December daysish - Work

[wildeabandon]

emperor asked "Where do you see yourself professionally in 5ish years?" and highlyeccentric asked "What is your professional field?", which is related enough that I'll answer them together.

What I mostly do is a mixture of data wrangling and project management, which I've done in a variety of sectors - initially in telecommunications, then at a hedge fund, and for the last few years in higher education. For a little over a year I've been doing it on a self-employed consultancy basis, first at Oxford University, and now at Kingston. I find that this suits me quite well, as I tend to get bored fairly easily, and usually find that my interest in a job starts to dwindle around 6-12 months in no matter how interesting the content actually is. Working as a consultant means that I can effectively change jobs that frequently without looking like a flake who can't stick to anything.

So that's where I am now. I got both of the current contracts through an agency, and I'll probably rely on them to find me a few more whilst I build up contacts and fill out a few last gaps in my CV. I'm aiming to gradually shift the focus of the work I do from being mostly data with a bit of management to mostly management with a bit of data, and I've actually just had a heads up about a possible new contract after the Kingston one ends which would be a bit of a move in that direction. I'm almost certain to stay within the HE sector for the next few years, as by now I've picked up quite a lot of sector-specific expertise, but once I've had a couple of senior management roles in HE then I'll probably try to broaden my horizons a bit. I think that once I've got a really solid set of transferable skills under my belt it'll be easier to, well, transfer them, and what I really want to do is have access to enough work in London to keep me here most of the time.

I think that five years from now I'll probably be around the point of "just about have enough senior experience to start looking at other sectors". Where I'll be ten years from now is a bit more uncertain. I might just keep doing interim management contracts on a mostly full time basis and hopefully be able to retire quite early, or I might deliberately take gaps as long as I can afford and enjoy rather more leisure time. If I end up getting more interest than I can supply I might even start to employ other people and end up running a small management consultancy, but time will very much tell on that. It's hard to know what my priorities will be by then.

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

That sounds like a fast-paced sort of job, lots of change and new people. Fun!