So far 2008 has not proven disappointing on the eventful stakes. Even in some part the good intentions and lifestyle decisions that I made on New Years eve are starting to play out.

But it did not start like that. In February I finished the last of the technology roll-out. Which had been the focus for my last contract with a firm of loss adjusters based in Reading but with their IT centre situated in Bristol. Having also resolved a number of their long term crippling technical issues and also demonstrated during the course of the year my all round expertise, they were keen for me to stay on indefinitely. The end of the roll-out though meant that my travels and freedom to schedule my own time were now at an end. Now I would be required each day to make the 132 mile round trip to Bristol and sit everyday at a desk in an intermittently air conditioned office.

The people that I have worked with at the loss adjusters have in the main been good people, especially those in Bristol. But sitting at a desk all day working for a company that has very little actually going on and therefore little to engage, was not for me. Eventually this and a whole bunch of contributing factors I won’t mention, drove me to resign on the 2nd day of April. Four weeks later on the last day of April I said goodbye. Well I didn’t because I ended up working in Birmingham my last day fixing a Citrix issue, but I will eventually get to Bristol to say goodbye.

Giving up a well paid job is not an easy thing to do, it almost goes against every instinct for survival we have in the modern world. In making the decision there were no great reserves of cash on which to rely on, I had about six weeks of back pay from my agency to come and that was it.

But I felt trapped working for this particular firm and needed to find some way out of the day to day routine of banal processes. Each afternoon in the warm still air of the office my eyes would get heavy and the remainder of my working life would flash before my eyes. I would picture myself at fifty five sat in the same chair crusty and grey and grumpy and wondering what might have been. Needless to say the whole experience was pretty depressing and I think in a small part explains why I jumped ship with little in the way of cash reserves and no prospect of future employment on the horizon.

During the four weeks that led to my departure I made vague overtures to my peers and managers about looking for something that would give me an opportunity to manage technical teams, which is a real ambition of mine on a long term basis and something I have done frequently as a contractor (in IT parlance contracting is the same as freelancing). But something I had no real clear path or plan with which to achieve this. My plan was vaguely based around changing my CV to give emphasis to my history of management, upload it to Monster (an employment website) and sit back and wait for the calls.

I did and there were a few calls, but little around managing and nothing of any real interest. I think the highlight of the prospects was working as a third line engineer for an anti-virus company. Not at all what I wanted. As the last week of my contract emerged I was admittedly feeling a little concerned but nothing I hadn’t seen before. Having worked as a contractor for the best part of twelve years I knew you actually seldom hear about jobs until you are actually on the market and available.

Literally the day before I left I did get a call. It seemed my CV had hooked just the job. The requirement was for a Technical Account Manager working in Basingstoke (nineteen miles each way through leafy picturesque forests). The role was defined as working for a facilities management company and required managing four engineers at a customer site and managing and maintaining the customers expectations. It was something I had essentially done before for two years while working for Novell on their major accounts team. This job would be a challenge but not so much technically but in the realm of judging the account management aspect. But nothing I didn’t consider myself capable of.

The interview went very well. Which was no surprise as ordinarily I do interview very well. My interviewers were the current Account Manager and the current Account Manager's boss - the contracts manager. The contracts manager was leaving, the account manager was becoming the contracts manager and therefore they needed a new account manager. And therein lay my problem – I would be working for the old account manager come new contracts manager.

My career has involved some interesting highlights that have included eighteen months working in Asia and the Middle East, the Bank of England (which isn’t as interesting as people seem to think although I did once watch 100 million in crisp new notes get laddled into a furnace because of a printing error), global financial organisations and Novell - which some may or may not consider a highlight.

Correspondingly I am confident but not arrogant, very experienced and come across very well in interviews mostly because I am all the above. Oh and I am a pretty decent fellow in the main. After the interview the outgoing contracts manager phoned the agency and said I was exactly what they were looking for and the lead candidate. They had one more guy to interview but then it would ultimately be down to the outgoing Account Manager, the guy that would be my boss, to make the decision. As it happens I knew the last guy they were interviewing and also knew that they had initially not even considered him for interviews. The last interviewee was a good guy, amiable but essentially a second line support engineer. I felt confident, especially as one of their requirements was a very thorough all round knowledge and experience.

The other guy got the job. I was stunned, especially as the stated reason given to the agency was that they felt the other guy was more ‘hands on’ as the role would require filling in for engineers when they were off. I am ‘Mr Hands On’. So much so I had been sitting there imagining myself in the role and working scenarios where I would force myself to not be hands on and focus on the managing aspect in the job title.

But such is life, you shake your head and move on. It was only a few weeks later in another interview that I guessed at the real reason why I didn’t get the job. Admittedly the reason is a little vain but it was not me that actually came up with the idea, it was another manager that was interviewing me, this time in London. This manager (for a firm of lawyers) was moving up the chain of command and was interviewing someone to replace him as the operations manager. Perfect again, I thought. But at the end of the interview he said to me: ‘Can you tell me why I would hire you when you are obviously better than me!’

‘Shit,’ I thought. I subsequently gave him a answer around my not being political and not wanting to do anything other than technical things or manage people doing technical things. So I would never have any intention of outshining him either deliberately or unintentionally. The world of senior management just does not appeal so I would never be a threat. I got invited for a second interview so he must have at least in some part been convinced. I was telling the truth.

But it did get me to thinking why I lost the technical account managers job to someone less experienced and less technically adept. At least I would like to think the reason I didn’t get that job was because I was better than the guy I would be working for.

After a week of unemployment and having been turned down for the account managers job I was starting to worry (getting the first call from the Lawyers was over a week away). I was not getting as many calls as I had expected. Certainly not as many as I am used to getting. What was wrong?

I got another call. This time from a female consultant, unusual in IT recruitment from my experience but a welcome change because the women tend to be far more amiable. She was looking for someone to work in Milton Keynes. As it happened I had been in Milton Keynes the day before which had been a round trip of 120 miles along the A34 and meandering country roads behind slow moving lorries. So I wasn’t interested in the journey and as it turned out the role was pre sales. And that is something I am just rubbish at, I can’t sell. But we did get to talking. During the conversation she mentioned that my CV demonstrated excellent experience but was short in one key area - I didn’t have any detail of my technical knowledge on my CV. The CV read well, she said. But you were left wondering what actual technical skills I possessed outside of the job descriptions, which only alluded to skills. This was especially important as many agencies don’t employ technical recruiters, so it is critical the technical detail is listed in the CV so it can be matched against the job specifications provided by the employer. This explained why I wasn’t getting calls.

Ironically as a contractor I used to have an abundance of the technical detail in my CV but after leaving Novell I assumed my CV spoke for itself. Surely I had to be good at technology to have got these jobs without having to list the specifics untidily on the page. So before leaving Novell I had removed the technical detail. Having not really had a great problem finding a job after Novell it never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with this new cut down non-technical version of my CV.

But sat here a year later nobody was calling. I immediately spent two days re-adding the technical detail. Making sure it was consistent with my skills and what I wanted to be doing. I then reposted my CV to Monster at the beginning of my second week of unemployment and waited expectantly.

Nothing happened at first. It doesn’t usually as it takes a few days for the CV to filter through the system. I now know it is likely that Monster is used as a central source from which CV’s get sucked out and down to other sites. The technical detail (which I didn’t have before) also then gets lifted from the CV and placed into databases as key search parameters. Then recruitment companies and their armies of recruiters search these databases.

By the time two weeks of unemployment came to a close I had just one call based on the new CV, which was to interview at the lawyers mentioned above.

It is at this juncture I should probably mention the good lady Priddeesh, the light of my life, who is not Indian or Asian for that matter. She just works as a nurse with lots of Asians who’s native languages do not ieasily give to contorting the tongue and palate to form her actual last name, which is French in origin. When they do try it’s like watching a trailer for the latest alien movie – all teeth and drool. As a consequence everyone has settled on Priddeesh as a less traumatic alternative.

Priddeesh was and continues to be supportive in my decision to resign from a well paid job. But like most of us takes comfort in the day to day routine of job security (as much as that is in the modern day) and being able to plan ahead knowing each month there will be a monthly salary. Which by the way as a nurse she would be the first to admit is not as bad as people have been led to believe in the press. It’s just not as much as you might expect of a position that requires as much education and training, and commitment. But its not that bad either.

As suppotive as Priddeesh is, there have been a few moments where the air at home has lay thick with worry. Mostly from her lack of comprehension for the mechanisms of IT recruitment, which operates on an almost completely different level than any other profession. This has resulted in the good lady Priddeesh remonstrating on just two occasions that I was not doing enough to find a job and that I should start visiting agencies and making sure they know I am looking for work. Try harder was the message, which is basically the same thing my dad used to say when quoting Thatchers mantra about jumping on your bike to find work. Otherwise dear Priddeesh's concern for my employment status has mostly been about diligently sending me via email a list of opportunities she has highlighted from the web. Which I should point out is more a consequence of her ability to wile away hours searching on the internet than her considered opinion I was not doing enough. Of course she would be totally unaware most of these advertised positions she emails me are bogus and designed to attract your CV so they can call you and pester you for contacts from previous jobs.

And who could really blame her. Everyone that does not work in IT is generally unaware of what a complete dog eat dog industry IT recruitment has become. Anyone in the industry looking for a job is simply a commodity (which will later turn out to be ironic). Everyone is an inanimate resource from which recruiters make a profit by aligning specific resources with companies that need specific resources, with no thought that the resources are living breathing humans.

During the later part of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st there were huge amounts of money to be made in IT recruitment. And there is still good money to be made but 911 and the worlds current economy means there just isn’t enough to go around.

So apart from a very few exceptions I have generally found dealing with IT recruitment agencies to be like dealing with a pack of hungry dogs – everything is sweetness and light until the food runs out. You just have to make yourself seem appealing enough as a commodity for them to place your CV in front of the employer. The minute you find a job with a different recruiter or your CV is not in contention you become the lowest of the low. Seldom do I get calls returned, or get notified if I was not successful at an interview. Having to take no call at all as, 'No you didn’t get the job.' Often I get the phone slammed down on me when telling an enquiring agent I am just not suitable for laying network cabling in Mongolia, or Essex, or Kent, or Canterbury (I live west of London). On one occasion I even turned up for a Support Manager interview, only to find the position was actually for a desktop support engineer (Which is like being asked to manage a football team to find out they actually meant clean the lockers - no disrespect to desktop engineers, most of us were one once). There is just so little that is professional about the whole IT recruitment thing.

So finding a job is a matter of having the best CV you can muster and posting it to as many IT jobfinder websites as possible. And then waiting and getting through the whole process.

The changes to the CV paid off in week three. My CV was put forward to three companies in addition to the lawyers.

During week three I had my first interview with the Lawyers in London, mentioned above, which went very well. They came back straight away and asked for a second interview which would put me in front of the IT Director who had the final say so. Another agency came back to tell me their company wanted to interview but couldn’t until the HR manager came back from holiday sometime in June. And another also wanted to interview in week four. The other job I was put forward for I have so far heard nothing about and probably won't.

So in week four, this week, I had two interviews lined up. One of which was a second interview. Which was good. The only problem being that these were jobs that not only focused on my core experience in solving technical and critical issues but also focused on Microsoft technologies. Of course I have worked a great deal with Microsoft technologies through the entire length of my career, right from the moment I saw my first Windows Version One in 1984 (it could only open one window and supported 16 colours). But my technology focus has been Novell products, a one time competitor of Microsoft’s.

Over the weekend between week three and four I spent long hours reading back through my Windows Server, Exchange and Active Directory study guides (if you don’t know what any of that means don’t worry, knowing will not change your life).

Ironically while I was head down studying Tuesday in week four I received even more calls from agencies all wanting to put my CV forward along with one for another position at a Commodities dealer in central London. This came out of the blue and right from the start 'sounded' right.

Literally 30 minutes after confirming they would be sending my CV to the Commodities people they came back wanting an interview. As it happens I was interviewing in London Wednesday afternoon (Lawyers) and Winchester Thursday afternoon. So their window of opportunity was Wednesday morning or Friday. They came back with Wednesday morning.

Wednesday and the unexpected interview with the Commodities IT and HR Manager went extremely well as did the interview at the Lawyers with the IT Director that afternoon. So much so the Commodities company made me an offer as I was buying tickets for Priddeesh’s birthday from the Adelphi. They would confirm the financial aspect and the contract on Friday. And today the Lawyers also came back with really positive feedback but could not financially put a stake in the ground until next week.

Of the two jobs I have to say the Commodities is the favourite, not just from the fact they came back first. But because the job offers an opportunity to do what I do best and to also get involved in technologies I am not familiar with, along with those I have not touched for ages but love doing, such as programming.

Tomorrow hopefully I will be set to work at the Commodities company from next week, but you never know. Strange things do happen, I could still be waiting on other interviews and the lawyers next week.