Category: employment

As I recently posted, for many years I’ve been working on bringing New World University into fruition. It’s been the public focus of my professional identity, but it’s not all I’ve been doing. It’s time I finally revealed my secret life… in training and development.

Since 2013 my day job has been directing e-learning for the training team at Cogent Communications, a tier 1 Internet service provider. I’ve never put my job at Cogent on my LinkedIn profile, or otherwise talked about it other than to very close friends, because I was concerned that it would be more difficult to be taken seriously as head of a higher education project if it were understood that I also have a day job doing something else.

Lately, however, I’ve since been having conversations with my friend Rich Douglas, a longtime higher education and training and development expert who now serves as Executive Director of Bellevue University’s Human Capital Lab. Talking to Rich and others who are participating with HCL has made me realize how much I’ve learned from being in corporate training that differs and complements a lot of conventional wisdom in higher education, to the point where it’s informed the way I approach higher education.

In fact, it’s part of the reason why my partners and I have split our project into two parts: Success Learning Center to offer business and other professional training, and New World University to offer a means to wrap up that training into a set of academic credentials. Put simply, academic and vocational education can work in concert.

That means that listing my time at Cogent is an important part of my story, even as it relates to making higher education more accessible to students in lower income countries. And in listing it after all this time, I felt that I should probably explain why.

So, as Paul Harvey might say, “And now you know… the rest of the story.”

“At least for now, I’m going to continue to do the commuting thing, … It’s just become part of my life. Sometimes coming home I think, ‘What am I doing? I’m completely insane.’” — Scott Harris

I’ve started at VIU, and so far so good. I’m getting enough to do to keep me on my toes here, but I can see value in what has to be done.

But this post isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey. Specifically, it’s about commuting. As soon as I realized I was looking for work I wouldn’t be doing from home, we realized that we had one car too few. When I worked outside the house before, Adella either was at home or was working close enough that we could carpool. But now she has a far ranging Zumba schedule, and I work too far away for her to be able to drop me off and pick me back up.

I hadn’t really wanted to devote resources to a second car, but there was no choice, and as the saying goes, when life give you lemons, make a whiskey sour. So I decided as long as I was going to get something anyway, it might as well be something fun, like, say, the Mazda Miata I’ve always wanted. Our budget on this was nowhere near that for a new one, or even a middle aged one, but fortunately they’re well made and they’ve been in production since the ’80s, so find one old enough that even I could sort of afford it was possible. I only had to go back to model year 1996 to accomplish this. Yeah, the car is older than my fourteen year old.

But like I said, I’ve wanted one of these for a long time. When I myself was sixteen or so, I went to the local Mazda dealership and asked whether I could test drive one. They let me, and it was awesome. Some of you might be wondering what sort of crack smoking car dealer would let a sixteen year old kid test drive a new car, but I grew up in an affluent area where some parents bought their kids new cars for their birthdays or graduation, so the dealer wasn’t as crazy as he might seem.

Anyway, it really is a fun little car. My mechanic looked it over and said it looks sound, so hopefully it will let me recover from the impact of having had to buy it before it gives me any repair bills.

The other thing is that I’d forgotten how cripplingly insane Northern Virginia rush hour traffic is. I’m “lucky” in that I commute the other way from most drivers, outbound in the morning and inbound in the afternoon, but even at that it’s been bumper-to-bumper both days so far on the Beltway. I’ve decided to give up on it and take local roads all the way. It’s twelve miles from my house to VIU, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but traffic lights have always adored me, turning red on my approach to be able to spend as much time with me as possible. Both days it’s taken forty-five minutes to get to work.

But hey, everyone else does it, right?

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” — Seneca

This is a pretty exciting follow up to my most recent post. On May 12th I start at Virginia International University as Academic Operations Manager. I’ll be reporting to Dr. Goran Trajkovski, the Dean of the School of Computer Information Systems and the School of Online Education. I understand I’ll be doing a bit of everything, but it’s largely a student facing position, which will be refreshing after a number of years dealing mostly with faculty members and then clients. Even though it’s been rewarding to teach the students I’ve had in my online courses, that’s not the same as getting to know them in person.

I’m interested in VIU for a few reasons. One, as I mentioned, is that the position lets me work with students. But not only that, VIU’s population is 97% international students, and as someone with a long running interest in international higher education, that’s especially interesting to me. The school is also fairly new, having been founded in 1998, started operations in 2000, and becoming accredited in 2008. That newness means that there’s room for diligent, capable people to gain more responsibility than they would at an institution that has been around for decades, and indeed this is something that was suggested to me by a number of people throughout the interview process. I also appreciate that VIU’s goal is to differentiate itself from alternatives by offering a superior service experience to students. In particular, the chance to help build up their online programs should be a blast!

So that’s it in a nutshell. Conventional employment will be an adjustment after nearly two years of working from home, but I’m ready for it.

“Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.”

So I’ve had a major bit of news this past week. For nearly two years, my two main contracts have been to design and teach courses for LCO Ojibwe Community College, and to write articles and other content pieces for Education Dynamics. The latter has taken up the vast majority of my time since then, and provided a more or less full time income. Unfortunately, however, Education Dynamics has been wrestling with changing market realities lately, and my contract has been reduced pretty dramatically as a result.

On the one hand, I’m fortunate in the sense that I still have them as a client, even if it’s just a few hours worth of work per week. But what’s left isn’t enough work, so I find I’m back in the job market. The name of my web site hasn’t been accurate for a long time, but it seems for the time being it’s exactly right: hire me!

If you or anyone you know needs an educational technologist, higher education administrator, or writer, with experience in for-profit education, non-profit education, and startup environments, please let me know. My resume gives a pretty good idea of what I can do, but I’m also fast to pick up new things, so if there’s something you need done that’s even close, let’s talk about it!