Increasing Professionalism – Jumping into a Career
My life has been kind of bumpy, generally a good ride, but bumpy. I’ve never been able to just settle anywhere very long. I was happily working as a trainer in Nu Skin when they decided to axe me. I really enjoyed my time there and made some great friends but man, aside from a few glorious moments (thank you summer Lagoon party 2006!) that place was out to get me. I got bumped.
Enter Heritage. I don’t have many nice things to say about that place other than I really learned how to use Photoshop. Any web skills I learned there have been dumped into the trash cause it was just garbage. But I learned Photoshop, and I made some terrific friends. Got a little cozy and then… I bumped again.
Main10 then hailed me over, and I had a great time there. Unfortunately, money was tight and work was scarce and I kind fell in to working for myself. But not after being introduced to CSS and the beauty and necessity of it in modern web design. However, the money-pinch caused me to, once again, be bumped.
At home, working for myself, besides not making any money (2008 is the year of the broke) I did decide to finally jump on the Valid wagon, fine tuning my code to match those stupid W3C standards; something I always thought was impossible due to the arcane methods that they tell you your code is invalid. (End tag omitted, but OMITAG NO specified… is that English?) However, I learned that Coda validates on the fly, so I could see the instant I messed up and learn how to correct myself, which I successfully have. And now I’m pretty anal about – if I can do it, so can you! And once that was discovered, I was bumped again.
Hello Only Websites. More specifically Law Firm Sites cause that’s what I deal with mostly – lawyers. They’re a curious breed of people. I really enjoy working there, and am feeling appreciated for what I can do. Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming to be the ‘go-to’ guy every time a project goes south, but I keep delivering so it’s all good.
For a few years now I’ve claimed that web design makes me money, photography is a side job, and that hopefully one day I’d reverse that and have photography be my staple with web design a fun hobby on the side. Well, I don’t think that’s my goal anymore. It seems that all my bumps have taken me step by step into the world of web design, and it’s time that I up my professionalism. I turn 30 in a few months and it’s time to make my career move and establish some goals for the next part of my life. I’m positive I’ll keep bumping into where I need to end up, I just need to start looking forward instead of off to the sides at the pretty people.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not dropping photography. Quite the opposite actually. This summer is proving to be my busiest one yet and I’m really enjoying it. I’ll just keep going the way that I am. Web design is my career. So, I’m setting a few goals.
Career Goal – I’m on that path, keep working my way up the web design ladder until I”m making a solid living making specialty sites.
Cool Goal – Create a CSS design that gets picked and featured on CSS Zen Garden. Sadly, I don’t think designs get picked for that very often.
Field Goal (No, not football) – Become so enamored and understanding of code that I can have a blog that a few people might turn to for web design/coding advice. Get a little following if you will.
Awesome Goal – Figure something new out and get a featured article on A List Apart. I’m a little ways off from that, and by a little I mean a lot but hey, I have years ahead of me.
Goals are worthless unless written down, and it’s been said that once it appears online, it’s almost impossible to make it disappear. Google snaps everything and gets rid of nothing. So there… my goals are written down pretty permanently.
2 Responses to Increasing Professionalism – Jumping into a Career
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Hey, no offense, but you worked for NuSkin? Oh how I hate that company. Sorry you got axed, but I would consider it a blessing if I were you. When I worked at the Marriott, a–hole guests and NuSkin employees were one and the same. 9 out of 10 of the jerks I had to deal with at the hotel were NuSkin employees — in my experience the are the snottiest snobs! They had this respect-me-i’m rich-even-though-my-three-credit-cards-were-rejected-when-i-checked-in-because-they-are-all-maxed-out-i-work-for-nuskin-and-you-must-worship-me attitude.
Sounds like a plan. Baby screwed up my plan. Miles did it first though. Now I have to come up with a new plan.