Something I have neglected to mention here is that back in late August 2023, I was laid off from my job. It had absolutely nothing to do with me. I got the axe with 5,000 other folks as part of a very indiscriminate “reduction in force” lay off. Unfortunately, while the United States has been enjoying record low unemployment, tech workers in general… and program managers in the tech industry in particular… are now a dime a dozen. Back in the day, I could easily find a job and the longest I had gone without working was a month… and that was after my twin girls were born and I was not looking all that hard.
But this time is different, and I have been without a job for ten months now, and I have been looking for work harder and longer than ever before… and yet I am still jobless. The good news is that I feel like there is a thaw and that it will soon be easier to find a job in my chosen career field. In addition, I spent the last two months studying for my Project Manager Professional (PMP) certification and I took the exam on Friday and passed… so that should help.
However, all of that is a bit of a digression from what I normally talk about here… until now. The past ten months have been difficult on a number of levels and I have learned quite a bit. I have also had a lot of time to think… to tweak and experiment… and to talk to others. Even my wife has changed her stance on a lot of things… including her absolute insistence that I get a job at a big company with benefits. All of that eventually led to me deciding to strike out on my own with my own consultancy gig, but I will integrate that with a new YouTube channel where I will employ what I have learned with the Worldbuilder to grow my consultancy business along with the channel itself. Even if I find a new job, I can still work on this… and my ideas for content for the new channel just might be good enough to make this work very well. Of course, this effort will be different from Worldbuilder… in that I am specifically doing this to make money.
So it should be interesting to see how it all turns out. However, it should not impact Worldbuilder too much as all this time and effort is coming out of what I am currently using to find a job… which itself was based on what I normally would spend at a job. However, if this does work like I hope it will, it will give me a new level of flexibility that I have not had before and that may lead to some positive changes with the Worldbuilder effort.
Either way, I am actually excited about the changes. Stay tuned to see how it all shakes out.