Lessons Learned: Landing Work During a Pandemic

I just ended my nine month search to returning to working within my professional career domain. It’s perhaps the single biggest relief of my adult life. Working barely part-time since early January 2020, doing what was supposed to be a temporary, filler job for a couple of months, became an extended nine-month period of growing fear, worry, concern, depression, desperation, and frustration. Two to three months of intended transition time between my last job in Italy and finding similar work back here in the USA became months of endless searching. I, like anyone else, did not plan around having an unprecedented global pandemic to deal with as part of my job search. My life as a whole, quickly went down a very different path than I had ever intended.

I want to share what happened as many others may be in the same situation I was just in. I’ll offer some key lessons learned the hard way, what mistakes I made in my seemingly endless job hunt as well as what did end up working for me to find and land a new and very desirable career which I now work in.

Let me set the context and timeline of key events for you first to understand the setting better. This is key to understanding the behaviors, attitudes, and actions I took at various points in my job search during the COVID19 lockdown all the way through late September.

Late December 2019, I return to Madison, WI (my hometown where my parents and siblings live) from a year spent working and living in Italy as a contractor for the USAF. I get back with plans to live with family temporarily while looking for a new contract role with armed forces populations to keep doing the work I love doing which is performance physiology and training for military members' readiness needs. I quickly make traction early on and have 3 possible job leads going well with onsite invites extended on all 3 leads by early March.

March 13th (Friday the 13th of all days) the COVID lockdown mandate for Wisconsin goes into effect. By the following week, all 3 of my leads have been delayed or postponed for TBD invite dates to resume….that never happened. So starts the long, difficult, painful, and frustrating process of looking for work again.

Note, I‘m 36, single, no kids, no pets, no debt, no major bills of any kind. I was actually extremely fortunate my entire 9-month search in that many others have it far worse than I did. In hindsight, I should have been more grateful for how well I had it despite what seemed like complete despair at some points. No one else was dependent on me, no one else was impacted by my unemployment, I was not bleeding out money for bills or payments. I did well to save up money while in Italy as well. Granted I did not have health insurance, benefits, or retirement anymore so that did ride on my mind daily. I did have some side income from publications I write for and some remote, online clients I coached for fitness-related outcomes and goals. It was something sure, enough to break even to buy my own food, put gas in the car I was using, and pay my cell phone bill. Beyond that, it was hard enough to make a living off of on my own. I did not have to pay any rent while crashing with family which was a huge help this entire time as well and something I cannot thank my family for enough.

I knew from the get-go I would not likely stay in or near Wisconsin due to the scarce military presence in WI relative to many other states. I’d have certainly taken a job in WI if I found one in my professional domain but as predicted, nothing come about in all nine months of my searching. I thus never planned to move out and find my own place in Wisconsin, but rather search for the more likely opportunities elsewhere. I was naively certain that a job offer would be coming very soon and I’d be packing up to move out any day. “Any day” seemed to keep getting pushed back further and further despite my best efforts to remain an optimist.

From April to June, its radio silence. I do not find or hear anything in the few positions I did manage to find and apply to. I almost had hits on three roles in late June on several contract positions I was selected to be submitted on for bid with several military branches. Sadly as I let my hopes build-up that one of them would surely land… not one of them did win the contract bid and thus I was not made a job offer for any of them… back to rock bottom, more despair, anger, frustration.

More radio silence from July through mid-August, finding little to nothing within my intended field while getting multiple rejections on several others due to government employment eligibility matters. I got desperate and started to apply to jobs and careers, positions, agencies, companies, and organizations semi-related to my field and specialty domain. Anything remotely attractive to me that I may be qualified for I applied to. 20+ applications a week. Regretable generic cover letters, generic resumes, casting a super wide net to try and catch whatever would bite. This was stupid, worthless, pointless, and irrational. The time, effort, and energy wasted on this only distracted me from what I should have been doing. It also brought on allot more needless rejection, frustration, and depression. All of which could have been avoided completely.

By July I attempted to pick myself up by the bootstraps and make my own work if I could find it elsewhere from someone else. I planned to offer a summer sports performance training camp for local youth athletes through a local gym owner and his facility. We both discuss and come up with a solid plan for promotions, marketing, word of mouth, calendar of events, etc. The whole thing is built, pushed out, and hype builds quickly. We get emails, calls, messages, comments, and many other inquiries showing major interest from parents in the program. Great! How many signed up by the deadline? 0! Yep, 0! Not a single kid was signed up. No glitch, no technical issues, no miscommunication. Parents simply were not ready to send their kids into a summer training program with other kids from other towns, in a small gym with a new and unknown coach while other gyms were barely opening up, local schools were not even sure sports would be taking place at all let alone classes. The minds of most parents sided with their children's safety over their sports performance needs. Can you blame them? COVID concerns and fears smack me in the face a second time! More despair, more anger, more depression, more hate of COVID!

Finally! After hitting a near rock bottom mentally, socially, and spiritually, I got my crap together and got re-focused, strategic, and determined. Applying a Zen-like focus on only the job I wanted most, where to best find it, how to find it, who to connect to in order to find it. Low and behold!…it’s mid-August now, and within a couple of weeks after applying to five new openings I got wind of through my professional network, four of them bite and offer me interviews. I do my homework and study the crap out of them all. They all progress well to the point of being a final candidate for each position!

By early September I FINALLY had not just 1 but 2 tentative offers on the table! I accepted one of them which is the role I have now. Then, over the next two weeks, two more offers were made to me as well for other roles I had applied to at the same time for the same exact type of job! That’s four offers on the table in less than 30 days! How in the world did I suddenly go from absolutely nothing to landing four, targeted, desirable job offers I would have happily taken in a blink earlier on? Here is where the hard lessons learned become all too clear.

Know your target job- I started out this way just fine. But then when I got desperate, emotional, and scared, I went crazy and lost sight of the exact job type I wanted most. This lead to misdirection, aimless applications, a sense of randomness, and a lack of control in what I should be looking for and applying to at all. I found job search sites like Indeed and LinkedIn to be very helpful to filter out for target jobs I wanted as well as USAJOBS for government based jobs within armed forces domains as well.

Stay the course- Related to the lesson above, have a game plan to begin with. Take some time to develop a formal plan of attack for what your job hunt needs to be. Just like a literal animal hunt… before you even get to the hunting grounds you determine the prey, the places to best find it, the gear to bring along to make the kill. Treat this like the hunt it is! I only wish I had stayed with my game plan all along, never getting distracted by emotions.

Network your a$$ off!- This gets played off as being a given and often times not in the right light… I had my light on too narrowly. Do not just look to network into the organization or company you wish to work with, do it yes but do not stop there! Having an insider help you get noticed is great, yes and I worked this angle myself. But do not forget to active your own external network! Let everyone you know in your field know that you are looking for work and inform them of what kind of work/job it is you seek most. This allowed me to put at least ten other sets of eyes and ears out there to alert me to jobs they knew of but I may not have. I also used my professional network via industry professional organizations I have a membership with. Social media groups and special interest groups tied to these memberships helped me post open and direct requests for support in finding such roles I was pursuing. Every industry has these so go find yours! Why go on the hunt alone when you can have a small army out there on watch each day for jobs you want to land? Turns out, 2 of the 4 organizations that offered me jobs (and the one I have now) came from my own peer network notifying me of the opening.

Do your homework- Once you do have some traction on a job application you have submitted and it goes to the next level of interviewing, even just a screening call, be ready! Know the company, know the job you applied to as best you can, know the people who will be calling you. Know your own resume! Plan and practice for some of the most common interview questions ahead! Know the city and region around where you may end up taking a job. This proved very helpful for me to know the typical cost of living in several cities as well as other stats on those cities that would determine if I would want to live there let alone work there. Datausa and Sperlings both proved great resources for me.

Don't cast wide nets- I was following this advice for a good while until I got emotional and desperate… funny how emotions make us do really dumb things! I went from about 10 targeted applications a week to specialized jobs I was most qualified for, to anything within my general field of health, fitness, wellness, and nutrition. That's a very wide domain to try and play ‘top dog’! I might catch a few target jobs but they were few and far between with far more misses and this lead to more rejections, inpatients, aimlessness, and wasted time on jobs I never really matched up for to even begin with. But trying to be a generalist had another big fault….being generic…certain death to any applicant trying to stand out in a pile of 100+ applicants for a hiring team who need just 1.

Craft is best- Just like a really good, unique, craft beer, you want to stand out as different and unique to the job applied for. This needs to show up in your resume and cover letter. When I was casting that wide net of applications to anything that seemed remotely appealing, the only way to do so was to send out a more cookie-cutter resume and cover letter with small tweaks to fit the role at hand. Bad idea! I likely was not standing out much if at all to anyone looking at it for more than 10 seconds. Once I took the time to go back and word every single resume and cover letter to one and only one job listing that I truly wanted and was well fit for…did I start getting callbacks for interviews. Go figure!

Stay Rational- Easier said than done when under the weight of unknowns, fear, pressure, time, etc… but still, when I did finally snap out of my deep, dark, negative funk and took a big picture look at myself and what I was doing (thanks again stoicism!) I realized I was letting emotion and illogical decision-making drive my actions and behaviors and it was not helping me at all. Almost within two weeks of getting back on track (stay the course) did things pick up again for me.

Follow Your Heart- This underlies all the above factors. It is what kept me going each and every day of my hunt on the good weeks and the bad weeks. I REALLY wanted the exact type of job I ended up getting. I have done it for 7 years, in 7 cities, 5 states, and 2 countries over the past decade. I am fortunate to be able to say I truly love my job. That passion drove me daily, to keep at it even when the process of doing so seemed almost pointless at times. You too really need to ask yourself what it is you love to do most and then chase it down to no end! My field/profession is niche and very limited to a specialized domain of skills, qualifications, eligibilities, and locations so this made finding roles rather hard even without COVID. However, being that I am single and mobile made it a bit easier for me to look almost anywhere to find and relocate for the right job/company when it did come up. That flexibility ended up taking me to my present location in west Texas, working for the USAF as a contractor at Goodfellow AFB.

Timing- This is really something that was out of my control and most of anyone else's as well. You cant apply for a job no matter how perfect it might be if it is not yet posted. Perhaps these 4 offers I got would have come about anyway and it was just a good timing matter all along? Perhaps something else was just around the corner also that I'll never know about? Perhaps something even better than what I have now opens up back in Madison Wisconsin next month. All possible. But I can't control that and so I do not worry about it. I put my focus on the right now, the present day, the present task, and give that my all. If you do all the other things right, the timing always seems to work in your favor in the end… it sure did for me. 4 separate times in fact! That’s beyond coincidental if you ask me.

Closing Thoughts

Now I get that not everyone was/is in my shoes and they may need to find work of some kind sooner than later to put food on the table and keep a roof over your family's heads and to keep the lights on. This is why I can say I did not have it as bad as many others do. My case, albeit very stressful, difficult, and seemingly strung with roadblocks, was never a true situation of desperation, financial trouble, or family struggle. It took me to some dark places for sure, it tested my resolve in ways I have never had to cope with and to be frank, I did not like the way I handled it in some cases. Daily outdoor walks with a supportive podcast, reading specific books on adversity and success really helped, hitting the gym almost daily to keep my physical self strong and anchoring my mind to something I enjoyed doing was critical. Having close, supportive family members I could fall back on and other close friends and peers who cared for me, checked in on me, and kept my hopes up all played into my coming out unscathed from this 9-month ordeal. I want anyone reading this to know that although it hurts, your scared, worried, and fearful of what may come, I want you to know you are not alone! You will come out of this better, stronger, revived, and renewed. Do not dwell on the negative and uncontrollable. Focus on being positive, surround yourself with good people. Use these lessons learned right now and nail that job/career you so badly deserve. It's coming and wow is it going to feel so damn good when it does!