In the morning you wake up, not because your body is fully rested and you wake up “naturally”, but rather because your spouse wants you to not be asleep, or to see the kids before they go off to school, or to start your work.

Work, what a nice word; some people consider it a 4-letter word, others think of it as a way of life. Those are the extreemes. Most people in the United States consider it a necessary evil that must be endured. Why? Why should it be an endurance test rather than an experience, and fun?

Unemployment is horrible. You go through the “stages” of unemployment with the last stage being you are employed once again. The stages inbetween being employed and being employed again vary from person to person, but all-in-all they are the same as any other stages that you may hear about. But I do not want to talk about the emotional stages of being unemployed, rather I want to talk about the attitude of being unemployed.

As an unemployed person, regardless of your education level, job experience, or skill set; what is your job? Your job, a full-time position, is to become employed. So, if you are not employed do you sit around the house and feel sorry for yourself, or do you actively seek out a new position with hard…dare I say…work.

As an unemployed person I wake up in the morning, take a shower, have coffee and maybe some breakfast; then I go to work! I sit at my link to the world – a computer – and search for jobs and positions posted in the last 48-hours. I look on all the main boards, like Dice, Monster, USAJobs, and the rest. If I find one that I am not familiar with I submit an application. This can be as simple as a couple of clicks of the mouse, to filling out a complete job application online through a link to a company.

Also, I use a service called Jobs By Fax. An Online service that permits a person to submit, using a fax machine, a resume to literally thousands of prospective employers in the US in the course of an evening. After I upload my resume to the system, I select the industries and cities I want to send my resume to that night. I paid my invoice and POOF! – I sent 1346 faxes out and got a LOT of calls over the next few days, and telephone interviews, and personal (in person) interviews. Using this service I have landed several temporary / short term contract positions that paid quite well. I really like this service and using the discount code I get a great deal. If you would like to target a specific city, or industry, or area of the USA, look into this service. Goto www.jobsbyfax.com and use the discount code of: R658157242.

But remember one thing. If you are unemployed, your JOB is to get a JOB. How hard you work at it, or what tools you discover in the process, may be directly related to how fast you succeed. True, there are extenuating circumstances that contribute to the speed of landing the new position. A minor inconvenience like no one is hiring in my field, or am I asking for more pay than the market permits at the moment are definite considerations. But there are alternatives to even those issues; look in other cities, or even other states. Noone said you must find a job within walking distance of home. If someone in California likes your resume that you FAX’d them last night; they may be willing to give you a good salary or hourly rate plus your expenses (like airfare, rental car, hotel, and food allowance) for a period of time on a contract or trial employment basis. After which they move you and you household to the new location, or the contract ends and you start looking for a new position all over again.

The worse aspect of unemployment is the fact that you will loose some of your self-confidence. Don’t! Unless you were let go from your previous position due to some rather drastic incident, it is not your fault. Layoffs, downsizing, canceling contracts, and a lot of other terms all mean the same thing. Companies are trying to make more profit by lowering the cost of business. If there are ten people in the department and everyone is working, the company can lower the number of employees to 7 in the department and everyone can work a little harder. Right! Well, we all know that this is a utopian fantasy that money hungry companies hold to, but in actually if it takes 7 hours to do something, dividing it over more people rarely makes it faster. Look at it in this way. Nine women cannot make a baby in one month.

So, you need to stay focused on your job, which is finding a job. You need to maintain a positive attitude, so when you talk to a prospective employer that attitude is sent through the phone line, and you need to use all of the new and creative tools available to you on the internet. You should extend your social network and send resumes to your friends, and ask them to forward them to their contacts, HR departments or supervisors.

It never hurts to get your skills in the hands of someone, especially if that some does not know yet that you are the next employee they want to hire.