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New Years Resolutions to Keep

If you’re seeking a promotion at work or are looking to make a job change, taking the time to enhance your skills and your qualifications will make it much easier to take the next step up the career ladder.

Individuals who continually upgrade their skills to keep pace with developments in their field will have the best chance of doing well in their career, both with their current employer and when job searching. Here are 10 ways to keep your job skills current and resume up to date

Time to Update Your Resume and Social Media

Before applying for jobs or internships – take some time to clean up your resumes and social media

Tips for resumes and social media

Industry Directories – Get Yourself Listed

Internships

Intuit QuickBooks’ Complete Guide To Filing Self-employment Taxes

Identify In-Demand Skills for Your Occupation

The first step in keeping your skills current is to identify the talents which employers value the most in your field. Review job titles for positions in your career field. Also review the top skills required by employers, both general and job-specific.

Get the Scoop

Speak with human resources staff at your current employer to gain more insight into the most preferred skills for your profession. Analyze the background of standout performers at your employer or stars from your professional associations and identify any skills that have helped them to excel.

Follow Industry Leaders on Social Media

Many corporate CEOs and industry leaders now post regularly on social media sites like LinkedIn in order to establish themselves as “thought leaders” or “influencers.” By following them on social media, you’ll be better able to identify new directions in your profession, learn about the skills employers most often seek in your field, and decide upon which skills would be the most important for you to focus upon.

Make a Professional Development Plan

Once you have identified your target skills, make a professional development plan to chart your career trajectory and then strengthen or gain the most in-demand skills for your occupation.

Attend a Workshop

Technology workshops or online tutorials are often offered by software providers and third-party groups. For example, there are free or low-cost online programming classes available.

Go to School

In addition, check with local colleges and adult education programs since they will often offer courses or seminars to help employees upgrade their knowledge and skills. Check out certificate programs and online educational courses you can take to revamp your skill set quickly.

Attend Professional Networking Events

Professional networking conferences are a great way to both build your professional conference list and to compare your skills to those of others in your career field.

Read Professional Journals

Professional journals and trade magazines are one of your best resources to keep abreast of technology developments in your industry and to track changes in best practices. By reading these regularly, you’ll be able to keep a running list of the rising areas where you might improve your knowledge.

Volunteer

Volunteer to take on projects at work or volunteer at organizations where you can develop and apply the skills you’re working on. Your ultimate goal should be to be able to document your key skills when you want to land a new job, gain a promotion, or justify a pay raise. Your volunteer work can be included on your resume just like paid work experience.

Develop Both Hard and Soft Skills

While it’s vital that you remain current on the hard skills of your profession (the job-specific skills you learned in college or in a training or certificate program), there is always room for improvement in interpersonal soft skills as well. Take a hard look at how well you communicate with others, organize your workflow or office space, or manage your time. If there are areas where you find yourself lacking, it may be time for you to focus on strengthening these soft skills.

More Tips For Updating Your Skills

Here are a couple of more tips to keep your skills updated.

Highlight Your Applicable Skills When Applying for Jobs

Be sure to reference your most relevant skills in your cover letters and resumes. It’s important that what you include in your job application materials is as close a match to the job as possible the closer a match you are, the better your chances of getting the job.

Start Over

Once you have done some or all of the above, start over. Keeping your skills current is an ongoing process. Technology is constantly changing, and your skills need to keep pace in order for you to be as marketable as possible.

If you plan on spending some time engaging in professional development on a regular basis, you’ll be able to upgrade your skills without too much effort. It’s easier to plan ahead than it is to scramble when you’re job hunting and realize that you don’t have the qualifications employers are seeking.

My New Years Resolutions for Broadway/NYC Theatre

Hello all, and thanks for reading and supporting SoundGirls! A quick intro to give context to my first post here. My name is Becca, I use she/her pronouns, and until March 12th 2020, I was a freelance sound engineer working primarily on Off-Broadway shows in New York. My main gig was as the Head of Audio for the 80s hair metal jukebox musical “Rock of Ages” where on March 11th I mixed my 175th show, a personal record for me! I often supplemented that work by doing shop preps and load-ins/load-outs on other shows during the day. I’ll talk more about my specific trajectory in some future posts.

The subject of my first post is my particular wing of the live sound industry: NYC Theatre. Including but definitely not limited to Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, etc. I’m going to refer to it as “Broadway” just for clarity of writing. It’s an industry I love, and I can’t wait to get back to it BUT…like any relationship, it’s important to step back now and then and reevaluate the terms. So, with a new year upon us, and at least six months to go before anyone is likely to be working on a show with an audience in New York again, here are my New Year’s Resolutions for Broadway.

If we’re going to be a “family,” support families!

The pandemic has had a disproportionate effect on folks who raise children. Lack of access to childcare with schools closed has pulled a lot of parents out of the workforce and forced a lot of people to choose between keeping their job or supporting their families. Of course, everyone in theater, parent or no, has been out of work for some time now, but when we come back, we can’t simply go back to the way things were. New York State’s Paid Family Leave law is a good start, but the way that sound jobs work means you are usually juggling multiple employers and can’t always pool your benefits, or use time off when you need it most. I have a friend whose partner gave birth to their child during the run of a show he was engineering, and all he was able to get was 1 week off unpaid.

The Broadway Community takes pride in the fact that we have each other’s backs, and that has to extend father. Make childcare at work more accessible. Make Paid Family Leave the law of the land nationwide for all workers, not just for the parent who is pregnant (if applicable). Provide places for breastfeeding folks to pump. Don’t just put pregnant people on disability and call it a day. The realities of workplace sexism and the “motherhood penalty” should already be things of the past, let’s not bring them back into the room with us.

“Women have to see it to be it.” So show it!

Jeanine Tesori spoke those amazing words when she and Lisa Kron accepted the Tony Award for Best Score for their musical “Fun Home”. They were the first all-women team to win the award. Jessica Paz took that one step further in 2019 when she became the first woman to win the Tony Award for Sound Design (as co-designer of “Hadestown” with Nevin Steinberg), having been only the second woman ever to be nominated in either the play or musical categories. Jeanine, Lisa, Jess, and so many other women have punched enormous holes in the glass ceiling of Broadway, but the work is not done.

The nominees for the 2020 Tony Awards were announced this fall, and the voters are only judging a small number of shows that opened prior to the March 12th shutdown. This year, there are zero women nominees for Best Sound Design or Best Score. But here is the even more key point: had the Broadway season gone on interrupted, there would still not have been any women eligible to be nominated for Best Sound Design (play or musical), and only two women would have been eligible for Best Score nominations. The Tony Awards may be a single New-York-Centric event, and they certainly don’t represent all of the amazing theatre being made in the US, but they are one of the few theatre-themed live TV broadcasts that reach the entire nation in a non-pandemic year. Representation matters, and we need a whole lot more of it

Open the gates to “The Room Where It Happens”

There are enormous access barriers to working one’s way up in New York. The few schools with theatre sound programs are exclusive and expensive. The pay starts low and the rent is high. If you’re freelancing you often need to work multiple shows at once to cover your costs, which stretches you thin and also takes opportunities away from other people who might benefit from them. Working on Broadway specifically requires a union card, and getting one can take years if you don’t have a connection or the “right” experience. People hire people they already know or people their friends already know, and the cycle perpetuates. For my part, I know I will be challenging myself to cast a wider net the next time I am in a position to hire or recommend someone for a gig. I’ll be looking at it as a chance to open a door, not help someone already on the inside.

Support the people you serve

So many New Yorkers have no connection to the theater, despite the fact that the unofficial world headquarters is in their city. Tickets are expensive, arts programs in public schools were already in bad shape, and local budgets are reeling from the costs of the shutdowns. Multitudes of research have shown the positive effects that arts education has on students, even if they don’t end up pursuing a career in the arts. But let’s expand the definition of what “arts” is. When a student group has a post-show talkback, make sure it’s not just actors and directors on stage taking questions. Broadway shows should partner with schools to give workshops not just on singing and dancing, but on songwriting, producing, stage managing, and of course sound. Getting kids interested while they are young will not only grow and diversify our future workforce, it will make sure we have a future audience to come and support that work.

We have to get serious about sustainability

Climate change is real, and it’s not going away without serious action from the top down. Broadway, with its high profile and wide reach, can be a trailblazer on the path to make our everyday lives less destructive to the planet. Specifically, to sound, the Broadway Green Alliance recommends that at a bare minimum, we make the switch to rechargeable batteries and start to limit the amount of single-use products we use to handle wireless microphones. Buy personal belts with sweat-proof packs for each actor to eliminate single-use sheaths/plastic wrap/condoms. Switch to Green Seal Certified cleaners to cut down on alcohol swabs and abrasives. Encourage paperless schedules and scripts, and make them easy to update/reconcile. Use LED light bulbs in EVERYTHING. All this is barely a drop in the bucket, but if we begin to lead by example, we can inspire change in others and make green thinking the norm.

So, with all that in mind, Happy New Year to you all, and let’s work on building the Broadway we want to work in when we come back!

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