One of the reasons I’m doing this blog is because I’ve been looking for work for a while, with varied degrees of success. Sometimes, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel full of fish, and sometimes it’s more like shooting fish in an empty barrel without any fish. With experience at both ends of the spectrum, I know how easy and difficult it can be to get work in the first place.
But when you’re in a drought, like many people are now, you can get consumed with looking for jobs. Soon, you settle into a rhythm. Your routine might not always be a good one (some suggestions here), but you will spend countless hours on the Internet, pouring over classifieds like it’s the last thing you’re ever going to do. And some of the skills you pride yourself on having might start to atrophy like a paralyzed limb.
After two months of searches, I found steady office work mainly thanks to my Excel expertise. The problem was, I hadn’t used Excel at all in the past year. Over the weekend before my first Monday, I gave myself a crash-course in the entire Microsoft Office suite, remembering how to mail merge, create Access files, develop Publisher pages, and make databases. It was exhausting and infuriating, and I promised myself I would never go through that again.
In order to keep my skills sharp, I will give myself little projects. I inventory my MP3s in an Excel file. I send out messages to family created with mail merge. I make flyers for friends’ bands using Photoshop. I cut together dumb Internet videos with Final Cut. I develop my writing skills with this blog.
The point is, with a competitive job-hunting environment like this one (the demand is greater than the supply – just like in high school economics class!) , you can’t afford to slack off. Even if you have to take a class to remember how to use InDesign again, it might be worth it to keep the skill. If you’re looking for work, it’s a bad time to be forgetting things.
