I’m starting a new category here, it’s called Career. So, instead of having all of my related jobs and career rambling falls into Personal, I now can start rambling about my job. Usually, I don’t really like to criticize thing too much because I really like to be a positive thinking person. Of course once in a while, it doesn’t hurt to be critical to relief those steam before it explodes.

When I first came to the company, there was no place for me to sit. I had to share my workplace with someone else until some of the practical students finished their working period and some of the other workers moved to the site office. I then acquired a temporary workplace which was right under the air-conditioner and it was freezing cold.

My Temporary Workplace

But strangely, the air conditioning got warmer and suddenly, one of the two main air conditioner on the second floor where I was located broke down. I’m used to be located in such odd office places so it doesn’t really matter to me that much. There was one time when I was doing tele-marketing, the office had no chair and I had to use a drawer as a chair with a small table desk for the telephone. It was hot and there was dust everywhere. The construction workers were knocking down the wall, it was horrible. Anyway, I survived as always.

Last week, my company had an organization restructuring. No one was laid off but there were a few people who resigned. I was relocated to the business development group and there are 2 fresh graduates assigned with the group. Being a senior person, I now have to guide them through the learning curves of the business development process which is tough considering I used to be the jack of all trade last time. So, new job position, new responsibilities and best of all, new working spot:

My Latest Workplace

Well, the air conditioning is not installed yet since I’m now in a new building right next to the old one. It’s warm and sweaty. At least I now have a permanent workplace.

I got a phone call this morning from Jenjobs.com and surprisingly, they’re looking for a candidate for a job opportunity and for some reason, I am on their list. If only they had just called me up a couple of months back, I would have probably tried my luck on that job opportunity. So, you want to know what the job opportunity is, here you go:

Blog / Forum Monitoring and Outreach Agent
(Selangor - Petaling Jaya)

Responsibilities:

The outreach agent will be responsible to actively scan the web for customer or industry blogs and forums mentioning Lenovo products and experiences with them, utilizing combinations of generally available, and subscription based tools

• Monitor activity on several leading third party forums, evaluating volume, content, and sentiment of posted threads related to Lenovo products and services.
• Log findings and activities to facilitate weekly and monthly reporting.
• Provide positive / negative sentiment ratings for each logged post / thread.
• Provide statistics.
• Following prescribed protocols, selectively respond to blogs, providing offers of assistance, with follow up to resolution via email with the blog owner.
• Solicit and co-ordinate action plans to resolve through Lenovo sales, fulfillment, service, support, and customer relation teams as appropriate.
• Assist and support posters on Lenovoblogs and lenovoforums when appropriate and required.

Requirements:
Strong written and spoken English skills are required, and secondary language skills in Chinese or Japanese are a strong benefit. Language skills in Spanish, German, or French would be considered valuable as well.

The candidate is familiar with blogging and may have their own personal blog, and / or is an active participant in an online forum (not necessarily computer related). The ideal candidate is already an active member in one or more forum communities or other social media, i.e. Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, a Wiki, etc.

I can hear the Jenjobs call lady tone of disappointment when I said that I am now not looking for any jobs at the moment since I had just been hired early this month. I guess, her commission just ran away but she e-mailed the details about the job to me anyway and asked me to let my blogging friends about this opportunity. Come to think about it, I don’t really have any close blogging friend that I hang out with, well I guess this blog post will do right?

Some facts about Lenovo, the company that is offering the job opportunity. They are the fourth largest personal computer manufacturer in the world. Incorporated in Hong Kong, Lenovo produces desktop, laptop, server, handheld computers , imaging equipment and mobile phones. Basically, they bought over part of IBM and thus the Lenovo product lines is created.

So, let me just analyzed and anticipate the job that you’ll have to do if let’s say you agreed to accept the job (if you pass the interview of course). The first thing is, you don’t really have to use any paper certificate which means, there are no paper-qualification involved. That’s a good thing right? However, you need to have a good command of English verbally and writings because you’ll need to present your reports to the team. If you have poor communication skills and all you are good at is e-mail, I don’t think you’ll cut out for this job. The second thing is, you’ll definitely be spending countless of hours scouring the web on blogs and forum and find out how the market is. As a blogger, I know blogger does a damn good job in doing research on the web. Normally they are twice the speed of average people when they lay their fingers on the keyboard. It might be fun at first but trust me, you’ll be burned out in a while. Well, that’s just my opinion and how I feel but if you feel you are up for the job, it doesn’t hurt to try. If you get lucky, you might even get a brand new Lenovo laptop for your job blogging needs..I think..hehe..

I did a quick search on Jobstreet, the position Blog / Forum Monitoring and Outreach Agent was advertised last month or contact me if you want to speak with the Jenjobs.com agent that called me.

I would have never thought this year I would change my job so quickly. I’ve never been comfortable working for a short period of time and making a move to change. Eventhough the pay is little, normally I would hang out a little while before I even consider making a move to change job. However, in one of my previous post an opportunity came by and I had to grab it before it is too late. Then again, all of my previous company that I’ve work with are all small start-up micro company with less than 10 employees.

3 months ago, I met the Managing Director of a company that hired my brother at Enterprise Asia Business Networking 2007 event. After he met me, he was quite interested to get me to join their team. I was a bit hesitant but after some negotiation and looking what they have to offer, I finally decided to let go of my Open Source Web Administrator job (primarily a Wordpress modifier) and take up the position of Facilities Management Specialist under the new company. It was a tough decision because I had to let go of the convenience of my 10 minutes drive to work with travel allowance with those fancy dual monitors and trade it with a 50 minutes drive (including hustling the traffic) since my new company is located nearly 50km away from my home.

Nevertheless, I find my new job more exciting and gives me a more broad view of the world. Here’s why:

1. Today, I got the chance to join a product presentation to a local university. It’s good to be back meeting people and communicate with them. They even give free breakfast after the meeting and it was delicious.
2. The company has more than 25 personnel, kind of a medium sized company. I even have my own web designer/developer under my belt. Now, there is no need for me to get my hand dirty with web programming language. However, I do have to train the person about Content Management System (CMS), PHP and CSS because she has no clue about it.
3. My job is more towards marketing so I don’t really have to dig into the technical part and do it myself. I have people that can do the job for me while I just have to focus on research and prepare a presentation for the management.
4. I get more PAY!

Some of you might find that having to attend meetings and discussion is a kind of boring. Well, it is if you are not the one participating. I had to attend a meeting after office hour yesterday because of today’s presentation. I don’t really favour meeting myself but it sure is better than having to bang your head on a piece of code that wouldn’t work after so many hours of tweaking it. I think the web designer that I’m mentoring is so lucky to have me because I’ve done all the crazy work of creating a website using CMS and now she can learned that in less time than I did on my own. Then again, it’s all about leveraging your effort and most likely, you’ll earn on what you deserve. If not, then you need to seek out other opportunities out there.

Recently, Zul from SkorCareer.com wrote an article on 5 Reasons Why You Need To Find Another Job. I think employers will have a difficult time retaining them if their employee read and take into considerations all the points on the article. I’ll summarize the points down below:

1. You may own the profession but you don’t own the company.
2. To find the life time opportunity, you need to look, and not wait for it.
3. Expand your network
4. Make more money
5. Learn to give back to community

I find that all the points above is relevant and it should be practive whenever you get the chance. This year has been a very busy year for me. Earlier this year, I landed on a new job. I wrote a couple of blog posts during the journey at that time:

• Alternative Job Hunting
• Going Through Job Interviews
• I Got So Nervous
• Trying My Luck Getting A Job As A Webmaster
• My Job Hunting Is Over
• Farewell Old Job - Hello New Job
• My New Workplace

This month will be my 6th months on my new job and something had came up. One of the most difficult thing to do is to make decisions. In order to make that decision, questions need to be answered. It is tough but it needs to be done eventually. I guess something new will happen and I look forward to it when it finally comes and definitely will.