Okay, so you have the relevant Teaching Assistant qualifications and/or experience, but you just can’t find any jobs. Maybe you’ve enlisted the help of educational job agencies or even relied on word of mouth to find vacancies, but you can’t seem to find roles in your area and every door is slamming in your face?
I have a little secret I want to share with you and it only takes a few minutes of your time to set up. Heard of Google Alerts? Let me explain.
Google Alerts is a nifty little tool which brings to you (usually via email) pages recently indexed in Google’s database. Google is finding new website material all the time and what you’re asking Google to do using the alert is to let you know when it finds content about a specific topic. You can specify exactly what search term you are interested in receiving information about i.e. Teaching Assistant jobs! Each time Google finds a new page with the words ‘Teaching Assistant jobs’ within the text, an email will be sent to you with the link.
Typical websites which regularly add new pages for TA jobs are Reed, The Guardian, eteach.com, jobsgopublic.com, jobisjob.co.uk, jobserve.com, Total Jobs and even school websites!
Instead of visiting each of these websites and searching for TA roles, simply create a Google Alert and let Google do the work for you.
This is what you need to do.
Visit Google Alerts (https://www.google.co.uk/alerts) and in the box at the top of the page, type in a specific search term i.e. ‘teaching assistant jobs’
You will be prompted to add an email address where Google will send these alerts.
Before you click ‘Create Alert’, have a look at the ‘Show options’ section.
How often?
Depending on how general the search term is, you probably won’t want to receive alerts as they happen. I usually go for once a day, where the related alerts are grouped into one email.
Sources
Leave as ‘Automatic’, but you may want to specify a source such as news or blog if you’re receiving hundreds of alerts which contain the search term you are using.
Region
Keep to the UK for the purpose of this example.
How many?
Use ‘all results’ unless you are receiving alerts for spammy nonsensical websites.
That’s it!
You can be more specific about the alert. Say you want to create alerts about ‘Teaching Assistant jobs London’, bear in mind that websites may include TA roles in London, but may use a different title such as ‘Teaching Assistant jobs in Hounslow’. Don’t be too specific as you may miss opportunities.
Alerts you may want to set up
- Teaching Assistant jobs
- Teaching Assistant roles
- Teaching Assistant vacancies
- Teaching Assistant job Level 2
- Teaching Assistant job Level 3
- SEN jobs
- SEN roles
- SEN vacancies
- LSA jobs
- LSA vacancies
- LSA roles
You get the idea…