Ask the Recruiter

		RELATED
		Join Joe Grimm and Colleen Eddy for a live career chat on Tuesday, July 7, at 1 p.m. EDT. During the chat, Leslie Kelly will talk about how she transitioned from being a Seattle Post-Intelligencer restaurant critic to becoming a cook.

Q. I've been in journalism for three years now and have spent all of that time on the education beat. I love it because it has a lot of opportunities for feature writing and analysis, two of my biggest strengths as a journalist. I've developed a reputation as a good education reporter, within both the journalism and education communities here.

But if I want to move to a metro paper, I think there's a good chance I may have to switch to some other beat to get my foot in the door and then work my way back to education.

I'm wondering if my narrowly focused career path will hurt my marketability in the future. I volunteer to help out with other beats whenever I can, so I have fresh clips outside of education. But still, education is really my passion.

I'm planning to stay at my current paper for a couple more years. Should I be looking for opportunities to move to a different beat?

In a Groove

Q. After about 10 years of mostly doing government and investigative reporting, budget cuts sort of forced me into a position as the night cops reporter. Most of the articles I write for the Web at night are run in extremely abbreviated form in the paper the next day. One of the day reporters then updates my articles and puts his or her name on it.

Thus, I end up with very few newspaper clips that are of much use on a job application. I am concerned that doing the job that's asked of me is making me unmarketable for a future job. If I get laid off and need to find a new job, I won't have any good clips to show for my work.

During last week's career chat, "How Networking Helped Me Get a Job," one of the participants said that the most difficult part about finding a new job "is that employers do not reply, not even [to] acknowledge receipt of the application."

Joe Grimm and Poynter's Career Center Director, Colleen Eddy, decided to address this issue and offer tips about how to handle a lack of response during this week's live educator chat on Tuesday, June 30, at 1 p.m. EDT.

We invite participants to submit their questions and share their own experiences related to dealing with unresponsive employers during the chat. Twitterers can tweet their questions beforehand using the hashtag #poynterchats.

You can revisit this link at any time to replay the chat after it has ended.