New year, new job? There’s never been a better time. Get fully prepared with The Big Issue’s guide to getting the job you deserve.
by: Evie Breese and Greg Barradale
3 Jan 2022
The start of 2022 could be the perfect time to kickstart your career and find a new job. Image: Unsplash
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The New Year is a time for fresh starts and new beginnings. If you’re in a job you love, great. If not, maybe it’s time to start looking. We’ll be with you every step of the way.
This is a great time to find a new job. With an estimated 1.2 million vacancies in October 2021, experts have coined the term The Great Resignation for the current period of job market fluctuation.
Here’s our advice on how to find a new job in 2022.
How can I change my career?
Changing your career without any experience in the new sector can seem, from the outside, impossible.
But far from being abnormal, it’s actually common to pull a career 180. A study by online education provider EdEx found that a third of Americans aged 25-44 have completely changed fields since their first professional job.
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Most workers plan to look for different jobs in the new year, according to a new survey by the job website CV-Library. So, get ahead of the crowds and start preparing now.
We’ve all read the headlines about shortages of HGV drivers but that’s not the only industry looking for workers. Now could be the time to retrain and find a whole new career path.
Ever fancied yourself helping others turn their lives around as a prison officers? Or building the homes and offices of tomorrow as a scaffolder? How about being a dentists or vet? All these fields have more vacancies than employees at the moment.
And if you’d ever considered a career in medicine, midwives, doctors, and paramedics are in high demand.
As part of The Big Issue’s mission to keep people in work and in their homes, we’ve launched our very own jobs board with hundreds of thousands of listings right across the UK.
It has a simple search engine which lets you filter jobs by category or location.
The end result of finding a new job may be exciting, but the process is almost always stressful. Tweaking cover letters and wondering if silence is a good or bad thing is enough to drive you to distraction.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. We asked experts for their most useful tips for adding some serenity to the job hunt process and the most crucial tip was to decide on designated time slots for particular tasks as a way to stop the ordeal taking over your life.
Staring at a flashing cursor on your computer screen is daunting – even more so when you know you’re supposed to be writing a sales pitch for yourself.
But there are a few simple points to help you get started. Highlight your strengths, list your most recent experience first, and try to tweak your CV for every application.
Of course, it’s not just what goes in a CV, but how it looks. Forget 2003-era Word Art and messy formatting, a professional-looking CV will give your application the best chance.
One of the big challenges of finding a new job is having the right skills for it. Luckily, one of the positives to come from the pandemic has been the advance of online learning. It’s never been easier to upskill and give your career a new lease of life.
Bad advice: work yourself up into a nervous frenzy, forget your interviewer’s name, tell them “if anything, my biggest weakness is that I care too much”, and reveal that you’re wearing pyjama bottoms.
This Christmas, 3.8 million people across the UK will be facing extreme poverty. Thousands of those struggling will turn to selling the Big Issue as a vital source of income - they need your support to earn and lift themselves out of poverty.
