On job hunting and the blogging future in Metro Philadelphia

I’ve been qui­et on the blogs late­ly, focus­ing on job search­es rather than rant­i­ng. I thought I’d take a lit­tle time off to talk about my lit­tle cor­ner of the career mar­ket. I’ve been apply­ing for a lot of web design and edit­ing jobs but the most inter­est­ing ones have com­bined these togeth­er in cre­ative ways. My qual­i­fi­ca­tions for these jobs are more the inde­pen­dent sites I’ve put togeth­er — notably Quak​erQuak​er​.org—than my paid work for Friends.

For exam­ple: one inter­est­ing job gets repost­ed every few weeks on Craigslist. It’s geared toward adding next-generation inter­ac­tive con­tent to the web­site of a con­sor­tium of sub­ur­ban news­pa­pers (appli­cants are asked to be “com­fort­able with terms like blog, vlog, CSS, YourHub, MySpace, YouTube…,” etc.). The qual­i­fi­ca­tions and vision are right up my alley but I’m still wait­ing to hear any­thing about the appli­ca­tion I sent by email and snail mail a week ago. Despite this, they’re con­tin­u­ing to post revised descrip­tions to Craigslist. Yes­ter­day’s ver­sion dropped the “con­ver­gence” lin­go and also dropped the pro­ject­ed salary by about ten grand.

About two months ago I actu­al­ly got through to an inter­view for a fab­u­lous job that con­sist­ed of putting togeth­er a blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty site to fea­ture the lesser-known and quirky busi­ness­es of Philadel­phia. I had a great inter­view, thought I had a good chance at the job and then heard noth­ing. Days turned to weeks as my follow-up com­mu­ni­ca­tions went unan­swered. 11/30 Update: a friend just guessed the group I was talk­ing about and emailed that the site did launch, just qui­et­ly. It looks good.

Cor­po­rate blog­ging is said to be the wave of the future and in only a few years polit­i­cal cam­paigns have come to con­sid­er blog­gers as an essen­tial tool in get­ting their mes­sage out. User-generated con­tent has become essen­tial feed­back and pub­lic­i­ty mech­a­nisms. My expe­ri­ence from the Quak­er world is that blog­gers are con­sti­tut­ing a new kind of lead­er­ship, one that’s both more out­go­ing but also thought­ful and vision­ary (I should post about this some­time soon). Blogs encour­age open­ness and trans­paren­cy and will sure­ly affect orga­ni­za­tion­al pol­i­tics more and more in the near future. Smart com­pa­nies and non­prof­its that want to grow in size and influ­ence will have to learn to play well with blogs.

But the future is lit­tle suc­cor to the present. In the Philadel­phia met­ro­pol­i­tan area it seems that the rare employ­er that’s think­ing in these terms have have a lot of back and forths try­ing to work out the job descrip­tion. Well, I only need one enlight­ened employ­er! It’s time now to put the boys to bed, then check the job boards again. Keep us in your prayers.

13,737 thoughts on “On job hunting and the blogging future in Metro Philadelphia

  1. I’m glad to hear a few peeps from you. You guys have been deeply in my thoughts and prayers. I know from both my father’s expe­ri­ence and my own how drain­ing the job hunt can be. It is good to hear you sound­ing strong.
    Regard­ing job-searches, would you con­sid­er relocation?
    Love to the four of you,
    Amanda

  2. Lest you think we have for­got­ten about you, I want­ed to leave you a com­ment. Mar­tin, you and Julie are in our prayers. May you find God’s best for your life.
    Much love,
    Craig (& Steve)

  3. Hi Mar­tin, Maybe you should con­sid­er becom­ing a cage dancer or some­thing, you know change it up a bit. Plus I think it would make for some inter­est­ing blog posts…but seri­ous­ly hang in there we’re are pray­ing for you and your family.

  4. Hey, Mar­tin.
    The job search sounds frus­trat­ing! .…Thanks for let­ting us know what’s been going on; I had been won­der­ing if your cyber-silence was because of the job hunt or because of new employ­ment. I wish it had been the lat­ter, just so that the hunt could be behind you.
    Still, I have a strong sus­pi­cion that you will end up “right side up.”
    Blessings,
    Liz Opp, The Good Raised Up

  5. Mar­tin,
    I’m new to all of this, can’t get enough of the Quak­er blo­gos­phere. I hope your job-searching goes well/is going well, good luck with it. I’ll think a lit­tle some­thing for you tomor­row at meeting.

  6. I hope you are offer­ing more than your tech­ni­cal skills to the mar­ket. For exam­ple, your vital role in help­ing the Quak­er blog­ger world coa­lesce shows an abil­i­ty to help orga­nize a com­mu­ni­ty. You also have a good abil­i­ty to vision and look fur­ther ahead than most peo­ple. And so on. Web design­ers are a dime a dozen. Lead­ers and orga­niz­ers who can also design web sites are price­less. Good luck and keep your stan­dards high.

  7. Your Nov. 29th post has a bro­ken link to quak​erquak​er​.org — it comes out as some­thing like quakerquaker.org-than.
    Here’s to Chris­tians who are some­thing like Jesus.

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