Looking for a job - day 1

Background

First things first, why am I looking for a job? Well, after 10 great years helping Rotherham Council with their channel shift agenda, I felt a change was needed, a new challenge. As their Online Services Manger, I've been located in several teams within the structure, starting in the Transformational Partnerships team (IT services at the time were being outsourced to BT). For me, online services and the web function I've been responsible for, could realistically be situated in 3 possible locations:

• Comms and Marketing
• Customer Services
• ICT

However, the physical location becomes irrelevant as the functions should all cross each other anyway.

Following a review of services about 18 months ago, my team shrank as we became more technically focused and the content elements remained in Comms & Marketing as me and my team moved to ICT in the Digital Change Team. It seemed to make sense at the time, although content creation suffered as staff in Comms & Marketing were more traditional media people and so creating digital content was not something within their portfolio. With content creation now suffering and services essentially driving content again, I felt we had taken a step backwards, after all, content drives the user journey, which leads to transactions, if that suffers, the end result also suffers.

Fast forward to December 2017 and the Senior Management Team decided that the web team and online services would be better placed in Customer Services, which was going through a review to consolidate all front facing customer services. I felt this was a strange move, particularly as digital transformation is a big focus for the next year or more. My role as 'Online Services Manager' was deleted and I was invited to apply for the role of Customer Services Manger. This did not sit well with me and so now I'm looking for a job!

First things first - CV

Before applying for any new jobs, I felt I needed to get my CV in order. Having been with Rotherham Council for just over 10 years, I found this to be somewhat out of date. I redesigned it and updated it, the latest version can be seen here:

Jon Ashton CV

Next up, LinkedIn. Again, having not actively looked for a job in a while, I'd let my profile slip somewhat. Obviously both these things should be an ever evolving entity and I hereby vow to keep both more current! My LinkedIn profile can be viewed here:

Jon Ashton LinkedIn Profile

Google search

Obviously couldn't end day 1 without a Google search - WOW! Lots of job searching site adverts, so decided to register with a few. The key words I was looking for were:

• digital transformation
• digital change
• online services
• web manager

Quite focused at the moment, no doubt this will creep over time to include many more words and variations, but the above 4 terms returned many, many jobs.

End.