Another Unemployed Holiday

So this one's a bit different. Same me, same lack of employment but different country - exciting! This time I come to you from Kenya. Specifically, a café in Nairobi. Again with a plus one, but in the form of a childhood friend whom I have known since we were four years old. What started in the classroom learning our ABCs has now moved on to both looking very professional while working remotely from a café in Nairobi. I use the term 'working' very loosely for myself, while G is actively working and currently participating in a very important (apparently pointless) meeting, I am writing this - further procrastinating from the arduous but sadly necessary task of finding a new job.

So far the job hunt has consisted of me scrolling on LinkedIn, Indeed and a handful of websites dedicated to places I might actually want to work in the future and I've found myself migrating towards charities or the civil service. I think past experience is telling me I don't want to work to make other people richer but to better the lives of others. That's pretty much all I've figured out so far on this job search. It's a very difficult place to be in when there are no key words to use for searching and when the market now includes remote work I can no longer rely on a small list of career choices within commuting distance. Deciding what I now actually WANT to do is a difficult task in itself.

Starting with working through a list of things I don't want to do I thought would be easier, but when I actually sit and think about it, there isn't a lot I don't want to do. More so there are things that I am in no way qualified or skilled to do, so excluding things like astronaut and dentist from the list helps narrow it down.

It is refreshing to have a different perspective from this café in Nairobi and I do feel very grateful that I can sit here and not really have any worries (apart from the unemployed sitch of course). Here in Nairobi there is a visible gap between the poor and the wealthy and enjoying what would be a very bougie, expensive café in London is a rather reasonable lunch. Learning that the national minimum wage in Kenya is 63 shillings, equating to just 37p, makes me very grateful for the life I have back at home.

But where does one start to find a new job when the last job I applied for was what lead me to this current period of unemployment. To cut a very long and boring (actually I think it's quite an interesting) story short, I was a police officer for just about 9 years transitioning from being a uniform officer on the streets to a detective and then an acting sergeant in a number of different roles. Moving from the Met Police to a county force was a challenge and ultimately lead me to looking elsewhere and I fell into an IT company where I lasted about two and a half months before they decided it wasn't for me. How does one put together a CV that includes fatal road traffic investigation and IT service desk engineer management? Hopefully I'll work that out soon.