By this time, the teachers union, the BC Teachers Federation, had realized that a number of teachers were likely going to lose their jobs. (They probably still didn't realize how many.) The BCTF had created the Unemployed Teachers Action Centre, or UTAC. I went to UTAC. I took them up on various aspects of getting another job, such as having a resume counselor look at your resume. (He told me that my two resumes were each about 98% correct. I asked how to make them 100% correct. He said that wasn't possible: after a while you reach a point of delivering diminishing returns, when changing one thing to make an improvement means reducing the attractiveness of something else.)
I also volunteered. I have always volunteered, since at least my early teen years, and probably since childhood. It was something that my parents modeled, in terms of volunteering for church work. I just extended it.
In terms of career advice, I give you volunteering. As you will frequently be told, in career counseling workshops and seminars, you will never be paid for everything that you do. A corollary is that you will be paid for a lot of things that you don't do, or at least that you don't put an awful lot of work into.
Volunteering comes under the category of not being paid for things that you do. But volunteering can pay off. Not all of it, of course. And you won't know what the important things are until possibly well down the road. Volunteering gives you experience. Real world experience in real world situations. You get to do things that you wouldn't be allowed to do in an ordinary job; or, at least, you would be directed and supervised in a regular job, and you wouldn't necessarily be allowed to try certain things. So, yes, you get experience. In addition, you make contacts. Real world contacts. Not necessarily ones that will be immediately profitable in your next job, but you will make contacts, and these contacts may be far higher up the career food chain then you would be allowed to create in a regular job. In a regular job your boss, and his boss, want to keep you from the people at the top. After all, they are protecting their jobs. From you. They don't want you making contacts with the C-suite. But when volunteering, that doesn't really apply. Your immediate supervisor, in a volunteer position, probably is completely outside of your career path. They don't care who you talk to. They aren't threatened by who you make contact with. They have different concerns, mostly to do with the pecking order, and food chain, of the volunteer organization itself. But you may actually be working with people who have C-suite positions, in your own career path. So, make those contacts. Work with those people. Do good work. Show what you can do. Those people may not be hiring right now, and they may never hire you for the companies in which they are currently working. But sometime in your career path you may both be working for the same company. If you show them diligence, hard work, and creativity, and what you do with the volunteer organization right now, they will remember.
As I say, you may never encounter them again. But take every opportunity. Always do your best work. Always be aware that you never have a second chance to make a first impression. The contacts that you make now may come back to assist you at some later point in your career. And, if you do a bad job (or nothing), that bad job may come back to bite you later in your career.
I highly recommend volunteering as a career strategy. You get to actually do something useful, which is helpful for your own mental balance. You learn new things, and get to do a lot of things which they don't let you practice in real employment. You make contacts. Volunteering is about helping others, yes, but you always get a lot out of it yourself.
Since I was already interested in computers in education, I had been studying what computers could, in fact, do for you. Therefore, I was well versed in the general functions of computers, and had learned not only programming, but word processing (with a variety of different word processors), spreadsheets, and databases. I prepared a workshop to give to unemployed teachers, so that they would be able to use these computer skills in finding other jobs. I gave this workshop very frequently. I modified it, and gave it for other groups as well. I gave it regularly for UTAC, and met a number of teachers, from different school districts, and different situations, who had been fired. One of them was one of my former colleagues from Kitimat. We caught up on what had been happening in Kitimat. He said that nobody had cared very much when I got fired. They didn't realize that it was only the beginning. They didn't realize how many of them we're under threat. He apologized that they hadn't done more for me right at the beginning.
Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/03/mgg-42-all-things-work-together-atwt.html
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/03/mgg-44-atwt-internet-although-it-wasnt.html
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