Day 46 of 100, Hannover, Germany
I started writing this one almost 2 weeks ago, flashing by fields, towns, stations, borders, on our way from Denmark to Germany for the second time. Family calls, and the train journey soothes. Over the past week and a bit, I’ve been adding and adding to it, so it’s coming to you in parts.
Continued from yesterday.
It’s been a long time since I last applied for a job.
After a significant time digging around in my hard drives and cloud storage, I found my CV. Its latest incarnation was from back in 2012, and that didn’t look so different from the 2010 version. It seems I was briefly contemplating a change of job back in 2012, before deciding to not have one altogether.
Ha.
Since I decided I needed a job, the one thing that’s freaking me out has been this: I have no idea how employable I actually am.
I’ve been out of the job market for 4 years, and 8 years before that, I worked for a bank. All my “real job” experience is corporate, an environment which I don’t suit, that didn’t suit me. Despite that, I enjoyed the work I did in the last few years immensely. Like the work I do now for Coffee and Magic – it was wrangling language, user experience design, content strategy, and building an audience facing home for all of it. It was work I was made for, work which I continue to choose to do.
So what do I want to do?
Honestly, I want a quiet job.
A job that lives behind the scenes: admin, customer support, editing, retouching, writing… You get the idea. Something where I can be of genuine help without having to sell stuff. There are people who can sell sand in the Sahara – I’m not one of them. I couldn’t sell water to a thirsty man, but if you close the sale, I’ll make sure he stops thirsting and feels / is cared for.
I want a job that won’t expect me to sell the company for billions, but which lets me make a difference one person / project at a time.
I’ve been researching remote work lately, having never done it before, and it’s staggering how you can do for someone else, independent of location. But do companies really want to hire people who don’t have crazy rock star ambitions, but are content to care deeply and would like to be compensated fairly? Does that actually exist outside of award-courting advertising?
charlene winfred 