On Networking
Aug. 5th, 2007 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebSo one job goal is to network more.
One book I read said it's not quantity but quality, and that's where I get in trouble. None of my friends are educators or hang with them. Even my work colleagues who are academic advisors interact only rarely with academic educators.
I joined some professional associations and went to conferences but most of those guys are from elsewhere. Hey, I talked to strangers at every session and at every meal.
There's a local meeting soon that I plan to attend. But "local" means "central Texas." This meeting will be in Fort Hood (one hour north of here). These are distance educators and most of them work for public school districts or other colleges. The public school jobs require teaching experience. Basically, whichever teachers don't run away screaming from technology get put in charge of educational technology. And it doesn't appear than anyone from my university is involved with this organization. In conclusion, I'm not sure how great these contacts are anyway.
I did tell another co-worker about my job goals and she actually listened instead of spacing out and changing the subject. Maybe that counts.
I'm afraid that I'm so clueless about how to get into this sort of thing that I don't even know how to find the right people.
Plus all the different jobs I can think of that involve developing educational materials are so different from each other that the folks who do them don't seem to hang together. Jobs I've considered include assistant to an academic journal editor, college learning skills center worker, the kind of PR person who writes articles about the research college professors do, the kind of person who works in a center that helps college teachers teach better, and the kind of person who helps professors develop distance learning courses.
A better approach may be to develop stuff, offer it around, and get relevant attention that way.
(I think I've only gotten one of my over 30 jobs via networking, and that was my first job as a clerical assistant to my dad. Mostly I get jobs where there is a need for a lot of folks at once, there is high turnover, there is low interest in the job, or some combination of those.)
One book I read said it's not quantity but quality, and that's where I get in trouble. None of my friends are educators or hang with them. Even my work colleagues who are academic advisors interact only rarely with academic educators.
I joined some professional associations and went to conferences but most of those guys are from elsewhere. Hey, I talked to strangers at every session and at every meal.
There's a local meeting soon that I plan to attend. But "local" means "central Texas." This meeting will be in Fort Hood (one hour north of here). These are distance educators and most of them work for public school districts or other colleges. The public school jobs require teaching experience. Basically, whichever teachers don't run away screaming from technology get put in charge of educational technology. And it doesn't appear than anyone from my university is involved with this organization. In conclusion, I'm not sure how great these contacts are anyway.
I did tell another co-worker about my job goals and she actually listened instead of spacing out and changing the subject. Maybe that counts.
I'm afraid that I'm so clueless about how to get into this sort of thing that I don't even know how to find the right people.
Plus all the different jobs I can think of that involve developing educational materials are so different from each other that the folks who do them don't seem to hang together. Jobs I've considered include assistant to an academic journal editor, college learning skills center worker, the kind of PR person who writes articles about the research college professors do, the kind of person who works in a center that helps college teachers teach better, and the kind of person who helps professors develop distance learning courses.
A better approach may be to develop stuff, offer it around, and get relevant attention that way.
(I think I've only gotten one of my over 30 jobs via networking, and that was my first job as a clerical assistant to my dad. Mostly I get jobs where there is a need for a lot of folks at once, there is high turnover, there is low interest in the job, or some combination of those.)