polishing the resume

Well, it was just one of those days at the office. I sat impatiently in a meeting, just waiting for it to wrap up so I could rush out the door and work on my resume. And I discovered that, for someone who wants to quit immediately at the end of as many workdays as not, my resume is surprisingly out of date.

I'm actually not at all good at job hunting--the only position I've really ever successfully sought out was a student job while I was in college. I started my career in the computer networking field at my high school while I was a student there. First I did it for class credit, and that developed into a paid part-time job, and over the summers I worked for the school full time. While I was in college, I still worked for the school district when I was back home for breaks, but I decided that I should get a job at school as well, and my search began. I applied for a student network assistant position, and they interviewed me. There was a whole committee (of three people) and everything! They were pretty impressed with the level of experience I had for a student, and hired me. After I graduated college, they offered my a full time position, and being clueless as I was (am) about job searching, I had nothing else lined up, so I took it. Fast forward five years, and I'm still doing the same thing. Now you know why I'm bored.

I did have one other unsuccessful experience in trying to get a job. Around 2006, I decided that I was stuck in a rut and wanted to get out. (And you can imagine how deep the rut is now after two more years.) I had been sporadically applying for jobs, and I was called for a phone interview by one of the places in Texas. I thought it went okay, but I didn't really hear anything from them afterwards, so I assumed they weren't interested. Then, out of the blue, two months later, they called back and said they'd like to meet in-person. So I went down for the interview, which seemed fairly normal I suppose. They mentioned that the position had actually been open for over a year, and that the reason it had taken so long before they interviewed me was that they were waiting for another application to come in from someone that had anything close to my qualifications. For a search committee with a search that was well into its third month for a position that had been open at least a year, they seemed unduly dismayed when I told them it would take me probably four weeks before I would be able to start (2 weeks notice, plus 2 weeks to relocate)--"It's getting pretty urgent for us to fill this position," they said. Anyway, the next week, they sent me an e-mail saying they went with another candidate.

So, I'm officially 1 for 2 in job interviews, and 0 for 1 in job interviews that are not for a part-time student position. Here's hoping I have better luck this time around.