I’m changing jobs. What can I tell you?
After ten years working for the Canadian Union of Public Employees national office as their web wierdo (Senior Officer, New Media) I am moving on. October 23 will be my last day. Then, on November 2nd, I’ll be starting at the Public Service Alliance of Canada national office as their web wierdo (Communications officer, New Media).
They’re both public sector unions, but they’re not rivals. CUPE represents predominantly municipal, hospital and school board workers, whereas the PSAC represents predominantly federal government workers.
My current employer has just sent me “warmest well-wishes and don’t forget to sort the details out with HR on the way out” kind of messages. So that’s good. Legend has it union cans be a bit touchy about employees going from one union to another.
The new job will be pretty challenging. The PSAC’s website hasn’t been substantially revised since 2002. And I have to imagine redesigning it won’t be easy. After all, if it was, they would have done it by now. However there’s a desire to make progress and improve how the union uses ICT, so there’s some support for change.
On the other hand, I’m leaving a website that’s already in fairly good shape. Standards-based design, semantic markup, search-engine optimized, database driven yadda yadda.
On the other other hand, I really like the idea of starting from scratch because sometimes that’s easier than improving existing things. You know, “Whaddya mean we need a new store? I thought we had one.” That sort of thing.
There’s a lot of people I’m really going to miss at my old employer. I’m really hoping they won’t be strangers once I’m gone and that my friends don’t take my leaving personally. I know it’s not something a lot of people do, but it really was best for all concerned.
December 4th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
awesome that you found a new challenge Chris. I’m happy for you!