Photo owned by Chris Seufert (cc)

This is my first week of self-employment. Friday was my last day in my permanent job and yes, I did choose to leave that safe pensionable job in the middle of the recession!

Last Wednesday evening I read three blog posts in succession, which turned out to be quite serendipitous. First, I read “Lesson learned from my biggest business mistake” by Seth Godin. Then I somehow found my way over to Damien Mulley’s blog where I read “And?” and lastly, I read “I can’t” by Joe Scanlon. Godin’s blog notes what he views as his biggest business mistake - not believing in the world wide web in 1994. Mulley addresses procrastination and makes the case for entrepreneurship and self-employment. While Scanlon follows-on to address a number of barriers that sometimes prevent people from starting their own business and offers some answers or solutions to these.

Throughout both of my college degrees, I was working part-time in various freelance and contract roles. As soon as I graduated from my Master’s degree I went straight into full-time employment. Since then I have spent the past few years working for a number of blue chip, well-known corporate company’s. Certainly I have learnt a lot in the past few years. I have learnt project management skills, gained my PRINCE2 Practitioner level certification and learnt about working on my own initiative as well as working in varied, dynamic teams. I have learnt about knowledge management, business development, making presentations, negotiations and how to work with stakeholders within dynamic, matrix, Irish and global organisations. I have expanded on my communications skills, my hands-on design and development experience, I have learned a number of new technologies and systems and a hell of a lot about marketing, communications, strategy and branding. However, I know that I have a lot more to learn and want to move my career in a different, more creative and more focused direction.

While online marketing/ communications, multimedia and the web have all had a role to play in my various positions within these companies, they were not the central core of the business but rather functioned as support elements. Furthermore, I want to work with people that are coming from similar backgrounds to me and that share similar interests. And if they are as passionate and excited about user-centered design, new technology and online marketing/ entertainment/ communications developments as I am, all the better!

Conventional wisdom is that it is always better to get a job when you are in a job. However, a 9 to 5 job does not necessarily start at 9 and end at 5 so making time, outside of work and other daily commitments, to plan out your next move, do the research required, search for, identify and then apply for a suitable/ desirable position can become extremely difficult to do, if not almost impossible in some cases. Therefore, I made the decision to take some time out to think, plan, network, learn more about myself and what I want, and to up-skill while I plan my next move. So far this week, I have gained one contract, been to a bloggers Christmas party, attended a digital media start-up event and have met a variety of interesting people in the digital space in Ireland… Surely only the beginning!

Thanks to Seth, Damien and Joe for their recent articles.

- Niamh.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 at 11:05 pm and is filed under entrepreneurship, freelancing, innovation. You can keep updated on the conversation by subscribing to the comments feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.