Follow our easy steps to a stress-free job search! Set your priorities before you send out your resume to get the job you want.

DECIDE YOUR PRIORITIES - WHAT JOBS, WHERE, AND FOR HOW MUCH COMPENSATION - BEFORE YOU SEND OUT YOUR RESUME.

We're sharing this series of weekly job search activities to help you not just find a job, but to find the right job. You worked hard to get into your university program, worked hard to get through grad school and to pass your Praxis. For the last few years your focus has been on getting in, getting through, and getting out of grad school. Drilling down and absorbing everything SLP related. Now you have to learn how to network, interview, understand employment structures, employment contracts, insurance and benefits, tax deductions, license and certification requirements and more! And you thought you just needed a job!

Identifying your priorities in a job search is an essential first step. Unless you identify where you want your career to go you will be overwhelmed with activities that may not move you forward in a way that best meets your needs.

We want to help you identify your professional priorities and then navigate and understand the process employers use to select applicants so that you can confidently find the right job for you. Congratulations on all that you have achieved so far. You have chosen a great career and are among a select group of professionals who will have a significant impact on individuals who receive your professional services while enjoying the security of stable employment with a wide spectrum of career options.

So let's cover the basics. There are three primary components to identify in an SLP job search; clinical setting, geographic location and compensation. Only you can determine the priority balance for these career components. And those priorities are set by two competing approaches to your career: your brain and your heart. Your brain may be saying one option is the best way to pay off your big pile of student loans but your heart is saying you really want to work with children, which is usually not the highest paying job. There are exceptions within the field that may make your competing goals come into balance and we'll cover that information in future steps. For now, try to assign a percentage value to each of the three areas, clinical setting, geographic location and compensation. In this exercise, the total should equal 100%.

Let’s look at a couple of examples:

New CF-SLP A: She needs to be in a specific geographic area.

New CF-SLP B: He has a passion for working with children using AAC devices and would like to be near a major city.

One lesson you should take away from this activity is that if you are geographically specific you probably need to consider all clinical settings. And if you are clinically specific you need to consider a larger geographic job search area. There are only so many CF jobs available and you want to make sure you get the one that best meets your priorities. There are no right or wrong answers and of course it's really difficult to get exactly everything you want in a first job, but this little exercise will help you narrow your job search focus and efforts in specific areas that move you forward in accordance with your priorities.

Everyone is different. Your priorities and choices are your own. And your future employer should know, understand and be able to meet your needs. That means YOU need to know, understand and be able to articulate those needs in a professional job search process. Your objective here is to use your decisions regarding your career goal to set the foundation for your job search.

As you consider these elements and plan your job search, the choices you make will influence how you develop your resume, how you search for job vacancies and how you interview. Use this information to choose the best format for your resume, the words you include to describe your clinical experience and interests and who you share your resume with. Use your priorities as the criteria when accepting and declining interviews. Your priorities affect everything from who you select for your references to which job offers you consider. Our best advice is to not skip the basic step of setting a goal for your CF job.

So let's get started! We can't wait to hear where your choices take you and look forward to sharing the next step with you next week.

To your success!

Take away Tip - When applying for jobs that are not commutable from your home, do not include your address in your resume. Employers often have a bias in favor of local candidates who might stay in the job longer and have fewer onboarding logistics to manage. Next week we’ll go over developing a backup plan for those ‘just in case’ situations.