Pimping and freedom of movement

Until fairly recently, I was certain I would never have another proper job again. I wanted to run my own business and nothing less. My business ventures until how have mostly been based around web sites and online marketing. I have had limited glimpses of success but nothing remotely looking like a pay check from any of these.

In March this year my savings began to run very low so I went to find a temporary job in Australia to make some more money. I ended up doing great and landed a pretty good job….. driving tractors. Yes, I put my degree to good use on that one. I’ll talk more about this in later posts, but I made a seriously good amount of money.

I came back to Asia and immediately realised in 6-12 months, depending how how good my budgeting was, I would have to do it all over again. This idea did not appeal to me.

As luck would have it, I stumbled on a freelance job site called oDesk. This cleverly designed site lets companies hire other people from all over the world very easily. I’d say 98% of the jobs were for under $4 per hour data entry type tasks. Obviously I wasn’t going to do this. Then, starting me in the face I saw what was essentially my old job back in the UK – Project Manager.

There was a number of roles for project managers for various types of businesses. What really stood out was these were small (and thus less bureaucracy), innovative companies that used the latest online tools to run their projects. I had a look at the type of people applying for these jobs and to be honest most of them didn’t seem all that awesome. It was time to pimp my profile!

Pimping your profile/cv/whatever is always necessary before you apply for jobs. It really does pay dividends if you take the time to make it as good as possible. One part allowed you to enter a lot of text which would appear right at the top of your profile, yet most people didn’t take advantage of this and only wrote a few sentences. I wrote a compelling “7 reasons you should hire me article” that demonstrated some of my skills, experience, knowledge and also my humour.

This last part might not win you too many favours when applying for the big serious corporations but any sort of web based company, advertising agency or Google type organisation will appreciate it. Furthermore, I’d say less than 1% of oDesk contractors are native English speakers. Showing that I have good communication skills through humour was a deliberate effort that would make me stand out against non-native English speakers.

I had an interview with the CEO of a US based web design firm. Five days later I was starting. My job is now to project manage the design, development and deployment of various web sites which the company is creating for clients. I get to manage a small team of contractors from all over the world, plus interact with clients. I’m absolutely loving this job so far, it doesn’t even feel like work. I love that I’ve been given a good deal of responsibility in both the project management sense and also the creative sense – which I love.

The best bit is that I can do this job from anywhere in the world, in any time zone. This presents great opportunities for geographic arbitrage. I get paid in US Dollars, but can live somewhere cheap so long as I have an internet connection. Basically, this job has something incredibly rare – total and complete freedom of movement.

The world truly is my oyster now. I have made it as a nomad so now the adventure can really begin. Onwards and upwards…..