Hold tight, close your eyes and jump!
I am super proud to launch my new business The Project Bench! After all these years I’ve finally found the nerve to go it alone! I can’t pinpoint the moment I knew the time was right – turning 40 maybe, the kids growing up, the sudden loss of my Dad, the need for something more – perhaps it was a combination of all of these, who knows? It certainly wasn’t an easy decision because I wasn’t miserable in the job I was doing, but I knew in my heart of hearts professionally I needed to challenge myself. Like a friend said to me recently, “the timing will never be perfect and sometimes you just have to hold tight, close your eyes and jump”.
The Project Bench was born out of a desire to provide a dependable, dynamic business that is a ‘go to’ for interim / contracting recruitment. My slogan says it all: ‘The Project Bench is reserved for impactful players who can make a difference to the interim market and start to set the record straight on what a professional interim can deliver’.
My journey so far….
I have spent the best part of September (when I haven’t been dealing with IT challenges – what I don’t know about ‘port clamping, fixed IP’s and VPN’s isn’t worth knowing!) meeting, qualifying, and advising some fantastic professional interims – all of whom are now on, or soon to be on, The Project Bench! This truly is my favourite part – meeting people. I purposely haven’t done a scratch of business development yet because without qualifying which skills are in demand and who’s available – it’s pointless, I’d end up over committing and under delivering – and we wouldn’t expect that from a recruiter would we? 😉
What its like out there?
As I strongly suspected, professional interims are more in demand than ever, driven by all sorts of pressures: time, resources, the level of uncertainty of our future economic state, costs and then of course the need for a short-term expert to deliver on a project. The interim market place is still confused and difficult to navigate but the good news is there is some exceptional project talent and some decent demand to match. I won’t spend too much time on the technical stuff because they’ll be plenty of that to come but briefly the skills I can see are in demand in the project world are:
Process Improvement / LEAN Six Sigma experts
Business Analysts
Programme Leads / Directors
Project Managers
Transformation PM’s
System Implementation Leads – particularly SAP, Dynamics and Workday
I know who the best project / interim professionals are and when they’re be available – I now just need to let people know about them!
So this is me – this is my business, the future is exciting – bring it on!
I’d like to say a special thank you to everybody that’s helped me so far – you’ve been amazing – Lianne Butterfield, Kerrie Thackeray, Jane Wood, Jo Banks and the guy at UKFast who, despite it not being a server issue nor me even being a customer of theirs, called me back with some technical advice just to help me out! Thank you!
