Wide Angled Lens: Job Hunting 1961-2001

INTRODUCTION TO MY PROFESSIONAL RESUME, MY BAHAI RESUME
AND THEIR ACCOMPANYING TWO APPENDICES
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The information and details in the resume below(NOT INCLUDED HERE) should help anyone wanting to know something about my professional background, my writing and my life. This resume should also be useful for the few who want to assess my suitability for some advertised/ unadvertised employment position which, it should be said, I very rarely apply for anymore. I stopped applying for jobs three years ago in 2001. But, MOST IMPORTANTLY, what is written here is intended to help those currently looking for work, written by a man who spent 40 years looking for work and applying for an average of two jobs a week for all those 40 years.
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Inevitably the style of one's writing is a reflection of the person, their experience and their philosophy. I have set out this experience in the paragraphs which follow in a logical fashion. If, as Carl Jung writes, we are what we do, then some of what I am can be found below. What follows may seem 'over-the-top' as they say these days. It is simply the last resume I used when I was in the job hunting game. I have updated it to include many of the writing projects I have taken on during these first years of my retirement from full-time employment.

The resume has always been the piece of writing, the statement, the document, the entry ticket which, over the years, has opened up the possibilities of another adventure, another pioneering move to another town, another state or country, another location, work in another organization, another portion of my life. I'm sure that will also be the case in the years of my late adulthood and old age should, for some reason, movement from place to place be necessary or desired. In the last five years, in the first years of an early retirement, I have been able to write to a much greater extent than I had been able in my early and middle adulthood. My resume reflects this shift in my activity-base.

This process of frequent moves is not everyone's style or pattern of living. Many millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and their life's adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines of a relatively small place. Movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth. But for many millions of people during the years 1961-2001, my years of being jobbed, the world was their oyster, not so much in the manner of a tourist, although there was plenty of that, but rather in terms of their working lives which came to be seen increasingly in a global context.

This was true for me during the years I was looking for amusement, education and experience, my adventurous years of pioneering, my applying for job days, the forty year period 1961-2001. The following resume altered, of course, many times over during those forty years is now for the most part--as I indicated above--rarely used in these years of my retirement. This document is, though, a useful backdrop for those examining my writing, especially my poetry. I frequently use this resume on various website locations on the Internet when I want to provide some introductory background on myself, indeed, I could list many new uses after forty years of only one use--to help me get a job. I don't have to say it all again as I did so frequently when applying for jobs. A few clicks of a few keys and I write all that needs to be said, probably too much.

During those job-hunting years, 1961-2001, I applied for some four thousand jobs, an average of two a week for each of those forty years! This is a guesstimation, as accurate a guesstimation as I can calculate for this forty year period. The great bulk of the thousands of letters involved in this vast, detailed and, from time to time, quite exhausting process, I did not keep. I did keep a small handful of these letters in a file in the Letters: Section VII, Sub-Section X1 of my autobiographical work, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Given the thousands of hours over forty years devoted to the job-hunting process; given the importance of this key to the pioneering venture that is my life; given the amount of paper produced and energy expended in the process, some of the correspondence seemed to warrant a corner in the written story of my life.1

1 The Letters section of my autobiography now occupies some 25 arch-lever files and two-ring binders and covers the period 1967 to 2004. I guesstimate the collection contains about 3000 letters. This does not include the thousands of job applications and the replies. Since about 1990 hundreds and hundreds of emails have also been deleted. For the most part these deleted emails seem to have no long term value. they were deleted as quickly as they came in. After fifteen years of email communication, though, nearly all the correspondence I sent and received which would once have been in the form of letters before 1990, is now in the form of emails.
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FOR A FULLER CONTEXT FOR THIS RESUME GO TO MY WEBSITE
AT URL: http://bahaipioneering.bahaisite.com/
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