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09/13/2005: "drawn and quartered, professionally speaking"
It's only Tuesday, and this has been quite a full week. So much is trying to happen at the same time that I'm really not sure what's going on or where to start. Thus, I'm having to stay flexible, which can be tough. I am attempting to simultaneously find some short-term work to pay the bills, job search both in my current line of work and in a different line of work, as well as get the ball rolling on working with my dad's business contacts.
At least I'm not sitting at home twiddling my thumbs. (Far from it - yesterday I installed drywall.)
Once I got back from vacation I was faced with an indeterminite amount of time in which I would be unemployed. Thus, I decided to spend a good deal of time at our local library (which has free WiFi access) and e-mail, research both companies to network with and a new career option I'm looking at. The rest of my time would be writing letters, making phone calls, and that sort of stuff.
First let me explain my career search as it stands. I've determined that applying for jobs like what I've had before (product designer) isn't going to cut it anymore. I need to get into a more senior role, where I'll be supervising, or at least directing, people. If design is where I'm going to be, I need designers underneath me, or I'm going to forever be nothing more than a design engineer for the rest of my life, and that's just not going to cut it. So that's one job search angle.
The next is technology transfer. At the memorial for my mother-in-law I got talking to Barb, one of my wife's cousins. She's a lawyer, and has recently made the move into technology transfer. Essentially, that's where you help people with a good idea take that idea, protect it, commercialize it, and market it. That sounds, to me, like a fabulously interesting job, as it deals not only with technology, but prettty much how to start up a new business, over and over and over. Luckily for me, the technology transfer community is pretty small in Ontario, and thus Barb knows most of them really well. In other words, I have a great inroad to networking with them. Next steps are to rewrite my resume as it would apply to technology transfer jobs, and then start getting informational interviews.
Of course, what I'd really rather do is ditch all this jobsearch stuff and simply get to work with my dad's business associates. I've known Bob for a long time, and even had him at my wedding. He recently introduced me to John, a Chinese-Canadian who is a big part of the ever-expanding outsourcing to China. It's John that has the big ideas and hopes for me. I won't got into detail, as things are both sketchy at this point and ripe with opportunity, and I also don't want to give away any secrets I've been entrusted with. Needless to say, I could quite happily ditch both my contracting and my jobsearching and work with John for the rest of my professional life, if our meeting a week and a half ago is anything close to what could happen with me, Bob, and John.
Screwing up the works is the contracting. Just yesterday I was told that I start a job in Mississauga tomorrow morning. The pay is pretty good, even considering the price of gas and the amount of driving I'll need to do, but commuting to Mississauga on a daily basis is going to be a real drain. It's also going to eat up a lot of time I could spend on developing a working relationship with John and Bob, and even jobsearching. But it pays the bills right now, so I'll buckle down and do it until something immediately profitable comes from John.
Just to show you how spur-of-the-moment things are right now (other than the above Mississauga contract job), I just got e-mail from John saying that he's going to set up a meeting tomorrow. In Windsor. The same day I'm supposed to start my contract job. Obviously I'm going to be a day late on the contract job, and instead of driving to Mississauga I'll be driving to Windsor. I have very little doubt that it will be well worth my while.
Stay tuned. There's LOTS more to come, I'm sure.
