A: It’s a good question, Mike. There’s two ways of looking at this. You’ve got to remember that along with the CV is the search. The job for those kinds of recruitment tools will probably slowly shrink and other tools will probably come up for me. I would on the side of I find a one page CV an insult. You know, someone has done a lot of stuff to filter out the things to fit onto one page. 

You know, to edit it down to that, to me, feel a little bit insulting when you’ve got a lot to share. So for me, I would on the side of share everything because there’s two ways that this will work. There’s still be that pathway where a CV or a document gets sent to an agency, but most of the people that I hire are people I find. 

And that’s where this stuff is really important, because I don’t know what the latest figure is, but I think it’s $120,000 a year is a costly thing for hiring the wrong person. So put all your trust in an agency’s method to collect CV’s and toss them up and filter them accordingly to the criteria. It’s taking a risk, and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. 

I’m just saying I wouldn’t rely on that solely. I would use those. My thing is that where is the action in this particular field? So say we’re talking about English language learners. You know, where’s the where’s the really good action having. What’s a good one look like. Where is this really getting traction. And when you go to those places you find people that are fully immersed in it and may just be interested in moving over. 

So I’ve had more success in finding people through LinkedIn and going to them and saying, hey, I’ve noticed your profile. I’m really interested in what you’re doing. I’m not offering you a job yet, but to me that’s a different conversation to posting a CV and waiting for, waiting for a response from a school or an agency. And, Mike, if I can add, to, you know, Paul’s response because it’s a really good question. 

What I found is a head of school, evaluating resumes, whether they’re in print in the old style, 1 or 2 pages or digitally. Now on LinkedIn, think of a layered approach. I scan quickly. First, for what jobs did you have? Where did you have them? What? Your academic background. So the way that, you know, a traditional outline looks, those stand out is bold headings then went beneath those. 

That’s when I can go back and look at the richness of that person’s experience in a particular location or a particular job. So it really is all or nothing. All could be there. It’s just the way you lay it out and layer it for the audience of that particular resume. Okay. So a resume, this would be like a I feel like A11 piece. 

It’s also digital brand. You’d say not so much. I wouldn’t say so because all it tells you is where you’ve been. You know, it doesn’t tell you what you’ve done and what you’ve achieved necessarily. And there’s still a school of thought that will put you well, this person’s been to these big schools or this person’s work for these big companies. 

They must be good. You know, it’s almost like deferring the hiring choice to someone who hired them before, you know, like they must be good because Apple hired them, for example. To extend your question to Mike, I think a very limited approach would be to take your CV and just hyperlink out of your CV into things, you know, maybe one little story about, you know, I taught at such and such a school and blah, blah, blah and oh, here’s a link to my blog where I talk about this is and it’s, you know, so you open the door to more things through that traditional model. 

And that could be the simplest place to start. Okay. Oh, I was thinking too, when you were talking like, for me, the resume is the first step, right? Like it’s like the precursor. And then I want to dig deeper and whether it’s hyperlinks or whatever the situation is, when I’m looking at someone and I see that, you know, someone has lived in another country and they’ve worked in a certain school, I googled them to see what they’ve done at that school. 

And if there’s nothing, if I can Google them and find anything about them, that is a little bit of a flag for me. Like, I want to see them engaging in that country, in that community and doing things within the context of that school in a visual way, so that I can say, okay, this it helps me see a window into what they’re doing so they don’t just exist on a piece of paper, because we can all make a piece of paper sound great. 

Q: And yeah, but like actually seeing it and that’s that action piece. And that’s where I think the branding really comes into play. and with what Dan is saying with searchable being search, being able to be searchable on the search engines, would you recommend that individuals definitely be on multiple platforms or is one platform okay today’s age? There’s a lot to that, I think, because people understanding how they can make their material more discoverable is is an important skill. 

A: And, you know, even just knowing that, you know, hashtags are important, but not too many, you know, things like that. So being really succinct about the kinds of mechanisms you use to choose to make your work discoverable. But I think, yeah, the more platforms you use, a lot of those platforms are integrated now. So, you know, if you post on Instagram, it’ll automatically ask you if it wants to post now on the license. 

So it’s not that hard to do what you’ve asked. So yes, unless you want to go into a full suite course and learn how to pay for, you know, Google words and so forth, I don’t think, you know, I think we just got to work with what we’ve got. Yeah. So, you know, I think that’s probably good advice. 

Well, one thing that I did when I first started working Ed Tech was I came up with kind of a name for myself, and then I decided to just like register myself on every social media platform ever. Now I don’t use all of them in the same capacity, but I just wanted to make sure that I had it. 

So if at some point within my career I wanted to use it, I had it. So I took just my last name and then I put teach because I felt like I was always so mean to teach once. So then I was always learning, but I was also the teacher. So teach me and teaching others. But anyway, I did that on like platforms that no longer even still exist. 

But what’s interesting is like I’ll hear about one at a conference and I’m like, wait a minute, that kind of sounds familiar. I’ll go to sign up. I’m like, oh, I’ve already signed up. Like literally like 2006. But it’s great because then I own it. So someone else didn’t already take that brand away from me, right? Like, normally if I look for that now, it’s mine. 

And I think like finding a way to like, do something catchy with your name that brands you is also helpful. And then you can just, you know, it doesn’t cost anything for most of these things to sign it up. And then you just have that as a placeholder. So when you’re ready to go and explore, you kind of have that component. 

Yeah. And you know what’s interesting is that that Nick Garvin guy whose CV I shared in the workshop, Nick’s been, navigating a a career change, I’d say potentially. And he’s getting right into crypto and bitcoin and NFTs and all that sort of business at quite a high level, you know. And he sure he’s lost money, but he’s made money. 

And when I asked him if I could use his CV, he said, oh yeah, sure, that’s nice. But he said, listening to what you’re talking about with branding, I really I’ve realized if I was to do a career change, my education CV is worthless. I have to recreate myself through a different lens. And just this week, friend is going into coaching, and one of the steps she’s using is the Strengths finder. 

And I’ve never done that strengths finder stuff. And I always find some of those things, you know, like Myers-Briggs and desk whatever were like a fad that were invented and, you know, lived and died over a period of time. And I sort of felt the same thing about strengths. But having done it, it was a really interesting process because it it made me realize that if I was going to rebrand myself for a career change, you know, doing your CV around your strengths would be really interesting approach. 

You could have bullet points as to where you worked on a very slim document, but, you know, actually putting together your professional profile through your strengths could be a really interesting approach. And I don’t know that that wouldn’t be relevant for education as well. You know. So I think the challenge there for us is to actually push the boundaries. 

You have to give the traditional CV and most agencies, most job hunting fairs. Well, I still ask for that, but I think that’d be food that that’s going to be enough because it doesn’t set you apart. And it’s no different to what the colleges and universities are going through at the moment. Lots and lots of applications. How do we differentiate? They’re all the same I think, Dana

.Q: Hey, buddy. Welcome, Ken. Yeah, it’s good to be here. Hello, Paul. Steve and Mike. Hey. Hi. We’re just starting the day here in Guatemala. So kids will be coming in in about 40 minutes or so. So I was just trying to get here before the, the traffic got too bad. 

You know, I’m just listening. I was part of the first session here, and I was happy to think that, yes, I had a three word brand that I created in 2017, which now I look at ES and I’m like, where did they get that? Because mine was learn to connect, engage. And I think yours is like the same words, but not in the right order, not the right order. 

But whenever I talk about that in a setting about myself or in applying for jobs, I make it a very circular, interwoven conversation. Because if when you’re learning, you’re connecting and you’re engaged and I got a whole stick and then, you know, to your point, Dana, my name’s Ken, who better than the Mattel Ken himself. Right? So my tag is education at 55, I don’t know. Somebody got it at another time. But in listening to the social media platforms like I do utilize Twitter as I’m just talking now, by the way, as you know, my primary professional media source and I’ve been reluctant to do Instagram because it’s another thing. And I think our lives as educators and really any profession, I suppose, is, you know, they’re very intertwined. 

And on the one hand, like my personal privacy and don’t want to be cyber stalked. On the other hand, I know Instagram, especially for the younger educators out there. It’s a really great source and I am on both sides of the recruitment process. I appreciate what you were saying earlier, Paul, because when I recruit for teachers, I do go out and look for people. 

A: You know, I just don’t rely on the top three website recruitment processes and I’ve had good success with that. So I don’t know if you have any other advice about having too much of a social media presence, but I do like the idea of the visual piece. And so perhaps creating a kind of montage, like in a portfolio of me teaching kindergarten in robot, and me as a principal in Lincoln School in Katmandu, and what I do now just to have it linked to my LinkedIn, I find LinkedIn to be a very powerful tool. 

They’ve only continued to get better, and I joined them actually when I wasn’t teaching. But was an entrepreneur doing events. So it’s been a long time, but I just, I guess, need to. The question I wanted to ask you as I came here today, was really what advice do you offer for somebody who’s trying to leap into the next part of their career? 

I am an elementary principal, ten year admin who is trying to become a director, and I know my wheelhouse is not a school of a thousand, but a school of 500 or less would be great. And I’ve had good fortune to be a finalist at a couple of gigs. However, I’m up against some stiff competition and so like, how do I set myself apart? 

I feel like I’m finding ways to do that, but it isn’t until I get into the first step. Like I need to be able to do it right at the beginning, and that’s got to either come in a video format or a really unique cover letter. I’m glad you’re shaking your head and like you, I’m trying over here, but, yeah, yeah, I don’t know. 

You know, in terms of how much is too much, I think it’s personal thing. You know, I’m a total advocate for social media and for people using it for good. But I’ve also seen people who’ve used Twitter, for example, thinking that they’re profiling themselves in a more positive light, but in fact, actually portraying themselves in a more negative light, by just reposting someone else’s post that’s like, hey, look what I found, you know? 

But reposting someone else’s post with a question or a comment that might trigger a conversation and draw other people in, I think is a good way of thinking about because it’s not just a flat page where you’re just sticking a post it on a wall. It’s actually a motivator for a conversation. I think that’s where I find a lot of people in my network, people who who say things that I even I if I comment on someone like, I mean, the other day I commented on something on Percy Sandberg’s website and that four principles condemned me privately and said, oh, I’m just interested to know that blah, blah, blah, you know, so things like that where you just don’t realize the value of the tool. It’s not just about saying, put a photo in my photo album, it’s actually saying, I wonder what the community thinks about this, and I wonder if this is important to other people as it is to me, because they’re the things that I think people will see, that will see your true sense, your true self in those kind of interactions. 

And I think, you know, one of the suggestions that I made in the in the workshop was if you choose three things to articulate your brand well, always post about those things, those things that that important to you. Make them rise to the top. And you, how do you do that? By frequency, you know, like by just continuing to tag them, continuing to, you know, you might become a bit annoying, but it’s it’s building your profile, you know, like it’s it’s something that you really care about, something that’s meaningful. 

 Yeah. I think we’ve got to keep in mind that the approach to hiring is changing. And it’s actually becoming more, in some ways becoming more controlled, you know, with psychometric tests and on the spot responses, written responses. You know, I watched some of the processes my wife went through recently, and it was just appalling. It was just like, oh, okay, you know, it’s like they they if you survive this process, we might give you the job. 

Q: What else have we got? Did anyone notice anything in the, in the chat that, that required sort of a response or did you have more questions, Mike? From outside? Not really. I mean, I have to, for where you’re at. Then you do. Mike. Yeah. Did you want to add something? No, I was going to say I look through, the form that we had on ask me many things, and I didn’t have any. 

Or in the feedback we already asked the ones that were on there. So, yeah, the stars, the two stars in the wish document. So we took. Yeah, yeah, we took from there. Right. But as we end off, I just have one question, because you, you spoke on rebranding. Okay. So I have like a two part question. I don’t know if it’s going to come out correctly, but like, I’m a hoarder of social media, you know, order of skills. 

Right? So in the social media, I go back to social media as far as a well, you know, my space and in regards to skill sets, you know, I my first job was like at Regals, you know, doing cashiers and stuff. So I want to know like, you know, as being a hoarder is at any point, is it okay to drop off of social media or to drop off a skill set? 

A: Oh, absolutely. But it’s interesting. A lot of people don’t understand when the skill sets actually contribute to a field that, you know, for example, when I was at Ice Age, we had a lot of students who are interested in a medical pathway to university to be doctors to. And so they would just load up any course that might have had science or anything to do with science in it, and then they’d want to do these additional courses on holidays and we would say to them, especially some of the kids that were, you know, a little bit timid, a little bit shy, and maybe even a little bit arrogant. 

We’d say to them, you don’t need to do any more knowledge based courses. You need to actually be put into a really challenging environment and volunteer in a in an emergency room, or just working really, really busy cafe, you know, go and put yourself under a stress situation where you have to respond quickly and those sort of things would contribute to your profile more meaningfully. 

So who would have thought a coffee shop stint would have, you know, help to a kid wanting to become a doctor? And that’s not an absolute, you know, example. But if the student can say, I did this thing of a summer, you know, storytelling, I did this thing. I was sitting in a coffee shop. It made me realize that blah, blah, blah, you know, and this is going to be useful. 

And transfer into that environment. So again, it’s just about how you pool the skill sets and experiences into the story to tell that, you know, the meaningful little nugget of truth about you. And that’s one of the things that I know that a lot of people, you know, dislike Twitter for, because it feels like it’s all these people grandstanding and telling and how wonderful they are and all that sort of stuff. 

To a point, that’s true. But what is also true is that you actually exposing yourself by saying things like that on Twitter and if they’re not true, and we’ve had situations where people have contacted us about people who’ve applied for jobs and say, don’t believe all that rubbish that I put on Twitter. It’s all of us, you know? 

So the tools are there to be used. And I think, you know, you have to be ethical in the way you use it. You have to be meaningful in the way you use it. And sure, if you don’t want to put this massive, you know, montage together that’s just, digestible. So, you know, I’d be clever about how much you actually put out, but I think to Dana’s point and to my reference as well, if you can’t find anything about people on the internet, then they probably haven’t arrived at the century yet. 

You know, they probably haven’t. Or they’ve, you know, they’ve they’ve taken a different path when they’re maybe coming into, you know, the dirt track, the down the mountain track or something. But I think it’s important that, that people have engaged in this stuff to an extent. And it’s clear and obvious that they’re using it for purpose, not just using it for everything, you know, which is why I’m divorcing.

So your personal life from from it and, you know, keeping these things bespoke to certain aspects of your career orientation and, you know, they’re fairly useful. And to piggyback on one thing that you said real quick is I had a student back when I was in Bangkok, and we did a week Without Walls and we did a service in Safari, so we worked with a school, which was an orphanage for kids whose parents were HIV positive, and a lot of them were HIV positive. 

And then we also did like a safari. So anyway, this one student had been applying to all different colleges, and it was a good thing she like, wasn’t like the top whatever, whenever. But she was a really solid zoom. But she wasn’t getting into the colleges that she wanted. But as part of like our weekly that wall thing is, she kept an ongoing journal on her portfolio of all of her experiences at this orphanage that we worked with, and so much so that she went back there the next summer and she went back there like the next Christmas, like it became a part of who she was. 

She loved working with this organization in this group. And literally one college said, when we read that you had us in tears, you’re in. And she was like, what? Like, I think I did not expect that to be the thing that was going to get me in. But she had sent them just a link to her in portfolio, and they got to see her behind just the grades and like, what a phenomenal human being, this person the student was. 

And I think if you can show people windows into who you are and what you believe and tell your story wherever you choose to tell your story, that really helps people understand who they’re committing to. Yeah. To that point, like one of the students we had in Tokyo at ASU was, yeah, she was a science math kid. She’d done all the courses that we had on offer sheet, and everything that I had that we we could offer her through the year. 

And she came to me, she wanted to do more courses over summer. And I said, why don’t you do a personal project? Why don’t you do you know, we had this thing in the timetable called it was corpus of School personal Project. But what it was is just a spare period where you would sit outside a teacher’s classroom and they would supervise you and you could do whatever you wanted to. 

And it wasn’t terribly rich. So we took that and turned it into a mentor approach. And with this girl, we just said to, what are you interested in? And she said, well, I’m really interested in, in chemistry. And I really love cooking. I mean that right. And so she did her, project on molecular gastronomy. First thing she did was she went to her chemistry teacher and she said, you know, I’m going to do I’ve just decided what I’m going to do now. 

It’s this. And the chemistry teacher said, oh, good. Well, you just need to buy this textbook and this kit and this resource, and, you know, you’ll have plenty of information. And she came back to me, all sorted. I’ve got it all sorted. And I said, no, you have a it’s fine. You teach. It’s not going to be your mentor. 

Haven’t worked that out yet. Having to do that. She said, well, who will be my teacher? And I said, I want you to go home and hashtag molecular gastronomy and come and see me in the morning, which she did. And she came back with eyes like this, and she said, I can’t believe it. There’s a chef in a restaurant down the end of my street who’s one of the top molecular gastronomy in this country. 

And it was just that one action of knowing that I can choose a hashtag to go and find a network of interest was just an incredible skill for her, and it was actually a turning point because she had no idea what she wanted to do. She knew she was going to get into a good university. She got into Stanford and it was on the merit of her personal project, because I loved the interdisciplinary nature of it. 

What she ended up doing was creating ten YouTube videos, instructional videos on burning questions like, why does lime neutralize chili? What happens when you caramelize sugar? And she did a mixture of experiments and interviews with kids and walking around. So here, taste this chili. Oh it’s hot. You know what happens when we put lime on your tongue? You know, things like that. 

It was very, very low tech and lowbrow, but it was wonderful. And Stanford said to her, it’s journalism, it’s personal choice, it’s science. It’s fun. We want you. So, you know, that’s something leveraging the tools that we have to.

A: Yeah. thank you so much for sharing. I see the time. Taking a look at the time. Looks like I 30 minutes is up, but just wanted to say thank you for coming in here to share your, your knowledge with us today what I got out of it is, go and tell a better story, so forth. So, thank you, everyone else. Thank you for joining in today for episode two. You can find us on podcasts, Spotify, and all the popular podcast platforms that are out there. Until next time, bye bye everyone. Yeah. Thanks, Mike. Bye, everyone.