The Construct

One career drawback of working from home is that it takes its toll on the social aspect of one’s life and career. As for career advancement, who knows when the recession will end or, God forbid, another dotcom bubble bursts? Not that I’m saying that working online is a dead-end path (since there are huge opportunities that can be had) but it can cause one to get really comfortable or stagnate. That, I don’t want to happen.

The past week and at least the coming have been and will be quite the busy weeks for me. I figured that aside from concentrating solely on my money-making efforts (which are mostly writing jobs), I should also start re-establishing a public face.

My work with the university is quite limited since I’m basically just in when I have classes but otherwise, I’m working elsewhere (at home, actually) and it’s difficult to make an impact when you’re not there. I have had quite the experience in in my former industry (education technology) both in the development side and the business side. If I can only find an opportunity to to converge the two so that I’d be able to weasel my way into two fields with a single effort.

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I might have been brash to attack my own (dying) degree but reality does affirm that English Studies (BAES, UP Diliman) has zero profitability. Survey the graduates of our batch and not one (aside from those who are teaching) has found a field to which the core concepts of the program can be applied. Most have graduated with law degrees, some are in call centers, and others in random corporate work.

This year, a number of our majors have graduated and face the real world. Interesting to find out what careers they will pursue. I wouldn’t be surprised at the diversity of choices.

Over the years, I’ve seen fellow alums struggle to find jobs and careers to which the learning in the program can be directly applied. This greatly limits the number of choices that would fit the applicability and profitability criteria. Compare the jobs to which our graduates have access and most of them offer wages in the lower salary ranges. A fresh graduate of our program is lucky to even get half of a fresh graduate with a different degree (like an engineering or a business degree) is offered.

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Author’s Note: Rant alert. This piece was written with rage. Read on at your own risk.

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It’s quite scary when you hear about the thousands of lost jobs these days. It makes you think about the stability of any job position in whichever industry. I have previously posed a question of whether the the economic crunch will have IT freelancers turning their sights inward to the local markets or not. However, even the local market doesn’t seem to be as stable as well.

Friends immersed in the local job market have already received memos and announcements regarding frozen hiring policies and austerity measures. Those, definitely, are concrete signs that money, in general, will be scarce this year. Imagine going to work the next morning and the first thing you see is a termination memo. Oh boy. That’d suck.

While the web content industry’s looking a bit resilient, no one can tell for certain if the stability of web work will hold. There are a lot of bloggers and other IT freelancers who rely on outsourced work that come from the States but if this trend continues, I have to admit that I am really concerned at how ugly things might get. I just couldn’t help but wonder if we can still rely on the same stability and resilience web-based media as a revenue source will be in 2009.

On a personal positive note, I’m very happy that Bloggy seems to be holding up pretty well. My boss said that he’d do whatever needs to be done to keep us afloat and there’s no reason for me not to do the same.
If your revenue stream’s your lifeline, then there’s no reason for one not to fight tooth and nail for it, right?

It seems like I haven’t really detached myself from my idealistic roots. Four sleepless months and 160 pages of social commentary and critical discourse analysis does that to you.

I’ll be speaking to young kids tomorrow about the learning resources on the Web and how to maximize them. I’m still thinking of what kind of message can I give to kids. I just don’t want to lecture. I want to reach out. Sure, I could sound preachy. But that has been a sort of disgruntled dream I have – build my own ministry. Haha.

Browsing from one blog to another, I chanced upon this post on growth and a career abroad. (Funny how I jumped from Angelo‘s to Yuga‘s to Mae‘s blog).

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