Evolving skills
The sun has begun to set on my time as a public sector B2B editor. I am peering into the dark abyss of unemployment. There’s a lot of ‘restructuring’ going on where I work. Restructuring in this context means paying management consultants a lot of money to advise who to make redundant. But I am undaunted. I shall find a way of editing text – no one can stop me.
I’d rather go back to being freelance anyway – you meet more people and have less to do with them. This means you don’t get to know them so well and, as a result, find them easier to tolerate.
But this time – at the height of recession – I’ll have to compete for a dwindling supply of work. So I’ve been looking into how I can make myself appear more attractive to potential clients.
‘Imagine, Create, Connect, Evolve, Inspire’ – even with the pointless capitals, these are the sort of words one needs to hear in a recession. All of them have something of the wondrous about them, except for ‘evolve’, but that’s buried in the middle, so it could almost go unnoticed.
This is the strapline for the Media Centre. Okay it’s media, you know, ‘creatives’ and the rest. But what can they possibly mean by ‘evolve’? Are they suggesting that potential clients haven’t evolved? That you’re pretty much ape-like until you sign up for a lemon package?
The Media Centre offers a “front desk virtual office service” – in other words, answering the phone and letting you use the address so you can pretend you’re a big company when you’re only a scruffy freelance.
That explains why it’s called a ‘centre’ but I still don’t get the ‘media’ bit. Unless, I suppose, you think of the word ‘media’ in its original sense of ‘communications’, rather than a bunch of shallow bitches working for the Daily Mail, the ruthless thugs at the Sun, those smug successful people on Radio 4’s Today programme etc.
The Media Centre is obviously run by ‘creatives’ because the ‘packages’ on offer are lemon, amber, vermillion, terracotta and chocolate. Not boring gold or silver or anything like that. I might write to Boris Johnson and suggest we adopt a similar pecking order for the Olympics.
Or may be not.
I have also been advised to think about “evolving” my skills, or as some call it – “up-skilling”, “re-skilling” and “cross-skilling”.
Of course, regular readers will know that I have tried this sort of thing before. That there have been times when I’ve questioned the very reason why I subedit, and even considered marketing and project management as alternative ‘career paths’. But no matter what ‘skilling’, it won’t work for me.
And since when did ‘skill’ become a verb anyway? It’s not in my OED. But then my OED’s old – the tenth edition from 2002 – and probably redundant. No wonder it doesn’t have a definition for ‘skillset’ either.
