veiled4allah: The Niqabi Paralegal?

OK, here's the story. For the last year and a half, I worked part-time as an office assistant for the Slingerland Institute for Literacy (I also did computer support and served as the webmaster). But I got laid off on May 15 because they couldn't afford to pay my salary (maybe I shouldn't mention their name when I say that, lol).

After some discussion with my parents, we have agreed that I should go back to school to get some technical training because while I have a lot of general knowledge and skills, that isn't enough to succeed in today's job market (not to mention this economy; I had already been searching for a new job for five months and got a grand total of two interviews in all that time).

At first, I was looking to become a medical transcriptionist. I thought it would be interesting to learn a little medical science (and it might lead to future career development), and that it might be good to work helping others in the medical field, and that it might be the sort of job where no one minded if I wore niqab at work, and that in the future I could work from home if I wanted to.

Then I found out that the nearby technical college will no longer be offering the training program for medical transcriptionists because it's not "current" anymore. What the -? Didn't all the blurbs say this is supposed to be a hot field?

So it's back to the drawing board. The two programs I'm looking at are Geographic Information Systems and Paralegal. Geographic Information Systems sound kind of cool and would make use of my computer skills and technical background. But I'm not sure what the market actually is for this type of job. There is a paralegal program for people with bachelor's degrees like I have (BA in Physics, The Johns Hopkins University, 1995) which means that the program would be the most intellectually challenging of those on offer. Also it might be kind of interesting if the job involved research. Or it could be really boring and abstruse.

So I need to do some research to find out more about what jobs are actually available in these two fields and what kind of work I would be likely to actually be doing.

And then of course there's the question of whether I could get hired in either field while wearing niqab. The one advantage is that if I get hired through the training program the teachers would be able to vouch for me and say "she may dress weird, but she knows her stuff", whereas it would probably be impossible to get hired as a niqabi if I was just sending in resumes.

If anybody was actually reading this blog, I would set up a poll: which career field should Al-Muhajabah go into? Maybe I'll post the poll at SV, inshallah.