A Returnship Story

Hey Lovelies, 

It has been a while since I blogged here. phew!! 

A lot of things have happened and still happening and I am now ready to commit to sharing here as I do on my social channels.

Here's a short story on my returning back to the workforce after taking out time for 4 years to raise my babies.

This time last year, I was determined to return to work after a 4 years break.

I had a 2-month-old baby boy at hand and was on the lookout for a skill to pick up and learn within the shortest time possible.

 A remote job will be a good fit at this time, so I decided to upskill in a field that will launch me into a career path where I can work remotely.

I can’t begin to tell you how it feels 9 months after. I’ve had the opportunity to work with different key individuals.

 These people have helped shaped and grow my knowledge in Growth/Digital Marketing. They deserve their flowers and I’m most grateful for the impact so far. This made me realise that you can truly set a goal and achieve it within the given timeframe and of course the right conditions. 

 In the coming days, I’ll be sharing how I did this and the importance of being diligent with small jobs to big jobs as this was what got me the right contacts who were willing to take me on without even an interview.

JOURNEY TO FREELANCING PART 1

My last post was about being confused about what you should be doing. I promised to share with you all on what my journey has been like. So let's get started

Today i'll share about my struggles on freelancing and learning new skills. I love correcting usability errors when using an application software or a website; I mean this comes naturally to me and i usually leave feed backs and ratings on google app store and reviews on websites to improve usability. So i thought hay! why not research and see if you can monetize this passion and improve on it.

I did my research and i found websites i can give opinions about a products usability by manually testing them or using them. some of the websites i signed up for all requested paypal account with which i can receive payments. I live in Nigeria and here paypal does not allow users to receive payments but you can send payments through it. This was my first blockage, as some websites do not even accept users from Nigeria while others do, but receiving payments after your job has been completed was another issue. I did find a way around that which i will discuss in a later post.

Learning the process of manual testing and checking for usability issues was not all bliss, I got distracted along the way and even more frustrated having signed up on many websites and applications itching to apply the new knowledge i had just gained,  yet i still couldn't get jobs to do online as i envisaged. I thought i wasn't good enough and maybe constrained by the country i came from as some jobs required people from certain regions to carry out the checks/test.

In between I had updated my LinkedIn profile to reflect this additional skills and while i wasn't getting enough job online, i started getting invited for interviews offline for a tester role.

I'll continue from here in my next blog post....

CONFUSED ABOUT WHAT YOU SHOULD BE DOING.

Today makes it exactly 9 months and 9 days i resigned from a job to move to another state just to be with my husband. I recently got married and this was something we had discussed. It didn't bother me much as i was already tired of the job.

I had made plans on what to do, skills to improve myself on and a business venture to do on the side while i await another job. This i thought would be a walk in the park, sadly that wasn't the case. I have experienced challenges, rejections after an interview, indiscipline to continue honing my skills, lazying around, emotional instability and a whole lot i'll love to share with you my readers on this incredible journey to finding out what i should be doing.

In the coming days i'll share a story about each challenge i faced and how i gave up, got distracted and tired.

This is not to enable laziness or indiscipline towards driving at ones goal, but just a story of my journey to let you understand that even the best of us sometimes never have this figured out.