Life after full time IT work

Its been a long time since my last blog posting and my life has changed so much since then.

My full time work , that I did enjoy so much has come to an end. After a lot of heart wrenching discussions with family and friends I decided to take voluntary redundancy from my full time job in June 2013. My job was with the local council looking after a team of IT developers and support people. I have been in IT since my twenties (over 30 years ! Yipes) and thought I was there to stay well in to my sixties but life is about living ! and its about time I had a change and leave all the new emerging technology to the youngsters.

4 and a half months later and I'm still trying to decide what to do for the rest of my life.

Do I try and find another full time job in IT? My professionally written CV is out there , I have job agencies contact me with jobs they think I'm suitable for and I have applied for a few jobs. Am I bothered that I don't get interviews? I think the longer I'm out of  a job , the more I don't want to go through an interview process and the more I'm scared of the 1st days at work , getting to meet new people , being tested on my IT skills (which will be diminishing as technology changes , month on month). 

 Do I try and make a living out of selling my hand knitted items. Well we all know that's impossible! If you calculate the amount of time it takes me to hand knit an item x even just the minimum wage then I would be pricing my hand knitted items right out of the market. So even though I love knitting and love selling on-line and the on-line community , hand knitting will always stay as a hobby. Saying that, have you seen my new "mug hugs" , little fair isle wool mug cosies using some techniques I picked up at a Rowan workshop. These are adorable , brilliant gift ideas for Christmas presents. I would really like these to take off , I have some really cool ideas for designs for the whole year , for kids and adults alike.

Within the 1st month of being at home , I developed 2 little web sites , one to celebrate TheFeminineTouch , linking to my Etsy shop. Here I try and give potential customers some background information on my designs , what I have been working on recently and how to buy from me. The other one - UniquelyUK, is one that really excites me is one I developed in collaboration with a team of UK artisans from the Etsy community.  here I used my team leader abilities to bring a team from all over the UK virtually together to develop an on-line presence. I am finding that each individual in the team has unique skills to bring to the table. For example, one young lady is brilliant at manipulating photographs into montages to use on the web site and another is a lovely poet and we have used her skills in bringing together an introduction poem (more of that in another blog posting).

So how do I incorporate my knowledge and skills in IT, my team leader abilities and my knowledge of on-line selling and crafting to make a living for myself? Read my next blog postings to follow me in my journey.........