The inevitable end to student teaching brings about the job search. Now being in education, we have heard our friends accepting job offers since August so it is a little intimidating having to look so much later than most people we know. However, rest assured, in the education world, you truly cannot begin the search early. Schools have to find out their numbers. People are moving around within buildings, people are moving to other schools in the district, people are retiring, and some people are just not returning.
This being said, my job hunt began around Spring Break. By this I mean, I found the school districts that I wanted to apply to, began filling out applications, and tried to find as many connections as humanly possible. Now it is crazy to think but finding a job in the education world is often reliant on connections. It is great if you are an incredible teacher and you are one of those people that were born ready to be a teacher, but without having some connections, it is very easy to slip through the cracks.
Here are the things that I have learned about the job search process thus far that I had no clue about:
- Connections can bring you from one of 8000 applications to one of thirty being interviewed.
- When you submit your application, it goes to the top of the list. This means that you should repeatedly submit your application to keep it current and at the top of the list to be seen by schools.
- Many schools don’t know their numbers until the end of the school year and some until the end of the summer.
- That means that you may not get a job until August so you should not stress if you do not have a job before graduation (still trying to remind myself of this one).
- Most applications are through a system called “Applitrack”, and your applications connect to each other so you do not have to retype everything in every single time – just use the same login for each school application.