Well this is new! Knowing from the get-go that my current position wasn’t going to last forever (nobody wants to clean powerpoints for a lifetime), and that there is no room for moving up, I have been contemplating labels, careers, paths, and suchlike, in an effort to figure out what it is that I might want to do in the future. Here is a list of things I do and what jobs they seem to be falling into. Maybe this will help me tune up my CV a little. Some introspection and rambling can go a long way. Makes me wish I had a huge whiteboard to doodle this on. As it stands, I think I may tabulate instead.
| What I do | Keywords | (made up) Job title |
|---|---|---|
| Talk to consultants, associate partners and partners about a bid they are putting together. This nearly always involves extensive powerpointing. I go through the deck with them, find the storyline, help them reconstruct the outline so it tells a story, and then clean up the deck aesthetically. | Bid coaching, storytelling | Bid coach |
| Take an artefact that is meant for publication or showing to a client, and redesign it from scratch so that it conforms to the IBM brand identity. This often means simplifying all diagrams, cutting out text, altering the colours being used, correcting fonts and occasionally terminology. | Branding technician | |
| When an event is coming up, and we have a strapline for it, I will be given the task of designing the branding and artefacts for it. From the logo, the scene, the powerpoint templates, to the printed handouts and souvenir take-aways. | Publishing, copywriting, design, layout, branding | Print and digital media designer, branding expert |
| Colleagues of all levels come to me to talk about their online presence. Where they need to be, how to interact on the various platforms, what their profile photos should be like, what their bio should say (or not say). I advise them on all that and teach them the ropes of twitter / linkedin and other social media sites. | Social media | Social media expert |
| When designing software product, there will be business requirements that have been gathered and are being pushed down by the product managers. My job is to turn those into functional requirements, and then create designs that will fulfil those requirements. First as feature lists, then as mockups of the possibilities, then as a semi-functional prototypes to ensure we have a good interaction flow going. | Interaction/interface design, user experience | UX architect, UI designer |
| I also build websites and wikis, which means I organise information online. I work with both the technical back-end, the visual front-end, and the information architecture aspect of things (deliver the information the user expects to see, where he expects it to be). Restructuring content is something I do frequently and well, for many deliverables. | Information architecture, web design | Information architect, web designer |