ever had, bar none. Family is the centre of my life and that’s not going to change in the foreseeable future, but I also want to pick up the strands of my professional life, to do fulfilling work completely distinct from my husband and kids. So you don't think I'm too pie-in-the-sky I should admit the extra money would also be a boost to our admittedly tight budget.

I’ve been thinking I’d like to get back doing some paid work for awhile now, but hadn’t made any real moves to make it happen until this spring. My first concern was I needed a new resume, one that addressed the substantial gap in my employment history in a positive way. I think I have that now, but writing it was a long, drawn out process of restructuring and revision. I also did soul searching in terms of what I wanted my life to look like with work added in. This was a great process; how many times in our lives do we step back to examine our core values and carefully outline the ways in which we are going to try and honour those priorities? Not often enough I suspect.
 
I see myself working part-time for a couple of years before transitioning back into full time employment. Part-time positions are not advertised or posted in the same ways full-time jobs are. If I’m going to find something by word-of-mouth I’m really going to have to refine my network.

I now understand better how new media can play a key part in my thorough job search. It will help me refine my networking capabilities and then focus my actual search techniques. Of course, in a more broad sense, Social Media is taking on ever increasing importance in the fields of communications, public relations and marketing – exactly the industries I’m hoping to get back into. It’s essential I have a working knowledge of applications like facebook and twitter if I want to be a remotely appealing candidate for employers.

Social Media is such a huge hydra-headed entity it’s a bit intimidating. Me taking BCIT’s Media Communications: Intro to Social Networking course is about getting from thrashing around in the shallow end to comfortably swimming laps of front crawl. Before September I didn’t tweet, wasn’t LinkedIn and although I whiled away many happy hours on YouTube there was very little “me” about my use. I only watched videos never put up a video of my own or commented on anyone else’s (my favourites and playlists are quite nicely organized though I must say). I’ve been very resistant to getting a facebook account. Most of what I know of it comes from horror stories in the traditional media (well really their online versions; I’m not a complete Luddite.) I do resent not being able to access interesting fan pages though so I may cave in to the pressure and join using a nickname.

Next week: what happened when I began to wade in.