1588: 33 Bloke LFG

Ahh, I’m jobhunting again. Goody. It’s always so much fun to do this.

Actually, though, this time around I don’t feel quite as despondent about the process as I have done in the past. I am feeling pretty despondent about my impending unemployment, of course, but the timely acquisition of a new job will hopefully fend that off before things get too difficult to deal with — either mentally or financially.

When I’ve been in this position in the past, the main source of my despondency was due to the fact that, despite having both qualifications and experience, I wasn’t really sure what I should be looking for. The reason for this is that both my qualifications and experience are quite specialist, with the possible exception of my degree — I have a PGCE, which is a teaching qualification, which naturally suggests a career in teaching, and I have experience with teaching, working in retail as both a salesman and a personal software trainer, and I also have experience at quickly and efficiently churning out content that people might actually want to read for specialist websites.

The challenge now is in applying that knowledge and experience and being able to position my qualifications and skills as being suitable for… something else. There is absolutely no way I am ever going back into teaching, largely for the sake of my own mental health. I am also rapidly coming to the conclusion that I no longer wish to work in games journalism — I think there’s a whole post in my reasons for doing that, so I’ll save that for another day.

So what, then?

Answering this question is where I’ve stumbled before. When confronted with a website promising literally thousands of available jobs, where on Earth do you begin looking?

Well, this time around I quickly found some suitable positions to delve into, largely in the web content editing and/or internal communications fields. Both types of position are directly relevant to my past experience, albeit from a different angle, and both types of position are something I could absolutely, positively do right now without requiring any additional training. For the most part, too, both types of position offer a salary that is at least competitive with what I’ve been earning at Gamer Network, and with the prospect of future promotions and actual career development — something that simply wasn’t there with any of the games journalism positions I’ve held in the last few years — I might actually finally be able to get my hypothetical income graph heading back upwards instead of, as it’s been doing for the last few years, downwards.

Anyway, that’s the situation right now. My Bank Holiday Monday is likely to be spent looking for and applying for more and more jobs. Hopefully one of them at least will come to something, as having dealt with long-term unemployment on one occasion in my life I’m in absolutely no hurry to return to that situation — particularly now Andie and I are safely in our new house.