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What do we all do for a living?
BlissC:
What do you do? Local Government Officer/Web Designer & Developer
More than one thing? Yup, I work part time in local government, specialising in social housing and research and strategy making/policy, and part time self employed as a web designer/developer.
Work at home? Part of the time, yes. I'm disabled and although I do go into the office a lot, I'm also on a working from home scheme for disabled employees my employers set up and work a minimum of four days a month from home. Helps out because I don't have the hassle of getting ready and travelling to work if I'm having a bad day, and I can even work in my pyjamas! I have a connection to the server at work so I can do practically everything I do in the office from home. The web design I'm home based. We've turned the spare room into an office for me, though it's an extra living room/office really. I have a sofabed in there and often rather than sitting at the desk I lounge on the sofabed with my laptop - much more comfy!
Seasonal work? FT, PT, variable, on call, hourly? Part time in local government - 18.5 hours a week. Web design - variable, depending on how many clients I've got, but I tend to work ridiculous hours with that and odd times of the day/night.
Are you doing what you wanted to do? I sort of accidentally ended up in local government. I originally trained as a teacher, but ended up working for a consultancy firm specialising in educational research for central government departments - both primary and secondary education, and adult education, but the role involved a lot of research and statistics work as well, and did a degree in psychology at the same time. When the company got into difficulties I decided to bail out and got myself the job in local government based on my research experience. I'd never worked in housing before, but as it was mainly the research role they wanted, they were happy to train me in the housing stuff I needed, and I went on to do the first stage of my professional housing qualifications.
About five years ago I "accidentally" ended up in web design after I volunteered myself to do a website for a voluntary organisation I helped out with, thinking "How hard can it be?" LOL! One site though and I was hooked! My first site was on the server for probably around 3 weeks, but after I posted it in the critiques section of a web design forum and got lots of comments like "It's really good for a first attempt, but...", I decided I was going to learn to do it properly, ditched Microsoft Frontpage, and started to learn to code by hand. I had one hell of a steep learning curve, and taught myself the basics from scratch, then did an 18 month university qualification learning various programming languages along the way. I love web design and I'd much rather do that than the local government work, which is tedious in the extreme, but can't risk throwing in the local government work and going full time self employed because of my health situation, because at least with the local government work I get paid if I'm off sick.
Would you prefer some other line of work? In an ideal world I'd probably do web design more or less full time and the rest of the time concentrate on my writing. Short to medium term though I'm hoping to get out of housing and more into IT, which I find much more interesting than housing work, and I'm hoping to get some work experience in IT later this year. Anything has to be more exciting than the data input I tend to end up doing at work these days, which annoys me greatly because it's not what I was trained for, and I'm not using my qualifications and experience.
Kelda:
--- Quote from: BlissC on March 17, 2008, 06:22:02 pm ---
More than one thing? Yup, I work part time in local government, specialising in social housing and research and strategy making/policy, and part time self employed as a web designer/developer.
--- End quote ---
I work in Social Housing too Bliss! But for the central scottish goverment.
BlissC:
My commiserations Kelda. ;) To be honest it was never an area I'd even thought about working in, and I originally got the job based on my research experience, but then as I was doing more and more housing related stuff, and my degree was in geography/psychology (the social geography bit did come in quite useful), I ended up the first stage of the Post Graduate Conversion Course with the Chartered Institute of Housing. I keep saying that one of these days I'm going to do the second stage, but given that ideally I don't want to stay in housing long-term I'm really not sure it's worth the hassle and keeping up with the CPD requirements etc. - just trying to keep on top of the government's ever changing housing policy is quite enough for me! :laugh:
Kelda:
--- Quote from: BlissC on March 18, 2008, 08:54:44 pm ---- just trying to keep on top of the government's ever changing housing policy is quite enough for me! :laugh:
--- End quote ---
:laugh:
Yeah I did a marketing degree and got involved in a regneration project who were using a residents panel to gain opinions, did it as a sumer job while still at uni, and thats how I snuck in the back door. So no real housing qualifications for me either!
shortfiction:
Thought you folks might like to see one of my unpleasant work spaces. It's a campus office that can be used by any faculty. The photo of it is actually posted right now at: http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com
Look at the archive on the right and click on the one called "Oh, the tears." I did not write the text for the photo, but it's funny.
You can even spot my bottle of water on the table!
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