Using My Skills

When you are a transitioning teacher, you are told that you need to cater your resume, portfolio, and LinkedIn to the career that you want to pursue. It makes sense that you would want to tailor those things to the job descriptions that you are applying for. I have felt that those resumes, portfolios, and profiles do not truly represent who I am or what I have done over the course of my life. Every time I work on my resume or update a portfolio, I feel like I am not showing what I can really do or who I am.

Today, I had a phone call with a mentor, Susan, to talk about UX design. It was a great conversation and I left it feeling inspired to (yet again) take this transition in a new direction. Instead of focusing on just UX design or instructional design. I am going to look for something that combines those things as well as my years of experience teaching kids to follow the design process and to make things. I have spent the evening creating one portfolio that combines my instructional design portfolio and my UX design portfolio and it will have a section for examples of work I have done in education. Susan suggested I start reaching out to businesses or organizations that I am interested in to introduce myself and start building relationships because the job for me may not be something that gets posted.

I feel like I keep changing my mind about what I am going to do next. I still have a passion for teaching people and I love using technology so now I just need to figure out how to combine those two things.  I had been thinking of combining all of my work into one big portfolio but hadn't done it because of what I have seen online about making a portfolio and being career specific.

The plan right now is to finish the Google certification program for UX design, work on building content with the lessons I have developed for my classes over the last several years, and to start networking.