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Frequently Asked Questions Do You Teach? Do You Teach?Although I have some teaching experience I prefer to mentor. Teachers have to stop doing these things to ensure that others can do them and frankly this job is too enjoyable to do that! By mentoring I not only get the enjoyment of doing this for a living, and the pleasure of helping others but I get to make my life easier by sharing my workload with a growing number of connections.
What Are Your Qualifications?Experience. When I originally left school computing was a niche industry, more useful for number crunching than for anything else. The only University Courses available were for scientific research and my skills were creative. As the nature of the computing market changed I followed it, getting involved in the early 16 bit computing scene and progressing to PCs and MACs as they became industry standards. As the industry changed so did the University Courses, but by that time I was actually earning more money by doing what they were teaching than I would have earned by giving up work to go and get the Qualifications (if you see what I mean). Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge believer in the quality of University Degrees in this country, not only in Design but in Usability as well and if an employer wants me to have a degree and is willing to pay for it I'm more than happy to take them up on it. Until then I'll learn as I always have, by actually doing the work.
Do You Work Contract or Permanent?Short answer is both. I've been working permanent for the last decade or so because it was easier and more lucrative to do so, but if the contracting rates are good and the role is right I'd certainly consider going back to contracting.
Where Won't You Work?There isn't an easy answer to that one. Clients appear all over the UK, indeed all over the world and I've travelled both to reach them, I'm happy to do so again for an employer just not myself. I am settled now so the answer is my employer/office needs to be somewhere I can commute to in less than two hours, so that's most of the Midlands and just about all of London, which isn't exactly a small area.
Why Don't You Code?I do, I can cut and throw around HTML and Javascript, I can work with Dreamweaver and have dabbled with Silverlight but there are people who do it so much better than me, so I let them. It simply isn't the way my mind is wired. I can communicate with them on level terms, expressing user needs in terms of function calls and laying out solutions that are based on real achievable coding practice but I'm a creative, I think in images and visual flows, that's my strength and I play it to it.
What Software Do You Use?Coming from a Design background of course I'm familiar with all the Adobe Creative Suite, but most of my time now is spent with Axure and Visio. Though I can use Expression and Omnigraffle I work faster and more productively with Axure, Visio and Creative Suite.
© Bob Powell |
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