A little while ago I made a change in my career direction. I finished with my last employer (big global communications tech player, you probably have heard of them) after 17 years that involved many interesting challenges, a lot of fun, countless interesting people, and to be fair more than a few numpties!
There were loads of great career adventures and one of the best things about that job was all the stuff I learned about the tech, the communications industry, work, and people.
The new chapter I am on at the moment is to be self employed. If you have a project in the tech industry, one involving strategy or marketing, and you want to make sure your business problem IS going to be addressed, and the fix will be delivered fast, then it might be an idea for us to talk.
A challenge I have is how to describe what I can do for people. My CV and career journey is a little unconventional. I went from manufacturing, to IT development, to program management, to business and strategy consulting, to cloud strategy,, back to program management in marketing, and most recently digital transformation. How do you sum that up for a business person with a problem they need help with?
I was talking to some people about this. A guy who works in finance for start ups said to me “I know what you are. You are a fixer. You are someone I give a problem to and you fix it”. I am told good fixers are very important in start-ups where title and role are subordinate to getting things done, and sorting out issues fast. The second valuable input I got was from a former boss. I asked him how he would describe what I am good at and he said “Strategy Execution”. Give me a problem and I will take care of it fast, while making sure that the solution remains business focused.
Both of those ring true to me. I just need to figure out how to succinctly describe that when I am talking to companies and recruiters!
One of the things I will be doing though is to change the emphasis of this blog a little bit. It helps to have a place for me to write and talk a little about technology and business. I don’t fancy going off to SubStack, and while LinkedIn is the usual professional platform, the writing there is a little strange sometimes.
Expect to see a few small changes around here then so.
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