Read the blog post here: https://www.heathermonthie.com/how-to-use-linkedin-to-find-online-it-teaching-positions/

Download the Technology Toolkit for Online Educators, Coaches, Consultants, and Experts working to create an online education-based business here:
https://bit.ly/TechToolkitforEDU

Join the Edupreneurs Online community to discuss your online teaching career/business
https://bit.ly/EdupreneursOnline

Schedule some time with Heather to review your LinkedIn profile for teaching IT/InfoSec/Software Development online teaching https://www.heathermonthie.com/work-with-me/

So in this video, I’m going to share with you some of my tips as a former higher education administrator working in both colleges, universities, vocational schools, community colleges, etc. and how you can use LinkedIn to find different online teaching positions specific to it and the technology professions. So I wrote a blog post last week that really shared some of my tips for you. 

And in this video, I’m going to give you an extra special tip that’s not included in the blog post. But I want to make sure to include it because I think it’s something that’s important. So listen all the way to the end to hear that final tip, it’s not included in a blog post. 

So the first is to really create a comprehensive LinkedIn profile that complements your resume and highlights all of your existing training and education experience. So in your profile, you want to make sure that you are including any types of training that you have done in the past, whether they are part of your paid positions, or they might be part of volunteer positions as well. So that when you’re trying to break into teaching, either online or face to face, having some sort of training experience, really is really helpful. 

Whether or not it’s paid, it doesn’t necessarily matter whether or not it’s paid. But it does help to show that you’re interested in this kind of work that you have some experience doing this kind of stuff that you have experience working with people who are trying to achieve a particular goal. So some things that you might want to consider highlighting with regards to your training experience that you may already have is that if you are you know currently working in it, or you worked at it in the past, and you’ve done, you’ve been part of a phase of a software rollout, and part of that software rollout plan, it usually comes a training plan that goes with that. So highlight any pieces of the training plan that you had a part of. 

So whether you put you planned out the training sessions, you determine who needed to be in them, you determine what the outcomes of those training sessions needed to be, you determined, you know if there were different types of training sessions that needed to be done based on work roles, things like that. It’s not necessarily always just delivering the training session, there’s a lot of planning that goes into coming up with the right training as a training plan for the right people in your place, or your place of work. 

So make sure you highlight that if you maybe you delivered a workshop for seniors, senior citizens, on how to use the internet, how to use Facebook, how to use email, how to stay safe online, how to, you know, properly do your internet banking, that kind of thing. So you put together any sort of, you know, a workshop for your community, senior citizens, maybe you know, through your Hoa, something like that, make sure you highlight that. And again, it’s not just the actual delivery of the training session, it also includes all the planning that goes into putting together that training session. 

And then also think about our few are the go-to person in your family for any tech-related questions. So the fact that people are coming to you and asking questions, shows that you are approachable, that you are patient that you’re you know, willing to work with people you’re willing to help them. So you want to make sure that you if you are that person in your family, just highlight that in some way on your LinkedIn profile. 

The next is to make sure that you’re active on LinkedIn. So your LinkedIn is got a lot of really great opportunities there. Some people are posting things, you know, probably personal things that don’t necessarily need to be posted there. But make sure you’re active there. From your career standpoint, get involved in some of the discussion threads, update your status, share blog posts, either that you’ve created or that you’ve written, or that other people have written that are related to your particular industry. 

The next thing to do is to connect with different recruiters, faculty, administrators, who work at some of the schools, colleges, and universities that you are interested in working for, you know, it might not necessarily be that they have an open position right now, but you want to get to know who some of these people are, and share, share, you know, the things that you know, and the things that you learned and the things that you know, just form that connection with them. You can reach out to them send them a message saying that you’re glad to connect with them that kind of thing. But then you also want to connect with people who maybe work at a school or you know, an institution that you probably wouldn’t consider working at. And that sense that you may be throw on the other side of the country they don’t offer online programs. But it’s a small world so you know, there’s a lot of people that that know people who know people who know people, so it’s really good to start connecting with people who are working in the higher education field, in whatever role they may be working in because Although they may not be the one hiring, they may know people. So you can search for them. You can search for them based on their work roles. There might be vice presidents, they might be Dean’s, they might be faculty, that could be an associate professor, full professor, things like that. So you want to look for them on LinkedIn. 

And, you know, just reach out and connect with them. And then, when you are connecting with people, hopefully, they’re, you know, writing to you as well. So when they do write to you respond back to your messages quickly. So sometimes recruiters will reach out to you, you want to make sure you get back to them quickly. But then, you know, oftentimes, other people might reach out to you based on a blog post that you shared that, you know, you shared something that was really interesting, it was really relevant to the time and maybe that person just had a thought about it, and wanted to share with you. So make sure that you are replying back to the messages that you are receiving. 

The next tip is to follow educational institutions and other companies so that you can stay up to date on what’s happening in the future, the IT workforce, I think anybody who works in the tech sector knows that there is a shortage of to have top talent in this particular role or with a particular industry. And so you want to make sure that you’re on top of where the needs are aware of the skills that employers are looking for not just your own employer. But when you’re working for a college, university, vocational school, Community College, educational IT training company, doesn’t matter.

One of your goals is to help your students get jobs at the end, right. So if you are training your students and educating your students on the means in the workforce, you know, if there’s a gap in the workforce, that they will naturally be able to find a position. So you want to make sure that you’re staying up to date on what’s happening, there might be a particular piece of technology that is sort of on its way out.

 But that doesn’t mean that there are no jobs, there’s going to be legacy systems that need to be supported as well. So make sure you’re staying up to date on not only what is this sort of, you know, cutting edge or bleeding edge technologies that are coming out. But what are the legacy technologies that are out there where people might be retiring, and there’s not a lot of workforces to support those systems. 

So make sure you’re paying attention to that kind of stuff. And then you want to just share content from others in your industry for visibility. So it doesn’t necessarily always have to be your own blog post that you share. It doesn’t have to be your own article that you share. Maybe you found a great article on CIO comm or you found, you know, another good article on another website that you think is great, and you want to share it. So make sure you share content from other people as well. 

And then reach out to people that you know, in your field. So if you just started on LinkedIn, find the people that you already know you’ve met in real life, you know who they are, you’re connected to them. As you start building out your network, it will, it’ll naturally just grow as you start adding people to your network. And then you want to share your recent accomplishments with people in your field. So anything that you might have accomplished in your work role, anything you might have accomplished as a volunteer, things like that. Don’t be shy, don’t be afraid to share some of your accomplishments, things that you’ve written, if you’ve been on a podcast if you’ve written a book, don’t be afraid to share that kind of stuff. It’s fantastic for people to see. 

And the final thing which I did not include in my blog post, but I wanted to make sure to talk about it here is that so when I was working in higher education full time, and I was constantly hiring faculty, I was hiring I was I was hiring people to be like, you know, in the trades fields, so pharmacy technician, medical billing and coding, it technicians, age back technicians. And then also when I was working in your four-year degree programs and beyond, so software engineering, computer science, data science, it cybersecurity, things like that, those are oftentimes very hard positions to fill. So what I would do is I would share on LinkedIn, as an administrator, I would share on LinkedIn, the current openings that I had. 

And so with the idea that people might see it, oftentimes what would happen is I would say I haven’t, I have a position open I need somebody who to teach in our it program, they know this that the other piece of software and people would reach out to me and say, Well, do you have any openings in English, you know, something like that. It’s maybe not necessarily relevant. But you know, if I, if I know you, if I know who you are, it makes it a little bit easier for me to make a recommendation to the people that are hiring for English faculty, but if I don’t know you, and you’re just you know, sort of a random connection that I just I don’t know who you are, I can’t put my name behind yours. I’m probably not going to make that recommendation. But if you are working in it, and you want to get an online teaching position, then you need to go connect with the people that are hiring. 

During the online it instructors because like I said, they will post open positions that they have on their personal profiles. So while you’re following the colleges and universities that you might want to work for, follow the people who are hiring for those positions too, because they will post those on their personal profiles. So those are a couple of different ways that you can use LinkedIn as your as a great tool to getting your first or next online IT teaching position. If you are interested, you can download I have it over here. It’s just go to https://bit.ly/TechToolkitforEDU.  I’ve put together a great document where I share all the different tools that I’ve used over the years teaching technology both online and face to face. Some of these things I use now some of these things I’ve used in the past and but I wanted to share that with you. You can go to https://bit.ly/TechToolkitforEDU to download that today. And I’ll see you in the next video.