The Unemployment Chronicles Chapter 2: Linking Myself In

Last week, my unemployment became official when I submitted my lay off notice to the Illinois Department of Employment Services (IDES). It felt weird waking up on a Monday and having no work junk emails to delete. It also felt weird waking up around 10-11am or so. I decided to give myself a little time to unwind following the lay off, hence the extra sleep.

That's not to say I haven't been looking for jobs - I have. But my focus in the days leading up to my last day at Tango2 and my first days/first week of unemployment were more or less about getting my cards in order. The best way to do that, I've found, is through LinkedIn.

Many of you are probably already familiar with LinkedIn, but for those who aren't, the site is a more professional version of Facebook (let's just say, you might not want to have that picture of you taking jello shots with your friends as your profile for this site). LinkedIn is basically an online resume of what you want prospective employers and networks to see.

For those of you who wish to use LinkedIn optimally, here's a few things I've found out that can help the most:

1. One of my favorite features of LinkedIn is the recommendations section. The people you add as connections and vice versa can vouch for your work history by writing up a small blurb of their interactions with you at your current or past job.
   
   One of my recommendations for the recommendations section is to initiate the recommendations yourself. Write about your colleagues who you have interacted with the most and let the world know about their professional strengths. In many cases, you'll find that these colleagues will return the favor and publicly vouch (on LinkedIn) for how great of a job you did for the company.
   
2. There's also an option on the site for you to endorse people's skills. This can work in several ways - you can add skills yourself or you can have someone endorse you for a skill. In this particular section, the skills that you have been endorsed for the most will show up towards the top of this section. Again, like the previous point, I recommend taking the first step and endorsing people's skills in hopes that they can return the favor.
   
3. While I haven't utilized these yet, I recommend joining groups in your area of employment or desired area of employment. There are groups for just about every different type of profession, and to help you further, there are a lot of groups specific to professionals in a certain city or region. This can help you connect quickly to people in your area and profession that you may have never known before. I am in a few groups myself, but have not utilized these as well as I should.
   
4. And last but not least, you can check out jobs a lot easier than you can on most of those job building sites. Most of the jobs that pop up on my page are relating to my last role as a Sales Support Specialist. My guess is that it caters to what you have mentioned in your job history in your profile, so make sure you provide up-to-date and accurate job titles for the companys you have worked.

In addition to my networking through LinkedIn, I have reached out to most of my old co-workers and friends who have jobs in similar industries to see what might be out there and hope to get a name-drop here or there. A few of my former co-workers were kind enough to write recommendation letters for me, which I will have at my disposal should potential employers ask for them.

Now's the time for me to set myself up with some hard leads and get myself some interviews. Hopefully that will be chronicled in one of the next Unemployment Chronicles.

I may need some help with my resume, so anyone who knows anyone who specializes in resumes, I'd be glad to send you mine to see what I may need to edit.

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you haven't already. I would be glad to write you a recommendation if I've worked with you in the past or endorse some skills of yours.

B List - Worst Jobs to Post on Your LinkedIn Profile (List 11)

As many of you know, LinkedIn is quite the popular site for people looking to network. People's resumes become visible in a way never seen before. While using the site this week for work purposes, I thought to myself, "What would be the worst jobs to say you worked in hopes of advancing to a bigger and better job?"

Here's seven jobs that people may want to consider deleting from their profiles should they have had the un-fortune of working in that role.

7. Storyboard editor for Saved by the Bell - Have you ever seen the story arcs on this show? If you have, you'd be the first person to discover them. Just off the top of my head, here are some of the most ridiculous ones (which is saying a lot):

• Jessie's brother from New York comes to visit, is originally despised by the crew, including his love interest Lisa. Then basically says, "You know what, I like it here. I think I'll stay." He never appears on another episode.
• Similar situation with Screech's only reciprocated love interest - Violet. The one girl he could possibly score with at Bayside, and they have her on for about one or two episodes? No wonder why Dustin Diamond hates everyone he worked with there.
• A clips episode that shows Zack reflecting on all the great times he had at Malibu Sands over the summer. Of course, Slater is the one (of all Bayside students) to go get Zack to come back to school, only to relax and reminisce about the summer as well. Unless I am completely naive to how the school system works, I'm just guessing that a principal would just let one of his students just leave the school to go retrieve someone who he knows is skipping class. Everyone knows the Ferris Bueller way is how it's done.
• And Tori - yeah. Shows up out of nowhere to replace Kelly and Jesse, whose disappearance is not explained whatsoever. That's not even the most believable part. Do you really think that Zack would go for a biker chick? 

These are only a few of the ridiculous story arcs. I won't even go into the College Years, the standout moment being when Slater learns that he is Chicano from a girl who he never met before, then gets mad at Zack later in the episode for being ignorant of his Chicano culture.

If you have this on your resume, you may want to take it off.

Not sure where this fits into the blog, but this is perhaps one of the best graphs ever made.

6. Musician for Saved by the Bell - Just because the tune and lyrics are easy to get into your head doesn't mean it's a good song. If you need any proof of that, look at just about every #1 Summer song of the past 100 years. I don't know much about music and how to create it, yet I could say that I know more than whoever designed any piece of music associated with this show.

5. Extra on Saved by the Bell (especially the nerd characters) - I always felt sorry for the extras who had to sit in the background of every bullshit scene involving Zack trying to exploit them and his fellow classmates in some way. The nerds had it the worst. They were the stereotypical glasses-wearing, pocket-protector, never-getting laid nerds who got picked on. I still don't know how Screech would fit into that social circle - no way in real life does a social circle, especially in high school, contain a nerd as nerdy as Screech hanging out with jocks and popular kids. I digress.

As I stated, these extras were forced to go to every single social function that Zack and the gang would go to, from the movie theater to the Max and everything in between. I can't say I've ever seen any of those background actors doing anything since then - perhaps The Bell  was a career killer in itself before there was ever a LinkedIn.

One of many uses for Bayside's only classroom

4. Prop designer for Saved by the Bell - Anyone ever find it funny that the classroom that the kids learn in, with normal school desks, is the same classroom that is used for the woodshop class. By golly, it's also where the kids take their drivers ed classes and get to drive a golf cart in order to get their licenses. And the school hallways? Not just for lockers - it's also used for Army-style obstacle courses, locker-type garage sales to help Lisa pay off debt, and also for many Zack Morris "get rich quick" schemes, among many non-traditional school hallway activities.

Couldn't they have built different rooms for these activities to make it just slightly more believable? Perhaps the budget was tight. Yeah, I'm sure that's it.

3. Video Editor for Saved by the Bell - I shouldn't put this so high, especially since they didn't have much to work with in terms of credible story lines and great acting. But you know the editor has to get some flack. After all, he was the one who rendered all the videos, making sure they can be edited in a "made for TV" format. If he or she wanted, a video of better produced shows, like any Bob Saget America's Funniest Home Videos could have been edited into the story line. Sadly, I don't think any Saved by the Bell story lines would have been ruined with random videos of people getting kicked in the nuts or falling off of a boat into a lake. In fact, I think they could have made the stories make more sense.

None of these actors stood a chance of getting future jobs.

2. Actor not named Mario Lopez or Mark-Paul Gosselaar from....you guessed it, Saved by the Bell - Quick: Name three shows or movies that featured any of the Saved by the Bell cast outside of the SBTB shows and movies. I'll even spot you Showgirls  for Elizabeth Berkley and Beverly Hills 90210 featuring Tiffani Amber Thiessen. Give up? Yeah - they've been that bad (or perhaps that typecast). Chances are, if your name is not any of the gentlemen mentioned above, you're probably cleaning gutters or picking up trash for a living at this point (I apologize to all my gutter cleaning and garbageman/women friends of mine for comparing you to SBTB characters). Maybe it has something to do with the childhood actor syndrome of not being able to live a normal life once you've peaked at a young age. Or perhaps it has something to do with them just completely sucking as actors and being lucky to coast on the SBTB wave as long as they did.

Yikes - looks like someone got ran over by a truck. And then by another truck

BTW, have you seen pictures of Lisa (aka Lark Voorhies) recently? I don't think Screech would have been pursuing her if he would have known she was going to look like this. Geesh.

At least he has cool facial hair.

1. Dustin Diamond - Speaking of Screech, he is his own category of "Worst Jobs" for the purposes of this list. Out of all the stereotypes that were exploited on the show, none was worse than the character of Screech, the typical high school nerd that lacks social skills, has no chance with the ladies, especially the only one who he is courting, and who was constantly picked on by his friends, yet still considered them his friends because....uhm, they'd talk to him? I can't think of what he brought to the table as far as being a friend goes or why those others considered Screech a friend.

Can you think of any actor that was typecast or could be typecast as bad as Dustin Diamond was? He had little-to-no shot of ever succeeding after SBTB series were done. He even knew this himself, as he was the only cast member to stay with the series beyond the college series, becoming Mr. Belding's sidekick in the new classes of the show.

His post SBTB resume includes a porn he released creatively called Screeched (if anyone has seen this, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me how bad it was) and also as an author of the book Behind the Bell, in which Diamond reveals all of the sex and drugs that went on behind the scenes of the show. I'm positive everything he said in the book is true, because when he wrote the book, he definitely wasn't hurting for money or looking for attention. Oh wait, nevermind.

Anywho, if your LinkedIn profile features "Dustin Diamond" for some reason as a job, you may want to consider removing it from your profile. Lord knows you won't be getting a job anytime soon anyways.

I guarantee you that if you follow this list, you will get a job and not be employed for long*

*No such guarantees can be made. I cannot be held liable for your shitty resume, interviewing skills, bad breath and excessive sweating while interviewing.