We tuned in to an webinar recently entitled, “Working in Sports.” While the webinar went into deep detail on only a few topics, it inspired us to create a series of posts on careers in racing – how to achieve your goal of obtaining a motorsports career.

This series is going to cover a few topics on how to find and obtain a career in racing, and depending on the response and information available the topics may evolve and be explored more in depth. What we plan on covering is: searching for motorsports jobs, creating the perfect motorsports resume, networking in the racing industry, interviewing for racing jobs and other ways to get the experience you need for careers in racing, including internships.

When thinking about a career in racing, there are two things you need to think about: setting yourself up for a racing job and actually applying and obtaining a motorsports job. They require different actions, but both are essential for your job search if you are able.

We’ll talk more about the act of setting yourself up for a racing job in a future post, but in order to do so, you’ll have to know what future employers are looking for in a new hire. That’s why it’s important to do these searches well in advance of looking for a job. When you know what the employer wants, you can build your resume in that direction.

For example, let’s say you do a search for job listings for race teams and see that most of the posting require you to know AutoCad. Now you know that you will need to have AutoCad training before applying for these jobs perhaps a year or two down the road, so you can begin your education now instead of when you actually need that job.

So let’s talk about the actual search process. In order to find the jobs you’re interested in applying to, you’ll have to do quite a bit of varied searching. One of the best tools out there is Indeed.com. Indeed will search a broad range of job descriptions without giving you some of the more spam-like postings you’ll get on Monster or other job boards.

The best way to start with all searches is putting in motorsports or racing, and leave the rest of the fields blank. You don’t want to even narrow it down to a geographic region, because you already know that racing jobs are rare and you may need to relocate even though many of them will be in the Charlotte area.

Once you’ve done the search at a job site like Indeed, you want to expand to sports-related job sites. Teamwork Online has postings for a variety of motorsports companies like ISC Motorsports and NASCAR. You don’t need to sign up for an account to view the jobs, although I would recommend that you sign up for email alerts – free! – so that you can be the first to know about any racing jobs that come up.

Google is the next tool I would use in your racing job search – this is a great way to find postings on specific team websites or unadvertised positions. Using the advanced search tool, you want to use keywords like motorsports and racing in the required fields along with hiring, employment and resume. Then, you want to put in one or two months in the date range to make sure that the job listing is recent and active. You can then visit the results and see what comes up.

Another one-off site worth visiting is Jayski.com. The webmaster is honest about not actively keeping these listings up to date, but often they are notified about job openings from insiders within teams. It’s hit or miss, but worth a visit.

Now that you’ve picked out a few job listings that you want to target for application or for future research, you can prepare yourself to apply for the racing job of your dreams. We’ll talk more about the steps you’ll want to take in a future post – next up: resume preparation!

Have you found any great postings? Feel free to share below, and we’ll do our best to give you tips on how to apply!