Starting the job search again

Well, I've been a Residence Director for about three and a half years now. It's certainly been the best job I've ever had, but I'm getting to the point where it's time to move on. I'll be graduating with my MBA in December, so I won't be taking classes anymore. Wifey and I are also a little tired of living on campus.

As well, my earnings potential is much higher than what my current position offers. Come June (when my current school year will be done) I will have six years of management experience and a master's degree in a relevant field. I know that having the ability to make more money is not a good enough reason in and of itself to leave a job, but it certainly is a consideration. I have a bunch of student loan debt, wifey and I both have medical issues, and the possibility exists of starting an expensive adoption process. Money may not be the most important thing in the world, but it sure comes in handy!

I've started some preliminary work for my job search already: touching up the ol' resumé, expanding my LinkedIn profile (still needs work), setting an appointment with Career Services here on campus, and making a few decisions as to where to look. I will begin searching in earnest in January since I'm in this job until June.

The last time I was doing a major job search was when I graduated with my undergrad. At that time I was looking to move to Pittsburgh but didn't really know what field to look in. Completely different now, we're not looking for any particular area but I have a couple of fields I'd like to be in.

When it comes to where we'd like to be, we're fairly open-ended right now. There are certain considerations like proximity to our families, proximity to our friends, areas of the country we like better than others, etc. There is also an idea of ours that it would be nice to live in Europe for a few years since we both love it so much, so at least we have it narrowed down to two continents!

As far as a field to work in, there are two main areas that I will be looking at. I am definitely interested in higher education administration, as in working for a university. The thing with that though is that I would only want to work for a Catholic university, there are too many things I don't agree with when it comes to other schools. The other issue there is that there are a lot of Catholic universities whose Catholicism can be called into question, so it's also tempting just to keep the search to those universities on the Cardinal Newman Society's Guide to Catholic Colleges.

The other field that I'm interested in is Human Resources. I am very interested in employee relations, hiring, firing, incentive management, and labor disputes. Personally I only have experience in employee relations, hiring, and firing; but the other two are very intriguing to me from studying them in classes.


They say that most jobs you get through networking. Back when I was a recent college grad that always frustrated me because I just didn't know many people in the work force. Now almost everyone that I was in undergrad with has a job somewhere, so hopefully that will make things easier. There are also quite a few people that I know from my time working as an RD who have already graduated and gotten themselves jobs, so that might work out too. In the end, I both know more people AND the people I know are older.

Things are very different than the last time I was doing this whole job search thing. More experience, more education (with better grades), better networking opportunities, and (of course) wifey. I'm excited, it will be a lot of work but I think in the end things will work out well!