| My best advice to anyone in this situation: time management, and cool projects. Bottom line is, if you're spending 100% of your time trying to find a new job, then your time is not well managed. Set aside some of that time to contribute something positive to the world. A few suggestions: Volunteer at a local nonprofit. They are constantly overwhelmed with work, and will love the help, even if it's only 20% of your time. It will be great for networking, and you'll have a good feeling about it, not to mention something to pad the resume with. Also, you'd be surprised how many places you think are official are nonprofits who could use the free help. Go to meetup groups. Spending money on a conference for networking is not useful when you can get the same thing for free. If you're technical, there are LUGs, programming language groups, database stuff, etc. Consider book clubs of people with similar interests. Start a blog and actively maintain it. Rather than brooding on why the system is keeping you down, study up on things and write articles to teach others. Once you get a flow going, people will start linking to your articles and you'll have some recognition. Just a few starting points. You can easily spend 1 day a week (20% of your time) working on a cool project like that, and still have plenty of time to search for work. And the next interview you get, you'll be a lot more confident. |