After ten years as a project manager at KKV GBG, I’m officially unemployed!
I’ve been a member at the collective workshop KKV GBG since my last year of art-school – 2007 – and since 2014 I was employed as project manager & coordinator. KKV is a non-profit workshop with studios for professional artists and designers, and in addition to a few paid positions (such as mine) it’s totally reliant on the volunteer work of it’s 500+ members. Just like most of the art and culture scene it’s constantly struggling with money – in combination with volunteer labour it means that “normal” project work goes out the window; it’s “agile” before Agile was a thing – there’s no other way to get stuff done when you have to coordinate work with people who do this in their spare time between paying gigs, on a shoestring budget.
When I started work, my ambition was to digitalise as much as possible (workshop scheduling, collaborative online tools, tools for planning courses) and then make my role redundant. The outcome was the reverse: the more I modernised and updated the everyday management, the more responsibilities I was encouraged to take on. In the end I was managing high and low – managing grant applications and project budgets, running collaborations with art schools, designing print and digital materials, documenting activity and generally making sure that the right info got to the right person and stuff got done.
My job was varied and rewarding – the organisation is a critical piece of art infrastructure – and the membership as well as the board mostly appreciated my work. But in 2022 I figured I’d been there long enough, and so took a leave of absence to study UX Design for two years. Those two years are now up, and as of yesterday I’m also no longer employed at KKV GBG; I know that if I’d return to the project management role I’d use it as a crutch and not apply myself as dilligently as I ought to finding a UX job, and I’m itching to get started on something new.
So. In Linkedin parlance I’m “open to new challenges”. Exciting times!
Oh, and I totally ran the above text through an AI and asked it to “make it more suitable for Linkedin” – you can see the result over at my Linkedin profile. I do feel a bit dirty by doing it, but there’s just so many hours in a day…