Dear Internet,
I was thankful to have known ahead of time my position was going to be converted from contract to permanent, which was why I sat on the fence about my decision to reapply for so long. The fall out from the revised job description, plus a few other factors, was the tipping point for my final decision. And that was that — I was on the market once again.
It doesn’t feel like four years since I last job hunted, but here we are once again doing the shuck and jive to win the approval so I can feel like a productive (and wanted) member of society. Go team.
Four years ago I thought I was hot shit because I had all this experience stacked behind me from a variety of career fields that translated well into library speak, which was and still remains true. But I was wholly naive about the depth and breadth of the library world. Even though I had worked as a reference librarian throughout my MLIS program, I was woefully unprepared.
Thanks to the insight from working full time in my current position for the last three years, I can now pinpoint all the mistakes I made in the first go round, and there were a lot of them, that I can now avoid on this round of job hunting. I feel immensely smarter, slightly more wiser, and better prepared then before.
I should feel like I am a better candidate and in a much better place to apply for positions.
But yet.
Yet.
I can’t help but feeling my first thought about this whole process is of soul sucking dehumanization.
I spent most of today, really all of today, tweaking my profesh website, cleaning up my resume and building up my references list. I had started saving jobs to apply for in January , but of course most have now passed, so more time allocated cleaning up that list. In nearly ten hours of working steadily through all of that today, I only completed applications for two jobs and started another two, which I will be picking up on tomorrow.
Last time I went job hunting? 114 job applications over six months.
While I’m praying to all of the gods that a new job will be much easier to find this time around, I am forever cautious on the process.
Don’t worry, I always end up on my feet, but sometimes I can get a bit weary of it all.