I didn't waste any time gearing up for the forthcoming job search. It's not easy finding a new position at my level. I have to be aggressive. I'm a Senior IT Executive with 25 years' experience. During my career, I've literally done it all. I've been involved with entrepreneurial ventures and start-ups, owned a retail computer operation, consulted for 13 years, owned a custom software house that produced one commercial vertical product for the legal industry and worked my way forward in corporate management and leadership, starting as a technical manager and progressing through roles of increasing influence, responsibility, scope and stewardship. I don't know where I'm going to end up, but I am excited about the prospects. Maybe I'll take advantage of my time off to write a book!

This is a good time for personal reflection and when I look back over all of the industries I've had my hands in over the span of my career, I am sorely amazed. At Bayonne Computer Center, my retail store, we provided hardware, software, and services for accountants, doctors, lawyers, retail operations, construction companies and the military; and I mean the whole gamut of services, too. I provided software installation and setup, training, custom applications, hardware repairs and installation, and Tier I support. As a consultant I wrote custom applications for real-time currency trading, independent distributor vehicle insurance program management, engineering project accounting, asset management and tracking, compensation cycle management, legal recruiting, document management and issue tracking. These are the areas I can think of right now. I'm certain there are  a lot of other little projects I worked on that I'm just not recalling at the moment. When I wasn't busy coding, I was always busy teaching classes somewhere.

For the bulk of my corporate life, I supported Human Resources, payroll, compensation, and benefits, first with PeopleSoft, then later with Oracle HRMS. I rolled out employee and manager self-service applications three times, once with voice response features. At Pfizer pharmaceuticals, I became an enterprise architect serving on the corporate architecture council and an information security officer serving on the corporate information security council. These two roles broadened the scope of my experience substantially and allowed me to gain a high level of knowledge in supply chain, manufacturing, corporate IT governance, software validation, learning management and finance. Working for CARQUEST, I learned about distribution and wrote their System Development Life Cycle. Overall, this experience is diverse and global in nature. The applications I've been responsible for producing or supporting have been deployed to over 70 countries, in the Americas, EMEA, Far East, and Australia.

So what's next? I only wish I knew. All I know is that it's time for the job hunt again. I updated my resume and leadership framework. I built a simple spreadsheet for tracking the job hunt activities and expenses for tax purposes. I joined ExecuNet and attended my first ExecuNet Raleigh meeting in December. I'll be attending the largest job seeker networking group in the RTP area at Colonial Baptist Church in Cary, NC every Monday morning at 8:00am starting Jan. 4th. I'm building my network on Linkedin and currently have almost 900 direct contacts with over 1,000 outstanding invitations to go. I've joined a whole bunch of Linkedin groups that I believe are relative. So far, in the one week before the holidays began, I sent out 45 resumes, 41 emails, made 5 calls, had 2 face-to-face meetings, and applied for 7 jobs. The holidays of course, slow things down, but I'll be picking up in earnest next week. And oh yes, I've applied for unemployment.