Or: How to learn new skills on your employer’s time

I never was one of those kids who knew what they wanted to be when they grew up. I still envy my friends who knew in elementary school that they wanted to teach, or be a doctor … me, I had no idea. I knew that I had little or no head for math & science, and I read like mad; but I had no idea what work I wanted to do. My parents never had the chance to go to college but it was taken as a given that I would, which suited me fine.

My first degree was great fun, but prepared me for … well, for very little really. I majored in American Studies, a combination of history and literature. It was the perfect choice for someone who loves to read, but has little patience for anything written before about 1850. The great thing about American literature is that there is none (or precious little) before then! Strangely, employers weren’t beating down my door to hire me with my shiny new BA in American Studies, so I decide to indulge a lifelong interest in theatre and go to graduate school.

I trained to be a theatre director, but life intruded on those plans. I spent the two years directly after graduate school running a community theatre in Omaha; however, that was the end of my theatrical career. Why? Oh, that’s a long story and maybe I’ll revisit it in a future post, but since then I’ve worked in various aspects of marketing and sales

In the early Nineties I moved to Minneapolis where I met my wife. I worked for a year or so at a Barnes and Noble, then sold advertising space for a small community newspaper. I didn’t enjoy it much, and wasn’t aggressive enough to make a success of it, so I started looking for a new direction.

Through some fortunate coincidences and a friend who took a chance on me, I was offered a job working for a “service bureau”. I’m not sure if service bureaus even exist any more; we bridged the gap between graphic designers and printers, creating camera-ready film and color separations. Nowadays that gap doesn’t really exist, since printers took some of it in-house and designers are able to do more of it themselves. But I was in the right place at the right time to learn some very intensive graphic design skills on someone else’s dime, and I quickly became quite a computer geek in the early days of desktop design.

I went on to manage publications for Public Radio International, helping to sell and distribute programs like Prairie Home Companion and Marketplace to the public radio system in the US, and then I went out on my own for three years as a graphic designer. It was great fun and very rewarding in many ways, but the ebbs and flows of a freelance income, coupled with needing health insurance coverage for our growing family, took me back into the job market.

Once again I was fortunate enough to learn new skills at someone else’s expense. I took a job at the local cable company when they started selling high-speed Internet access, and despite my lack of online experience became their web content manager. I learned to build sites with Dreamweaver; learned a little Flash animation; and wrote reams of content for a local portal for our customers. Since then I’ve worked solely in web-based design and marketing and I suspect my print design days are long behind me.

For the last two years I’ve managed a variety of clients’ PPC campaigns for a marketing company in NYC. It’s a very different form of marketing to anything I’ve done previously; like so much in Internet marketing the feedback is almost instantaneous. If I roll out a new ad creative for a high-volume campaign, I know within hours if it’s working or not. Compare that with the world of print design, where the success or failure of a direct-mail campaign may not be known for days or weeks.

As I’ve mentioned previously my next career move will, I hope, be back towards self-employment. One of the reasons for that is an enormous lifestyle change my family and I made three years ago, which will be the focus of my next post.