Job Shopping

It's time for the great Job Shop of 2010/2011 to begin! Don't get me wrong, I love both of my positions greatly. I just started with one this past summer, and it's a lot of fun and incredibly easy! I do work with a small team though, and even for the holidays, the workload is small as well. I get my greatest number of hours on the weekends.

And my other position, LW, I love doing what I do.Okay, I don't love the QA part. Ick. I do love managing the team though. We are starting to hit the dry time however, and it's starting to look more and more as though LW and I have two seperate directions in mind. I want to go one way, and they want to go another.

When I look back over the past year and a half, it amazes me what I had accomplished. I started as just a expert. Some guy had a huge spreadsheet of queries that needed to be answered, and I had some time on my hands so got to it. Others were on the forums and such and had no clue what they were doing, so I decided to try to help out a bit.

It's been a wild ride, that's for sure! I've managed projects for Ask.com, Dictionary.com, Ebay, Shopping.com, as well as a few others sprinkled here and there. I got a real feel for what I was doing, and I liked it!

And team management online is nothing like in the real brick and mortar world! In the B&M world, you show up for work, punch your time clock, and just get to it. You take your breaks and at the end of the day, you go home. Your motivation to be there is simple: if you aren't, you're fired. If you don't do your job, you're fired.

Online though, it's a lot different. People don't seem to care if they are fired or not. It's just another egg gone by. One person stated she had over 12 jobs over the past year alone! So people don't really care about having a nice, clean resume or showing work longevity. Many don't see the online world in the same way as they see the offline world. (That hurts our industry a lot actually.) What motivates these people is the fostering of personal connections.

In my jobhunt, I hope to find a place where I can apply all that I have learned over the past year and a half, to help manage a company's workforce into continued success. I want to grow a team, while maximimizing company profits. The company that I choose should have adequate pay for their staff, as well as fair treatment. If the company pays them decently, and has fair rules to follow, the workforce will put the work out quickly and efficiently.

And no, I'm not looking to leave LW just yet. I am looking to spread my wings a bit and see what else is out there.

Good luck and happy holidays to everybody! The past year has been a wild ride, and I thank all of you. :)

Dana