It's all about me! (Part 5)

back to part 4

Unemployment, a time to re-evaluate oneself and a time to do financial damage control. Would it last 2 weeks or 2 years?

I’ve been told that I plan obsessively and I believe my need to plan is genetic.  So I needed to map out a plan for several scenarios even if most of them were not realistic. My need to plan is coupled with my drive not to fail and being prepared for almost anything.  After a little time to except the situation, it was time to get to work and turn this ordeal into a challenge. I was an active member of the Society for Technical Communication and I had a nice stack of their monthly magazines.  The April 2003 feature article would help me make an amazing discovery. “Information Architecture -You Do It, You Just Don’t Know It”, as I read this article, I realized that I actually had done many of the tasks associated with Information Architecture and these tasks were the most intriguing parts of my work. Of course, marketing myself as an Information Architect would still take some time, because I needed to refine my experience and complete my degree. At least now I had a goal. I wanted to be an Information Architect.

With a little help from my friends, actually a relative, I landed a freelance position at Palm Beach Tan. I was able package all of my experience at Nokia and convince them that I could develop an operations manual from scratch, something that I had never come close to doing in the past. This was a great challenge for me, because it required all my skills from user and task analysis to project management. Of course, it didn’t hurt to supplement any shortcomings of experience by bidding the job lower than anyone else could and I still doubled the salary I was making at Nokia. To say this was a great experience that further solidified my expertise as a documentation specialist is an understatement. I hadn’t forgotten about being an Information Architect, but I still needed to work, and the Palm Beach Tan gig was a great opportunity. I actually continued to research Information Architecture and discovered an interesting company call imc², mostly because they actually recognized the Information Architect position in 2003 and they focused on developing websites. It just sounded like a fun place to work, so even though I did not have my degree and loosely fit the job requirements, I decided to massage my resume and send it over. *Crickets*

In part 6, I mark the completion of something that I started 24 years earlier.