I was an employee at Motorola doing test tools in OO-Perl. (I was completely working in OO-Perl applications development.) I was unhappy about 4 months ago, given the corporate instability in the telecom industry. So, I threw my resume up on hotjobs, monster, dice, and every other free resume site I could find. About 2 months later, I had a job.

Things to (and not to) do:

  1. Update your resume. Make it as good as possible. Go through the resume-helper sites. If you can, get a recruiter to look at it and nitpick about the language. I had a friend who's in HR for sales look at mine and, even though she didn't know anything about what I did, she helped a lot with the formatting, etc.
  2. Put your resume out on the WWW. Recruiters scan those sites every single day.
  3. Apply for every single job title that remotely looks like you could do it. Ask good questions in the interview and ... YOU CAN ALWAYS SAY NO!
  4. Get search agents going. They didn't help me, but they have helped others immensely. They help you focus on a given set of geographical markets.
  5. Email bomb EVERYONE. It's just an email. It's not like you bought a stamp.
  6. Do NOT despair. You will get a job. It's just a matter of time. The economy is nowhere near recession. (Remember, unemployment is still under 5%.)
  7. Be willing to move, even just to the next town. You increase the number of jobs you can be considered for. (If you're willing to move to Columbus, email me at dragonchild93@yahoo.com and I'll hook you up with my consulting firm.)
  8. And, most importantly, keep your chin up. Don't despair. /msg me if you need to. I'd be glad to talk with you.

I'm now a contractor working in 100% Perl. (The kicker is I'm working with Verizon right now. *laughs*)

Update: pmas is correct, in that you need to make yourself stand out. However, I still maintain that you should try to contact every single person you can. Send that resume, even if you know that you'll be rejected ... because you don't know. You might be that 1 in 100 people that skim through the weeding process. Every single one of us can learn to do pretty much any kind of programming/sysadmin job out there, in about 2-3 months. You can fake knowledge for that long, until you get up to speed. Right now, your goal is getting a paycheck. Once you have a paycheck, you can figure out what you want to do. Don't turn your nose up at a possible job, just cause you don't like the description. I've never worked at a job which matched the description in the ad. And, frankly, I don't think very many of us have, either.

------
/me wants to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier!

Vote paco for President!

In reply to Become a Perl contractor! by dragonchild
in thread Perl Job by gaggio

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