Sick of your job? Check out editing courses

Career breaks are increasingly common. Maternity leave is a well-established reason for a woman to put her career on hold, but travel, volunteer work, and hobbies also provide many workers with reasons to step off the career ladder and take time to explore other avenues. If your career break lasts too long, you may find your absence has rusted your abilities or that your field has progressed so quickly that you will need to retrain, go back to the bottom of the ladder, and start again. If you seek a new direction, you might find editing is to your taste.

Career switch

There may be a personal reason you left your career, or maybe you just didn’t enjoy the lifestyle that came with the job. However, you still need to make money, and maybe you don’t want to go back to school and start over again. You need a career that you can feed your existing knowledge and experience into. Recent developments in distance learning mean that editing has become a viable option for those seeking a new career. Online editing courses make it possible to find a new career without leaving home.

Knowledge bank

Whether you realize it or not, your previous career has enriched you more than just financially. You have acquired experiences, tips, and tricks that outsiders would take years to pick up. Many professional jobs require excellent written skills to write proposals, meeting minutes, and appraisals. Without realizing it, you have built up experience as a professional writer, even though those writing tasks seemed secondary to your main job at the time. In fact, those methods of communicating your experience, knowledge, and professional opinions served the actual purpose of your employment.

Transformation

If you are good at spotting mistakes in other people’s writing or if you can always find a better way to express a writer’s ideas, you may be a suitable candidate to become an editor. You can’t expect to become a senior editor straightaway. You will need editor training and can benefit from taking editing courses.

Distance learning

If you used to be a nurse, you would be an ideal candidate to edit articles and books on medicine and health care. If you used to be an industrial engineer, you should look for opportunities to edit brochures, user manuals, or sales documents for industrial equipment. You will find it easier to get into editing if you resolve to specialize in your previous area of expertise; from there, you can always branch out into other fields. To improve your chances of landing a trainee position, you could take a few editing courses. Fortunately, you can take editing courses online, so if you are a stay-at-home mom or a surfing fanatic, you can prepare for your new career while maintaining your current lifestyle.

Editing courses

“Editing” is not one standard role. A range of tasks are involved in the process of editing, and each can be taken up as a job. The number of editing courses available matches this range of tasks. For example, proofreading is a key part of editing, and all potential editors would benefit from editing courses in this field. You may decide to focus on just this task for your new career, so you should explore online proofreading courses.

There are many advantages to life as a freelance editor. You can work from home, have flexible hours, and choose your clients. But the question remains: How do you become a freelance editor? Here are four tips to get your career as a freelance editor started.

Develop your skills

The first thing you need to be a freelance editor is, of course, editing skills.

If you’re just starting a career as an editor, you will need to learn what the job entails and develop the necessary skills. Many local colleges and professional training institutes provide courses that will teach you how to become a freelance editor. There are also many excellent online editing courses. The advantage of an online training course is that you can work at home, at your own pace, and at the times that suit you. It’s almost like working as a freelance editor already.

Even if you already have extensive experience as an editor, it’s still a good idea to take a refresher grammar course. You could also expand the services you will offer as a freelancer by taking additional courses in related fields, such as a proofreading course.

Have a flawless résumé

When you apply for just about any job, you usually have to send in your résumé. As a freelance editor, you will need to send your résumé to almost every potential client. And, just like applying for any other job, you need to make sure your résumé stands out from the rest.

But remember, you’re selling yourself as a freelance editor, as someone who can spot a single misplaced apostrophe in a 200-page document. It won’t matter how much experience you have or how carefully crafted your résumé is; if there is just one tiny typo in there, you’re unlikely to ever get that job.

One simple tip to make sure you have an error-free résumé: ask someone else to edit it.

It is always useful to have that extra pair of eyes look over anything you’ve written, and it’s especially important when you’re applying for jobs as a freelance editor.

If you don’t know any other editors who can check your résumé, or you don’t want to alert any of your coworkers that you’re thinking of working freelance, try an online editing service. Look for a fast, reliable service that offers confidentiality.

Show samples of your work

A great way for a freelance editor to back up a flawless résumé is to have a portfolio of previous work. If potential clients can see that you have tackled similar work before and did a good job on it, they will be even more likely to hire you.

Gather some representative samples of the type of work you typically do or would like to work on as a freelance editor. It usually isn’t necessary to show the entire document. Two or three pages of each type of work you specialize in will be enough.

One way to provide samples is to show the original unedited document and then show your corrected version. You could also include a copy that shows all the changes and comments you made using the “Track Changes” feature in Microsoft Word.

If you’re just starting out as a freelance editor and don’t yet have anything to fill your portfolio, you could offer a discount on your services or do some free editing for friends, local businesses, or community groups.

Promote yourself with a website

Don’t just keep that carefully prepared portfolio waiting until a client asks to see it. Build a website and show off your skills as a freelance editor to the world. You never know, the clients might come to you. You don’t need to have a complicated website with dozens of pages employing the latest in Internet technology. Use a simple design with a page about yourself, your experience, and the services you offer, and display your samples clearly. Do some research to get some search engine optimization tips, making your website more attractive to potential customers. Don’t worry if you’re better at editing than writing. Many content writing services are available online and can provide you with text tailored exactly to your needs.

If you follow these four tips, you’ll quickly learn how to become a freelance editor. Before you know it, you’ll be ready to start looking for clients and building a career as a freelance editor. And remember those online editing services mentioned earlier? They’re also great places to get work on a freelance basis. Why not start there? You might never need to go hunting for clients again.