Assistant professor of spanish skills for your resume and career

Soft skills are most important to working once one has gotten a job rather than important to getting a job since those are quite difficult to discern from applications and brief interviews. That is one of the reasons schools can be wary of hiring with tenure; a person could look great on paper but be a nightmare to work with, and you're stuck with them.

I believe that tenacity, organizational skills and time management, and the ability to work long hours are crucial to getting tenure and succeeding in academia more broadly, in some ways more important than raw intelligence (if such a notion is coherent). Failure and rejection are endemic to the job; anyone who gets discouraged easily will do so. One must persevere in the face of sometimes harsh criticism and hostile conditions (especially now that much of the country has turned against higher education and the humanities in particular), and one must be able to juggle multiple responsibilities that make considerable time demands. In this, the tenure track resembles other early-career positions, such as medical residency or working towards partnership in a law firm. The untenured often must do the scut work that no one else wants to do, made more difficult by the fact that they are frantically trying to learn on the job with little to no guidance. It is not at all unusual for early-career professors to teach 4 classes per semester, at least some of which are new and/or large, do all the grading for them, serve on multiple committees, and write for elusive publications, all at once.

Well, a Ph.D. is necessary, although one can sometimes be hired within striking distance of it. The ability to teach so as to bring students to the major and get high student evaluations are often requirements at teaching schools while writing well enough to publish, often in journals with single-digit acceptance rates, is crucial to research schools. Comfort with technology is becoming more and more important.

Most important advice: Take initiative and be productive.
Find practical ways to use skills even if unpaid. Volunteer work is good. Use language skills. Technology skills. Exploit technology skills around the area of interest. If you want to be a teacher find out what software they are using today; what research skills are they utilize. Make sure you log your activities during the gap year especially those that relate to the area in which you want to work. If you want to go into finance, and you're working at a lawn service, understand and learn the business model and the accounting. If you're working at Starbucks (or in any commercial environment), get a chance to do inventories, learn about the ordering process and sources and suppliers for those orders; and how people are scheduled for work. All of that is relevant experience for business.

The CFO and recruiter for Keystone Staffing Solutions emphasized having evidence in your resume of of being productive during the gap time, no matter if it's one, two or three years. Evidence of being productive is what recruiters want to see on your resume: He stresses: "What did you do to expand your knowledge and skills not only in your selected area but beyond. BEING PRODUCTIVE for yourself proves to be an indicator of how productive you will be for me."

Still on gap year. How to go about it? Use teachers, friends, family, anyone in the field or related to it to provide guidance, insight, suggestions. This can lead to projects or experience that will help in learning and growth.