The past few weeks have shook South Africans from all walks of life, businesses, employees and freelancers. As a South African I have remained committed to my duty of staying at home and doing my due diligence. However it has not been all that easy.
If you follow my blog or podcast you may know that I recently resigned form a senior UX designer role in a well known consultancy. This has not been easy for me but has been a years work of pondering and considering the action. I finally did it, took a month Sabbatical the whole of March to plan my next moves and when i was ready to start executing my great plan, the coronavirus hit the world with a bang.
The challenges of living in a 3rd world country became very evident and real. Again if you follow me you may have noticed I launched a web-class series that i could not execute because of the poor internet connection, i since had to order a new line and hopefully i can continue with the series. Other than the internet sucking, new local client prospects immediately turned cold and all of my speaking gigs canceled.
This feels like it was the worst time to leave my stable job and a secure income. It feels like its a punishment for finally leaving the corporate world.
"Not a UX Designer"
Not a UX Designer is a podcast about building better products and the people that make it happen. I speak about the UX Career landscape in South Africa, Design Sprints and other product design stuff. I host some of the industries leading experts making real impact in the world with design.
As crazy as it has been and as much as things seem hard to comprehend right now, I see a very positive side to this whole chaos. I think this period is going to change the way we work and collaborate in the future, it is going to continue after the pandemic.
Working remotely globally is one of the reasons I left my normal 9-5 job and got into more of a freelance consulting role, working gig by gig and managing how much I make. I think now more than ever the world is more open to remote collaboration and working with global talent.
This is an opportunity for designers alike to take their careers to the next level and become part of the global economy. Unlocking global talent is going to be the biggest impact that we will walk away with from this pandemic if we survive it.
I have picked myself up and got things going again. I was distracted from all the overwhelming things that were happening around and the changes within our country. I am working on realizing more content and running the remote work web-class for designers over the next few weeks. I am excited and looking forward to taking my career to the next level.
Taking next steps, moving forward swiftly.
The world is changing, always has and always will, Over the next weeks, months I will be rolling out a new wave of content, podcasts, web-classes and will be trying out design streaming on YouTube, yea design streaming like game streaming but for design. I have some exciting events planned for Q2 and Q3 and hopefully most of them will happen online.
