Good news! It is applicable! It's applicable in the area of training. Something that is truly exploding these days is any kind of software training. There are tons of these jobs near any major city.
In today's climate, there are lots of software companies whose growth is so explosive that they're desperate to hire as many trainers as possible. Since their product is new, they aren't looking for people who already know their software - after all, no one does yet.
This means, if you have a pulse and can demonstrate some capability to learn new technology, possibly even string a coherent sentence together, you can probably get hired to do this. They'll train you on their software and then pay you to train others.
This is a great way to cut your teeth in the training world and establish yourself and your resume. Trust me - take any job in software training. I've seen guys with only a little bit of experience and no college get hired for 60-70k per year plus benefits. If you graduated seminary, you have a masters degree in training and communications (verbal and written), not to mention critical thinking. You're a training team's dream - though they may not know it if you don't translate your resume into a language they can understand. More on that in another post.
First, there are two broad areas of training you can get into.
- Internal training: getting hired by a company to train their employees internally
- External training: getting hired by a training organization to provide training on demand for external clients
Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking number 2 would be more exciting and would probably pay better, right? You're probably right, though I doubt the pay difference is that great, if it exists at all.
I've done both internal and external training. External training is exciting at times, especially when you get into creating custom tailored training for a specific client for a specific purpose. That can be pretty cool and can involve travel, etc. However, chances are you're going to be stuck teaching the same basic class 3-4 times a week to a different group of students each day. That's if business is good. If business isn't good, then you have to worry about getting laid off. And once you truly understand your situation, you'll worry. A lot. Especially when there's no advertising budget.
When you're doing internal training, business is always good. Plus, you'll get more opportunities to get beyond the basics with your users because you're right there in the organization, available to them at all times. Yes, you'll teach some classes, but you'll also find yourself in a resident expert role. You'll answer help desk tickets and troubleshoot problems.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, yuck, I'm not an IT guy. Right. Neither am I. But I answer help desk tickets. Granted, some of them are rather tedious and the need to document everything gets old fast. However, some of them are really interesting problems to solve and people need help doing some really advanced stuff. This is where you'll really learn a lot and prove your value to the organization.
People who do good work in these kinds of jobs have tremendous job security. They can lay off a couple salesmen, but they can't lay off the guy who enables ALL the salesmen to do their job.
For example, let's talk about SharePoint. Lots of people have all kinds of notions about SharePoint. Usually it's that they hate it. But they only hate it because they refuse to take the time to learn it. With a little time, it's actually really quite easy. If you can use Microsoft Office proficiently, a Windows PC and the internet, you already have the skills you need to learn SharePoint. Nothing about SharePoint is hard, there's just a lot to learn. Your ability to memorize is very sharp, though, you who have studied Greek and Hebrew, so you'll find it quite easy.
I had about a year of training experience (teaching writing, public speaking, critical thinking, etc) before I got a job doing software training. I was able to get that job based on my training for the ministry, my small amount of experience as an intern and my year of classroom training experience. After doing that about a year and a half, I took a job doing internal SharePoint training. I had no SharePoint experience at all. My new employer simply gave me an account to access online videos. After 2 weeks of thorough study, I was all ready to go and began building curriculum, answering help tickets and troubleshooting problems.
And five years ago, I would have said that anyone who makes as much money as I do is rich (though I now realize how naive I was, especially about money). Now, I'm not greedy, and I'm sure you aren't either. Nonetheless, there's probably a little part of your heart somewhere that's secretly glad you're not in the ministry making 35k at some tiny church in a small town with 3 stubborn families who refuse to acknowledge that theirs is not the only true church in the universe, and all because it was the only call you got and you needed a job.
You have a masters degree and some very sharp, very marketable skills. Once you learn to market them properly, you can join the my-wife-doesn't-have-to-work-nights-anymore club. Don't you want to call the Dave Ramsey show and do your debt free scream? I sure do. And that day is coming soon. I will be 100% debt free in just a couple more months. No car payment, no school loans, no credit cards, nothing.
When I'm debt free, I'm going to save up for a sizable down payment on a house. But I'm also, for the first time, going to be able to respond when the announcement is made in church that "the deacons have a special need for $500 for a worthy individual in need." I'm looking forward to that day. Much more than buying a house.
Sorry, I got distracted. Where was I? Oh yes, SharePoint. Like I said, 1-3 years, you could very possibly be making low six figures. The secret is this: competence and motivation. If you do a good job (which you are more than capable of) and you have an ongoing reason to want to continue to do a good job (such as a desire to provide for your family and please your God), you're pretty much going to get promoted and excel, so long as you don't offend people and make enemies. By the way, don't aim at making everyone you work with your friend - that's impossible. Just aim at making some friendly acquaintances and not making enemies out of everyone else. And of course, make opportunities to pay your boss respect and show initiative in any way you can think of.
SharePoint is easy. But it's a great example of an opportunity for you. SharePoint is easy enough that it won't make you crazy trying to figure things out. You can get answers to any question within 30 seconds if you have access to Google. But SharePoint is complicated enough that most people won't spend the time to figure the thing out and they'd rather pay you to figure it out for them and just point them at the easy button. Sure, if they'd only spend a week getting great training (which you'd be happy to provide), they could do this for themselves. But they know they're far too important to spend a week doing that.
SharePoint is made by Microsoft and is used by just about every large-ish enterprise in the US. It's not as ubiquitous as Office, but it's up there. Companies use it to provide structure for their company intranet, which is just like the internet only it's inaccessible outside the company's network. People use it to store documents and collaborate on them (like Google Docs). They can store other files as well (like Google Drive).
Let me give you an example of a use case that will be more familiar to you. Suppose you're back in seminary and your professor, in the week leading up to the exam, hands out this huge list of 100 essay questions he may ask you on the exam as a study guide. As soon as he exits the room, 20 of you collaborate and divvy up the questions, taking 5 questions each.
When you were actually in seminary, you probably used Google to do this. We did at my school. But that was definitely a pain.
Now imagine you have SharePoint...
You could build a site, accessible by only the students who actually collaborated. That one guy who said he needed to do his own work or some such thing and refused to participate wouldn't be given access. If he's logged into Windows, you won't even be able to navigate to that web page.
You could have lots of tools for your use on this collaborative site. You could have a calendar where you could post times when you were planning on getting together for discussions and study groups. You could have an announcements list that anyone could contribute to, to let people known that a new event has been posted to the calendar or something. You could have a discussion board where students could debate answers to questions without having to put 50 comments in the Word document. You could have a document library, which is in some ways kind of like an online folder to store documents. But it's also more than that. You can view a document or edit it right in the web browser, or you can download it and edit in on your computer. You can also set the documents so that people have to check them out to edit them, which prevents anyone else from editing it until it's checked back in - though they can still view it.
You can do more too. You can set up a workflow, which is simply an automatic process. You can also set up an ability to have draft and published versions of your essay answers, and each person can start out with their own document for their five questions. The workflow would come in when you say to yourself, ok, I think I've got good answers now, I'm going to publish this. Then you can turn on the workflow (or it can kick on automatically whenever you upload a document to a document library you decided to call the "done" library) and it'll automatically email all the collaborators, signaling them that your document is done and ready for them to read.
Do you think something like that might come in handy in today's workplaces? Oh, you betcha. Man, companies are eating this up. But like I said, it's kind of a lot to learn for most people, and since it doesn't directly contribute to earning glory for yourself by impressing a client, most people can't be bothered to learn much more than the very basics. So they'll always need you and your expertise.
But why don't they just use Google Drive for free? Because Google Drive is...well, where is it, exactly? Your data I mean? When you upload a document to Google Drive, where does it go? No one knows for sure (probably to a server on some barge off the coast of San Francisco), but wherever it is, Google owns it. That literally terrifies company executives. They want it stored in their server in their building where their IT people can babysit it and assure them that no one else can see it. SharePoint provides the structure that allows them to do this.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to learn SharePoint with just a week or two of concentrated effort. You're willing to do that because you can make a living from then on. You may not be able to land a job like that right away. You may have to establish yourself a bit first. But it won't take as long as you think.
Maybe SharePoint won't be your thing. That's ok. It's just an example. There are lots of opportunities out there in software training. There are lots of opportunities in other areas too. Reach out to everyone you know. If you can get someone on the inside, that helps tremendously. And everyone you know that works at a good sized business has people that do their training that they can put you in touch with. Who knows - they might be hiring. And if the person you know has a good reputation with them, they'll be much more inclined to hire you.
You'll also want to target certain software companies or whatever organizations you're interested in. And when you do, be sure to Google "pain letter".
Resume tips coming soon.
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