Ten uses for an Ex-Journalist

The redundo payment is safely in the bank, you’ve paid off the tab at the Frog and Nightgown after the leaving drinks, and you’ve handed back the laptop. There are only so many  times you can watch daytime television and your friends don’t want to have their first drink of the day at 11am. So what next?

This series of five pieces, aimed mainly at print journalists, will look at some ways to create a new professional life. What career will you aim for? What can you do to get it? What are your transferable skills? What are the less transferable attitudes you might have to relearn? Comments and suggestions from others that have been through this are welcome: it is based very much on my own experience.

Part One – Plan

It is going to take you three to six months to find work; perhaps longer. So have a strategy for how you are going to fill that time usefully, in a way that gets you out the other side.

Part Two: The New Career (Tuesday)

And what do you want to be when you grow up?

Part Three: Get Moving (Wednesday)

Don’t just sit there: do something!

Part Four: Your Skills (Thursday)

You have real aptitudes that are useful to others if you have worked in virtually any area of journalism.

Part Five: Attitudes (Friday)

Many journalists and former journalists (myself included) also face challenges in switching sectors.

Some General Links

CareerShifters - Some good advice on career change

CareerBuilder – Making getting fired work for you

Life after newspapers from the American Journalism Review

We Were Print: Former and soon-to-be former print journalists.

John Zhu’s excellent blog on this subject.

Mark Potter’s very good Recovering Journalist website.

If i had found Zhu’s and Potters’ sites earlier I probably wouldn’t have bothered with this. Still.