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Have Trowel Will Travel

Part 5: Finding and Keeping that Job

By , About.com Guide

Have Trowel, Will Travel, The Series

Among its many insidious but useful changes the Internet has wrought on our society, it has made finding jobs of all kinds in all fields in all kinds of places much much easier. There are places on the net now where you may read job listings, or post a resume, particularly if you're a computer specialist of one sort or another. Within the last few years, several web locations have opened up with archaeology-specific employment opportunities, places like the Chronicle of Higher Education, Christine Ivory's Archaiologia, and the Social Science Research Grapevine. But these are mostly for full time jobs, for academics or professional archaeologists seeking employment. They really don't do much for the temporary job market for field technicians.

Speaking as a CRM archaeologist who occasionally hires field and laboratory technicians, I know why that is. The turn around time, even for posting jobs on the world wide web, is too long. The moment you've published the job list, the listing becomes obsolete. Most of the time, when my firm needs temporary help, they go to the stack of resumes they have and start phoning. As a field technician, you need to get your resume in there, so that when the boss goes to the stack, you get your foot in the door.

Until the Internet was invented and started becoming a fixture in our society, the only way to find out who had jobs opened was word of mouth; and much of the hiring was done, still is, based on your networking ability--it's "who you know, not what you know" as one disgruntled field tech told me. But now, in the Information Age, "knowing" is the easy part.

I figure, what you need as a field technician without a job is a list of places to send your resume: one place on the web that would list CRM companies that, over any given year, might hire quite a few temporary employees, might very well be interested in your resume. I contacted CRM firms around the United States to see if they might want to be listed on such a web page. Several companies have agreed to give it a shot; and here is the list.

Field Assistant Contacts. A list of mid-size to large cultural resource management firms that seek temporary help.

Since I first wrote this, of course, R. Joe Brandon's Shovel Bums and Jennifer Palmer's Fieldwork Server have been up and operating, and they are great places to get news on who is looking for big field crews.

Good Luck, and keep that trowel sharp!

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