So, I’m looking for a job – each day I log in to several different job searching sites, and every week I go to each of the area post-secondary institutions and scour the job postings for appropriate things that might fit with where I’m at. I have about a decade’s worth of work in e-learning development, mostly in the training side of things, but even with that level of experience, I’m not getting a ton of bites without a degree. It’s thin all around and I think we’re seeing the beginning of the economic hurt that everyone else has felt the last few years in education right now. I can think of five or six other people who are laid off, or had their contracts dropped in the last seven or eight months.
So with things in the education sector looking soft, I’ve been looking at business based opportunities. Of course, lots of training goes on in business, and a lot of that training is going web-based, or has gone web-based already. It seems to me that there’s obviously a fit there, but the one thing that all the business e-learning jobs don’t seem to use the same technology as what the post-secondary institutions use. Why? Surely Blackboard would want those contracts? Why haven’t they moved into the training realm? Or maybe they are there and I just am not seeing it. And why wouldn’t businesses use Blackboard, Wimba and Elluminate (now Blackboard Connect)? Why are they using Cisco and WebEx? Is it because that those are the market that Cisco has gone after? Switching to a new system is never hard for me – it’s just a matter of getting the muscle memory to switch to new actions and learning some new terminology. I can’t wait to start on something new.