Has anyone seen my career? I left it around here somewhere...

Since my decision to start looking for work, I have already had one confirmed job offer with a corporate travel company that many of you may have heard of. The start date is on Monday. I know... MONDAY! What's strange is it's as if they don't have their shit together because no one returns my calls about what time I'm suppose to be there...8am? 9am? Full moon of the summer solstice?  You would think they would want me to know what time I need to have my butt in their office, right? Oh, well. I guess I have a couple of more days before I really start wondering WTF. Anyway, the position is for an international travel counselor for corporate clients. It's a couple years of a step back in my professional career in my opinion, but the experience will be priceless. This company teaches and certifies all their agents in a particular system that is widely used in the travel industry. A system I never learned because all my travel-related jobs had their own internal systems. Learning this system was something I was going to pay about $300-400 out-of-pocket to learn to have more experience for my upcoming business idea. Taking this job makes it nicer to be paid to learn it rather than paying my own money to learn it. Plus, I will actually have experience applying it to real travel itineraries by working for this company.  So I think it's a win-win situation.

However, I got a call last Friday to come in for an interview at a management consulting firm for a Manager position they have available. I went yesterday morning. Their main focus is to financially optimize companies - study their day-to-day operations, review employees' roles and responsibilities, audit all invoices and expenditures per month, etc. then develop a plan to reduce operational and fixed costs in the short- and long-term. I've determined that they are kind of like "The Bobs" on the movie Office Space...haha.

The present economic dismay has this business booming. Of course, companies like this have always had a use but now people are looking for even more ways to save money on their business operations or run the risk of going bankrupt. I actually used a company similar to them that specialized in getting call centers into Best Practices operationally. I hired a consultant for what I considered a low fee of less than $3K to help me professionalize and make my call center more efficient. All in all, the consulting company's over 20 years of expertise in call center industry management helped me establish better roles and responsibilities for staff members, how to schedule agents more effectively, how to organize paid-time-off requests, and how to develop reporting to monitor activity and success ratios. In whole, the consulting company probably saved us several thousand per month just by getting us the right tools to do our jobs that we didn't even realize we could use or that we already had but were not using to their full potential.

The position with the consulting firm sounds interesting and the pay is comparable if not better than my former job.  When I told Husband about the salary, his eyes lit up.  Actually, I think he zoned out to a daydream sequence of him fishing on the brand new Century 2600 WalkAround boat he's been eyeing for the last two weeks.  The only reason he hasn't pulled the trigger is that he's been worried that if he did purchase the boat, we would have to eat hot dogs and ramen noodles for the rest of the year if I continued to be unemployed (and not the delicious kind of ramen noodles that Weenie gets to eat in Japan).  Needless to say, my interest is piqued with this company.  Even though it is not in the travel industry, I can definitely learn from their company on how to run any future business that I have to its full financial potential.  So there is still some career benefit for me.  I have a second interview tomorrow.  I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime...

Happy Hump Day!  I hope the rest of your week is splendid :)