Real Women Talk About Taking Advantage of Temporary Employment to Gain Experience & Make the Best Use of Their Time  

Katie Smith panics as she stares at her resume on the computer screen. There are long periods in her employment history where the only skills used included the phrase, “Would you like fries with that?”

The years she had spent working full time and simultaneously taking college classes for a business degree left precious little time to acquire job skills useful in an office. Now, she dreads every request for a resume, fearing that compared with her peers, she will come up short.

Smith doesn’t realize she can gain valuable experience and never have a potential employer see her resume—or its gaps—before they hire her. Temporary employment could be a great option for Smith and others like her. And “temporary employment” isn’t confined to administrative roles, either. Some of the top industries in need of temporary employees for short-term assignments filling in for vacations or leaves of absence include: healthcare, tech/IT fields, accounting and finance, legal and marketing and advertising.

Forget What You Think You Know  (About Temporary Employment)

According to Brandi Britton, District President of OfficeTeam, common misinformation about temporary or interim employment sometimes casts a shadow on the industry. Britton has heard the excuses:

• • • “I don’t want that job because it is only one week.”
    • “I don’t know how to explain or list my temp experiences on my resume.”
    • “My resume has little to offer a potential employer, they won’t hire me.”
    • “I know how to do the job, but there is no one to recommend me.”

Don’t Sweat the Resume
Britton pointed out that even women who don’t think they have enough on their resumes can be placed in temporary positions, often without the potential employer actually viewing a resume. Employment agencies build relationships with companies for you, and frequently hire interim employees based on the recommendation of the staffing company. That same staffing company can also instruct you on how to advantageously add the skills you acquire on each assignment to your resume, which can be a big benefit for women returning to the workforce or transitioning to a new career path.

Be Flexible
Don’t be afraid to take on an interim assignment that doesn’t seem like the ideal fit. Britton recommended that women be flexible about temporary opportunities, “You never know who you will meet.” That door you are afraid to enter might be the door that leads to an even bigger door down the road.

Know Where You Stand
So often at a new job it’s hard to determine if the employer sees value in your contribution and if you are assimilating into the company culture. Companies like OfficeTeam will keep tabs on how you’re doing and eliminate the guesswork.  Britton explained, “Typically, we check in with the employer on a weekly basis and with the employee who is working there.”

Work with Your Recruiter
Make certain your recruiter knows your areas of interest as well as all the skills you possess. Take the proficiency tests they offer as a way to “prove” to potential employers that you know your stuff. This helps the recruiter to vouch for your knowledge, which is especially helpful if the roles you have filled don’t necessarily align with your job titles.

Turning an Administrative Job into Full-Time Employment

Interim employment can offer significant benefits for building a resume, changing careers, or finding the right fit. For Debra Ann Matthews, a professional resume writer and business owner at Job Winning Resumes, her 11 months of temporary employment eventually led to two permanent positions with large companies. She learned, as many temporary workers do, that you get out of it what you put into the work and gather additional skills to build your resume. “Although the positions were administrative in nature, many times I was able to make a difference by learning additional software and demonstrating my knowledge by making charts. I also conducted information interviews learning as much as I could about the company from staff and managers,” Matthews said.

Matthews added that making it known that she was a professional by always wearing a business suit, and available for work, which she demonstrated by calling each morning by 8:00 a.m. to check in with the agency, assured that she got better, longer-term assignments that lasted as long as 6 weeks. She enjoyed temporary employment so much, that she even left a permanent position she didn’t enjoy to return to temping.

When an individual is proactive and takes initiative to do extra work, as Matthews was, that person will often see their assignment extended, especially when they demonstrate their own ROI by saving the company time or money, for example.

Interim professionals are still in high demand despite the recent improvements in available full-time employment because some companies are still leery of hiring permanent employees. Britton said, “Certain work roles are not needed full time, so a lot of corporations will allocate a percent of their resources to temporary employees.”  And she added that, “Compared with five years ago, many more of the positions are temporary to hire.” Britton has also seen temporary assignments last longer than in the past.

Take Advantage of Booming Industries Like Technology to Seek Opportunities

Some industries, like the technology sector in which Lindsay Tabas, a user-experience and design-thinking consultant and Owner of Tabas Consulting operates, experience periods of feast and famine. They use temporary employees or independent contractors, Tabas explained, “so they can manage payroll expenses through periods of high and low profits.” Understanding this has enabled her to work the industry as both a 1099 contractor with her own firm and as a W-2 temporary employee.

By taking a temporary position that looked and acted like a full-time job for a few months, she has been able to do what she loves and still earn income and replenish her rainy-day fund—critical to anyone self-employed.

Tabas said, “I recently finished an 8-month contract in December with a large financial services company as a Contract User Experience Researcher. There, I ran a bi-weekly usability lab where I worked with product teams across the company to test digital products like live chat, mobile bill-pay and rewards points redemption with customers.” She has a passion “for empowering leaders in startups” but understands that start-ups’ limited cash flow means they cannot always afford to employ her steadily as a consultant. Temporary employment also allows her to use multiple skills sets, something she found was hard to do in the more rigid confines of full-time employment with a larger corporation.

Health Professionals Can Travel for Temporary Employment

For health professionals like dentist, Dr. Cyndi Blalock, interim employment delivers income and provides keen insight into the type of practice they want to operate. Upon leaving dental school, most dentists are faced with a million choices and not much in the way of practical experience. Where do they wish to practice? How will they choose the equipment they will use? Do they prefer a frenetic pace or a laid-back office? But when she purchased Cardinal Dental in St. Peters, Missouri, and hung her “Cynthia Blalock, D.D.S.” shingle out front, Blalock had a really good idea what she wanted, thanks to her year of living on the road as a temporary dentist.

When a non-compete clause would have kept her from working in her hometown for 3 years, Blalock left her possessions in storage and traveled across Missouri with her dog in tow for a year, staying in Candlelight Suites and Drury Inns and working in whichever practice Staff Care–a provider of locum tenens (a Latin term meaning “to hold the place of or to substitute for”) physicians and dentists– placed her that needed a dentist to fill in.  At the 15-20 different offices where Blalock subbed, she learned “how to be versatile and what to do,” especially when she asked for an implement that the practice didn’t have on hand. Blalock said, “I had to use what they had,” and that taught her how to improvise when necessary. One benefit, Blalock mentioned, “I got to use a lot of their materials and equipment,” which defined her preferences and what she uses in her practice today.

Traveling hundreds of miles did have a couple of drawbacks. Sometimes, Blalock had to leave her dog at home if the hotel she stayed in wasn’t pet friendly. And there were occasional scary instances like having to carry mace to walk from her car to the building in one location that had a raucous bar too close for comfort, or the time that she huddled with hundreds of other hotel guests during a tornado warning. Compensation, in Blalock’s experience, was at least comparable to what an associate or employee dentist would earn, with the added bonus of experiencing a variety of practice structures.

Businesses, too, benefit from using interim staff. Interim employees help employers keep the workflow going without burning out their permanent employees. Sure, they could keep their employees working overtime, but that can lead to disgruntled employees that feel abused. Employers can test a person out to determine whether than employee will fit with their company without the commitment and benefit expenses of a permanent employee. They ability to only pay for the labor hours you actually need improves the bottom line and makes accounting happy as well.