by Abid Khairul
15 Jan 2019
Blackbox Thinking has primarily been a freelance technology consultancy for the past 7 years. Moving forward we are looking to review our successes and lessons learnt over the past year as well as to set targets for the year ahead. In this post you’ll find out more about what to expect from Blackbox this year.
In the past year I’ve worked for a few different customers. Most of my time was taken up providing cloud infrastructure expertise to one of the UK governments largest departments in a team put together by Equal Experts. What was great about this assignment was that the customer was asking me to work with leading technologies that I was not familiar with. In particular with stream processing of data in near really time. It was an amazing opportunity to learn and gain first hand experience in large scale data processing. However the oppotunities to learn in tech industry are plentiful and should be no surprise to anyone who works in the sector. As with previous customers I have worked with in the past, they don’t expect you to know all the answers. They trust you are smart and can figure it out which is a great complement.
Highlights for me personally in the past year are:
With all this great experience under my belt adding to the 20 years of working in the tech sector it time to look ahead.
I’ve set aside a few months at the beginning of 2019 to completely focus on building up the foundation of a training division to Blackbox Thinking. Teaching is one of the most rewarding professions and is often not given the recognition it deserves. So all you teachers out there, give yourselves a round of applause and I hope the world applauds you too! I’ve thought about teaching tech skills for many years. Even before starting Blackbox in 2012. That’s a lot of thinking now that I look at it! So what has held me back? As with many people with a successful career I’d have to take time away from that success road and meander the untrodden, uphill path to something that has no guarantee of success. It’s a big step for anyone with dependents. For anyone starting their own venture you need container loads of courage and the ability to think big. I have neither, gulp!
So with little idea of how this will turn out and an attitude of “I’m going to do this anyway” it begins.
There will be lots of free content to try and build up a social media following. I’m aiming to do two blog or vlog posts each month to keep my followers engaged. With little experience in managing a businesses’ social media profiles I’m looking to start from zero followers on all on my selected networks to reaching the below targets. It’s a blind guess but something to aim for and learn from in next years review.
I’m still exploring which outlet to host my training content but I am aiming to produce two courses. There’s a shortlist of courses that I’ve produced and I’m looking to start with something simple. I hope to get these completed in the three months that I’m dedicating to this project at the start of the year.
Along side the training business I’m looking to use expertise shown by the training channels to promote the freelance technology consultancy. I’m still going to spend the majority of my time serving business customers until I see that the training business is baring fruit.
With these goals in mind I’m heading out to see if I can conquer this new world.