When I was last looking for a new job (autumn 2019), the job market for instructional designers, e-learning designers, learning experience designers and similar depended heavily on your physical location. No matter that various global technology companies had provided us with email and the tools necessary to work remotely – the recruiters wanted you there, on the ground, face-to-face.

Having been laid off in May 2021 due to poor sales and the subsequent need to economise, I waded back into the job market, prepared for the worst, only to find it had been revolutionised. Those jobs that had previously had a physical location were now nearly all permanently remote due to the Covid pandemic and the shift to home-working. In addition, the number of jobs had exploded. I applied to 30 companies directly within the first week or two and had more interviews than ever before, all remote. More applications and interviews followed as the month went on. Recruitment agencies, who had previously been lacklustre in their efforts, fell over themselves to contact me and then put me forward. As the workforce stayed at home, learning moved online and my skills were in demand.

Happily I was snapped up by a company and I was able to start my new role quickly… much to my wife’s dismay/rejoicing, I never did get to do the gardening or DIY that I’d lined up.

2019 certainly brought a raft of changes and challenges to not just me but everyone. While the world watched in horror as Covid-19 spread like wildfire, my own little world changed when my wife and I welcomed our firstborn in November 2019. A new person, full of potential to learn, to absorb new skills and words at the rate of a dry sponge in a bucket full of water. In December 2019, I moved to a new company and had to learn at the same rate!

My now not-quite-so-new company was founded and is still run by engineers with PhDs in physics and maths, for whom the most fiendish maths calculation (as I see it) is a piece of cake and who probably actually enjoy calculus. It’s my role to translate their knowledge into something the rest of us can easily understand and to do so in bite-sized videos. The world is battling a virulent virus and I’m fighting to understand geolocation and radio frequency monitoring. Our son, meanwhile, is sitting, crawling, and showing a wonderful interest in books.