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Although this is a little late in posting (there’s no excuses) the All Women Blogging Carnival number 10 was held at Absolute Leigh. Which is a new blog by the creator of the All for Women site and is really good and well worth a look.
I submitted What is a Meme and How Does it Work? I have been submitting to this carnival regularly for a month now and I have really enjoyed it, and will continue to participate in it. But I would like to find some more carnivals to submit to as well. At least another 2 so I have 3 that I join in with on a regular basis.
If anybody knows of any good carnivals beside the All Women Carnival then please let me know. Otherwise I am going to have a look at www.bloggingcarnival.com to see what I can find there.
Thanks
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:absolute leigh, all for women, blogging carnivals, bloggingcarnival.com3 Things You Don’t Know About Me!
I have recently finished writing a series of articles about my career timeline, which was very interesting and rewarding to do. You can find them all on my articles page.
But that was all a bit serious and I thought I would do something more fun and less taxing to finish with. So here are 3 fun things you don’t know about Mandy Jones!
- I have read all 7 of the Harry Potter books and thought they were great (and yes I do know they’re children’s books).
- I hate heights, but I went on a hot air balloon ride - and enjoyed it.
- I have an ambition to drive a race car or very fast car around Donnington Park Race Course in England where the Moto GP bikes race.
Only 3 but interesting all the same! Hope you enjoyed them, and how about you!
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:articles page, Career TimelineMy Career Timeline - Part 3
2003 - Present
Hard Decisions
My husband and I did have children in fact we had 2, a son and then 3 years later a daughter. They are a huge blessing to us and our lives have changed completely since having them in so many ways. But after having our son I was looking to go back to work after maternity leave, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought and there were going to be some hard decisions to make. The Advertising Agency I worked for were unable to make my hours more flexible, so I had to decide
- Could I live with working long and irregular hours and not see much of my son in the week.
- Should I give up everything I had worked for over the past 3 years and more, building myself a career, to see more of my son.
Well there was no competition for me, I couldn’t live with hardly seeing him all week. Our priorities had changed and our son had to come first, I would just have to find another way. So I gave up my job in search of one with more flexible working hours. Although there was no competition it was still a hard decision to make, after all my hard work I had to just walk away. I felt like I was back at square one. I knew it was the right thing to do though. If I did have to start all over again, then that’s just the way it was going to be. Should I give up work altogether until my children were older and then go back to work or could I find another job that suited us better? Again another dilemma and a hard decision to make. But nobody said parenthood was going to be easy.
So What Did I Do?
I didn’t want to give up on having a job/career altogether, but if you take a child out of a childcare place, which had been arranged since before he was born then we would lose it, and the place I had was a really good one. So we decided that I should find a part time job in the meantime to be able to afford to keep the childcare place. So I went to work part time in a large DIY chain of stores as a customer advisor, while I was there we had our 2nd child our daughter. If nothing else you can say I am flexible, because this was another huge departure from anything I had done before. But it was only a stop gap until I could decide what I was going to do. Read more
Site Search Tags:articles page, Career TimelineMy Career Timeline - Part 2
1990 - 2003.
So I left school and became a Dental Nurse, and I had my 1st experience of seeing how self employment worked - Dentists in England are classed as self employed. The thought of being your own boss definitely appealed to me, although the Dentist I worked for did not recommend it and said I should never do it. But I kept the thought at the back of my mind anyway. Although I never had any intention of becoming a Dental Nurse I did enjoy the job, all my experiences and the people I met. I was a Dental Nurse for 10 years and I gave it 100%, became qualified and managed to get experience in a lot of areas including General Anaesthetic and Oral Surgery. Having to deal with people going through different emotions, like pain and fear and dealing with it well gave me a huge confidence boost.
Could I Retrain?
But I still had nagging feelings that I should take another look at what I should do for a job. Should I try and change my career and how difficult would that be, would I be able to retrain in a different area completely? I decided to sit down and write what I enjoyed doing, to see if I could get a job in that area, I came up with the usual suspects:
Art
Photography
ComputersSo I went to night school and enrolled on a course that I found that covered all 3. It was Apple Mac Training in Quark, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Computers and technology had moved on hugely since I had left school and there was a lot of courses on offer. This course suited me down to the ground. I really enjoyed it, and although it was hard to work and find time to study (I had to take holidays to be able to attend the lessons) what I was learning was extremely rewarding. It was so easy to manipulate the photos and create whatever image or illustration I wanted, it really fulfilled my creative side and what I wanted to do.
I Changed my Career Path
I qualified and I was lucky enough in 2000 to be able to get a job in an Advertising Agency, creating recruitment adverts for various clients. This was a huge step, I had never done anything like this before, it was a complete change and everything was new to me. I wanted to be successful at it, so I grabbed the bull by both horns so to speak and went for it. It paid off I did really well and was soon promoted to team leader and sent to visit clients and attend presentations, learning more about the business side of things. I also learned how bigger companies worked and interacted, (not always well!) I was proud of the fact that I had adapted so well from Dental Nursing to the Advertising Agency.
I still had this nagging thought at the back of my mind about working for myself, but I always put it off because the market was already flooded with Graphic Designers, and I worried about the competition, and not being able to make an impression on it. The only down side to the Agency job or Graphic Design was the hours, they could be erratic and long, but that didn’t bother me too much because it was just me and my husband. I was then offered a promotion that would have meant even worse hours and less job security. But I hesitated to accept it, what if we had children that could be a very different story? And we did want children, would I have to choose between my career and a family, how would we fit it all in?
Did we have kids? Find out more in part 3!
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:Advertising Agency, Dental Nursing, Retrain for a new careerMy Career Timeline - Part 1
I thought it would be a good idea to give you some background information on me. To give you a little idea on where I am coming from and who I am. So here is a brief history on Mandy Jones, my journey and how I came to be writing this blog.
1973 - 1990.
I was born on the Wirral in the North West of England (UK) in 1973 and I am the eldest of 2 children. If your not sure where the Wirral is (not many people are), then have you ever heard of Liverpool, and the song ‘Ferry Across The Mersey’, well you may have wondered where you were ferrying from in the song! The answer is the Wirral. Now I don’t want to bore you with all the childhood stuff, I’ll just say that I was a 70’s child and yes I had some very dodgy haircuts, and I was also made (as a child) to wear brown dungarees with orange flowers on. Which have strangely come back into fashion! Read more
Site Search Tags:Career TimelineWhat is a Meme and How Does It Work?
I know I said I was going to start my career timeline today but I just came across a new meme and I wanted to find out more.
What is a meme?
Well I think sometimes explanations can be hard to grasp and I am new to meme’s and just learning, so lets give one a go and see how they work. To me they seem a little like blog carnivals, in the fact that you are participating with others in sharing information, whether it be articles, images or video about an agreed topic. They seem like fun to join in with and I am sure are a great place to meet people and make new friends, (also they may help with traffic generation and getting your blog seen).
For instance the meme I am going to join in with is called ‘Our Abstract Emotions’ ran by Confessions of a Housewife and this is what we have to do:
“Your assignment is to find a picture that abstractly expresses how you feel. What I mean by abstractly is a picture of something, a drawing, a image, that does not have you or another person in it. I don’t want to see pictures of a smiling face to show happy (nor a illustration of a smiley face! :-))”
Sounds like fun, this meme is held every Friday and you can join at any point in the week as long as it’s before the next Friday. So all I need to do is find a photo to go with my emotion at the moment. At this time I’d have to say I feel expectant, my blog is moving on nicely and I am learning new things on a daily basis which is very exciting. But I am expectantly looking forward to what all this hard work will produce in the end. It seems the ‘sky is the limit’ on what you can do with blogs and achieve with them, it just depends on how much time and effort you can put into it. So I am expectantly waiting to see what this blog will become and what I can do with it. It is a very interesting learning curve, learning about blogs and it is exciting to see the results. So that’s why I chose this picture.
So to enter I now go to Dillydesigns.com Meme and add a comment with a direct link to this blog article, (which means the address for this article when the title has been clicked and it is the only article on the page, that gives it a unique address). And that’s it I will have submitted to my 1st meme, it was fun and easy (hope I’ve done it right). Confessions of a Housewife also looks like an interesting blog to read so I will be visiting often.
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:Confessions of a Housewife, Meme3rd Time Lucky With Blog Carnival!
It’s 3rd time lucky with the All Women Blog Carnival. I managed to join this week on the Monday (nearly forgot) the day it’s released. I’m interested to see if making my submission on the proper day will affect my traffic at all. This week it is held at 4 fab moms.
I love their post for the carnival, I have 2 kids myself aged 4 and 1 and I know what they are talking about. I really like their blog aswell, as I too am a mom who is trying to start a business from home. So I can be there for my kids more and have greater flexibility, and I am constantly trying to juggle the usual work, home, kids and all there related issues. Not always successfully I have to say. I applaud what 4 Fab Moms are doing and I wish them every success for the future.
Hope to see them all next week.
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:4 fab moms, all for women, blog carnivalComing Soon on Build a Blog…
I am in the process of writing a 3 post series of articles on me! I would like to share my career (or business) journey with you. To give an insight into who I am and how I got here, writing this blog. I hope to give you a little background information, and show what has motivated me to choose to blog and use the internet in this way. Saying that, it is taking me a little longer than I had anticipated to write it, which is why I am behind a little on posting, and I hope to start publishing it on Tuesday 7th August.
But I have found it very interesting to sit down and write what I have been up to for the past so many years. I can see in black and white the decisions I have made, for better or worse over the years and how they have led me here. It’s very different seeing them written down as to talking about them, it somehow makes them stand out more. And also makes me look to the future and what I want to achieve in the next couple of years, and what I need to do to get there. So it is a very useful and fulfilling exercise for me that I hope you too enjoy and get something from.
You’ll have to let me know what you think!
Mandy
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Site Search Tags:build a blog, career journey
