Teaching instructor skills for your resume and career

Basic skills in more than one department are helpful. The more a technician can understand other areas that may overlap, the better the chance of more opportunities. This does not exclude the importance of focusing on one technical area, but the technician who understands how that one area, or several areas, influences each other, the better the technician will understand the collaborative nature of theatre.

Motivation/Drive: It is essential to be a self-starter if you want to stand out in a crowd.

People skills: Active listening, empathy, keeping cool in stressful situations seem more important than ever.

A gap year is a terrific way to build a resume. By looking at where there might be a lack of experience like competitions, teaching, administration, summer festival interns, assistantships - they can focus their time and build their resumes well. I also think being creative in these current times, showing that you have experience teaching remotely, making a studio, creating a website, writing an article, and doing research that could be helpful later on. You could also spend the time preparing repertoire to teach or take auditions and make your first recording and video YouTube performance.

Those graduating with degrees in dance will need to be as versatile as ever. Indoor theaters are mostly closed during the pandemic. Choreographers and directors shift their focus outside and to video to keep doing work and finding new ways to present movement material to people in different situations. The dance surfaces themselves are challenging norms. Instead of a sprung floor covered with Marley vinyl flooring, dancers may be dancing barefoot in the sand, swimming in the water, dancing in trees, or rolling on concrete - all potentially in front of a safely distanced small audience or through the lens of a camera. Site-specific and digital performances are not new concepts, but we are leaning on them heavily now.

The technical skills that stand out to employers within the various collaborative partnerships both on and off the Navajo Nation have been documentation and writing skills through various software platforms. Given that psychology blends both hard and soft skillsets, the rudimentary knowledge of psychological determinants of behavior allows for greater insight and direction, which can be useful for employers in psychology. The use of therapeutic techniques and implementation has been a critical feature that allows a graduate from the BA in Psychology program to stand out. Moreover, the knowledge and the experience of learning psychological research methods and data collection create a well-rounded feature for employers to utilize when working with diverse communities and ethnicities on and off the Navajo Nation. Additionally, the critical feature of ethics is paramount given the close-knitted element of working on the Navajo Nation; therefore, the learners have the ethical mindset to be a crucial asset when working within the community. The aspect of career planning has been the main feature of the Psych BA program, as the hope is to have the students garner a job. Lastly, cultural, traditional, and language awareness is an essential skill set that blends both hard and soft skills to offer the utmost care within the Navajo communities and abroad.