I hate my job, and I don't know what to switch to... how screwed am I?

Re what could you do, how about temping, call centre customer service, or market research? The last two aren't awesome, but they're heaps better than telesales as far as stress goes and you aren't selling anything. Re your resume, it's not terrible or anything but it doesn't provide a compelling reason to hire you, or really say anything about you. After you decide what kind of job you're going to focus on getting out of telesales with, take a look in an online job database at 5-10, or more, job descriptions for that kind of job to see what kind of duties you'll need to convince and employer you can perform and what kind of skills you'll need to be able to demonstrate. So, say you want to go into admin. (Hooray for paper pushin'!) and you're thinking you'll apply to temp agencies. Take the top three-five duties / skills you've identified and provide a dot point list of how you are super-awesome good at these things. Temp agencies want to know if you can use MS Office, file, answer the phone, fit in well in new environments and type, for example. Put this dot point list at the top, ahead of your employment history. Then, in your employment history section, do the same thing, but be more specific. Use an abbreviated STAR (situation, task, action, result) formula, with the emphasis on whatever action you took in your job and positive results you achieved. So, ''Provided well-written, high quality leads to clients and partners becomes, ''Import, sort, and analyse leads in Excel, presenting data in chart format for weekly client and partner reports''. Or whatever you specifically did, slanted to what you want to do now! And re your skills, dude, telemarketing is brutal. If nothing else you've got stamina and persistence, even if you're ready to quit now. There's also client handling skills, networking, business development, identifying key decision makers, persuading, convincing, some elements of marketing, translating potential into revenue, promotions, public relations, handling conflict and rejection, developing rapport with clients, as well as all the admin stuff you have to do as part of any business role. And having telemarketed, you're in a great position to canvass employers by cold calling. Yeah, I know you hate it. But unlike most schmucks, you know you actually can do it, despite hating it. So get yourself a list of (for example) temp agencies from the phone book and call 'em. Be the most charming, employable, awesome person you can be on the call. Identify the person who hires for the kind of work you want to do. Send them your resume. Call 'em back if they don't call you. Sell yourself. Go get 'em tiger!

That is not the worst resume I've ever seen but it's not the best either. (Truly, it's very middling.) You DO have a lot of skills, you just haven't teased them out. You need a skills based CV, where the highlighted skills are tailored to the job you're applying for. I would do a profile, key skills, employment history, technical skills, education.

I work in nonprofit, and have worked closely with development. I'm going to be blunt, partly because I'm on my way home for supper: your resume is Not Good. Its way too vague and doesn't really tell me what you're good at, what you're passionate about, and what you can do for me. A chronological resume like yours isn't always the best format for people new to the work force. I would advise you to rewrite your resume into a http://blogs.wsj.com/laidoff/2009/03/23/getting-ahead-with-a-skills-based-resume/ so that hiring managers know what your capabilities and passions are. Imho, the key to writing a good skills based resume is to look at a bunch of job postings in whatever field you are looking to enter, and then create a resume that tells hiring managers that you can do the things they need you to do. http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=%2430,000&l=philadelphia,+pa&rbl=Philadelphia,+PA&jlid=f6285c85bb4a85b4&jt=fulltime for jobs paying $30,000 + in Philly. Start applying for stuff. BUT! Take the time to tailor each resume and cover letter you send out to that particular job. Its time consuming (it gets easier the more you do, just because you have a library of stock phrases to pull from that you develop over time), but it works. Memail me if you want, and I can provide you with a sample resume to look at.

"Borderline harass people over the telephone into taking a sales call." No, no! You have ''Demonstrated tenacity and persistence, cold calling over 500 potential clients weekly to identify key decision makers and generate 45 solid leads per fortnight, exceeding your sales target by 15 per cent.'' Or whatever. It's really tough when you're stuck in the mire of a job you hatehatehatehatehate, but you *have* to identify the positive. Adopt a brainstorm mentality where nothing is off the table as far as skills you could possibly lay claim to. (You can always go back and make things more realistic, but don't bring the hammer down on anything while you're brainstorming.) Maybe you could try doing it as a theoretical exercise? Pretend you're helping a ''friend'' identify their skills from a telemarketing job? Ask yourself what would your soul-sucking pointy-haired boss* say if he/she were selling the job to a new recruit? Is there any corporate marketing material around the office that you can rework parts of to describe your job? Or better still, look up lots of telemarketing job descriptions and see what duties they say the job has. In fact, to get you started, I had a flick through the first five telesales positions advertised where I am, on http://www.seek.com.au. Here is a mish-mash of skills / qualities / duties they ask for. I bet you can take some of these and do the STAR thing with them, slanting it toward whatever jobs you're looking for. *Growing, maintaining and retaining customer relationships. *Account management *After-sales service *Speaking with existing customers to further explain benefits of the product / assist with product queries. *Managing and developing sales and customer base within your set territory *Identifying and maximising sales opportunities *Utilising sales tools to produce reports and analysis *Liaising with your team of external sales representatives to deliver and manage customer needs *Managing and monitoring key accounts to ensure customer expectations and service standards are met *Ability to identify cross or up-selling opportunities *Developed negotiation and closing skills *Excellent communication both written and verbal achieve budgeted revenue targets. *Enthusiasm, drive, and the desire to succeed *A bright, outgoing, confident personality *Excellent communication and people skills *Ability to achieve targets *Good organisational & time management skills *Keen & willing to learn And while we're at Seek, they have a great example of a skills based resume http://www.seek.com.au/career-resources/get-your-dream-job/resume-guide.ascx#3. Scroll down - they call it a Functional Resume. Tweak to make it more US-ian obv, but it's a start. There's also good advice on interviews and general career stuff http://www.seek.com.au/career-resources/?cid=sk:main:au:tab:tools. They also have actual examples that you can download pdfs of, but I find them really hard to locate through the site. A quick Google of ''sample resume site:seek.com.au'' found samples for: http://www.seek.com.au/career-resources/faqs/Marketing/documents/MarketingSampleResume.pdf http://www.seek.com.au/career-resources/faqs/Hospitality/documents/HospSampleResume.pdf http://www.seek.com.au/career-resources/faqs/Law/documents/LawSampleResume.pdf http://ninemsn.seek.com.au/career-resources/faqs/Nursing/documents/NursingNSWSampleResume_1.pdf http://www.seek.com.au/career-resources/faqs/BuildingConstruction/standout/sampleresume.pdf http://www.seek.com.au/career-resources/faqs/Advertising/standout/Adsampleresume.pdf http://www.seek.com.au/career-resources/faqs/InvestmentBanking/documents/IBSampleResume.pdf You might not want to work in those fields specifically. But check out the goals and personal qualities sections. Anything you can borrow and rework for yourself? How have they used the STAR formula? Is there something in the way they've set out their duties and achievements that you can adapt to your own resume? Go for it! *Actual boss may not be soul-sucking or pointy haired, example only.

OK look, I did this in about 10 minutes while watching Stargate, but here's a http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ASEzvWEEbk_zZGM0YzVxYzJfNjBnOThyemhkMg&hl=en. This is NOT A GOOD EXAMPLE of what you should do but is perhaps a helpful example of how to do it. This is based on your current CV. If you're applying for a largely administrative job, like the VA job posted upthread, you emphasise both a totally different set of skills and different aspects of your past jobs. You might, for example, focus more on data entry, record keeping and organisation, and telephone skills.

I have a completely different suggestion, although I'm also prepared for other posters to say "bad idea". This depends, of course, on your experience. How much technical and business writing experience do you have? Have you written reports or documents for a certain type of company or companies? If so, I am going to suggest running your own freelance writing business. I've had my own freelance writing business and really enjoy that fact that I don't have to interact with people too much (no going into an office, no chit chat, very little phone time...definitely not calling people and trying to sell them stuff). Also, I've been able to earn a much higher hourly rate than any of my previous jobs...definitely more than the amount you want to earn over the course of a year. If you do decide to try your own freelance writing business, though, I would suggest creating a cover letter/email and CV that mainly emphasizes those skills, with links to writing samples. Write to several companies and state "I am a freelance business writer" (or technical writer, whatever) -- I did this during month 2 of my business, and I am still getting business from sending out that original batch of emails. Start sending out a lot of emails to companies right now -- I would bet that you can land at least a small assignment before you quit your job. Good luck. PS: On preview -- if you create a functional resume (and carefully target that CV to jobs that you want), you can remove certain job skills or things that you don't want to do. It sounds like you really, really hated calling and don't want to do that anymore - that's great - if it were me, I wouldn't even list that on a CV, especially if the goal is not to do it anymore.

One very smart thing to do (and surprising it isn't listed already) is joining in a networking evening of Association of Fundraising Professionals or the Direct Marketing Association in Philadelphia. These are influential job pipelines that work. It bothers me how many people in fundraising eschew professional associations when overall job satisfaction is so low. 95% of fundraising is sales: selling the idea, the people, and the reason for philanthropy. AFP has networking evenings every month.

I just wanted to echo killdevil's suggestion of leaving the community college associate's degree out. Just put that you did a BA at Temple.

You're welcome.