So after 9 years working professionally as a video editor, I'm pivoting my career in a more technical direction. My new position at Sirens Media is firmly in the IT realm, and while it's IT at a media-centric business (television production) I've stepped away from a creative role.
In one sense, this has been a long time coming. I've considered myself—since a young age—a more "left-brained" or "analytical" (whatever you want to call it) person. While I dabbled in web design, graphic design, typography, photo editing, and video editing as a teenager, these pursuits were always grounded first in an interest in the technologies behind the tools first. I'd been playing with computers and learning how software worked since I was 6 or 7, and trying out new stuff on computers was a big part of my growing up experience. Being able to make my career in video editing for almost a decade grew out of an interest in the tools and technologies that made the process possible in the first place.
On the other side of the fence, my departure from Bethesda was unexpected. Being laid off was a serious blow to my self-confidence in my work and abilities, and it took me the better part of a year to really recover. And yet, I could feel that I was burning out. The demands of continually creating new work takes a toll, and the spark to create was going out. I knew a change was necessary.
The best part of moving into IT at Sirens has been twofold. Firstly, I'm gaining lots of new skills (or polishing old ones that had fallen by the wayside). I haven't dealt heavily with anything beyond basic networking since my CCNA days in high school, so getting to deal with managed switches, VLANs, routing, and more has been a great refresher. I've gotten to dive into server administration, so I've been learning about DNS, VPNs, user and group administration and permissions, as well as data management and archiving. I'm getting to research new tools and technologies and make plans for implementing software across an organization. But secondly, I've gotten to utilize my experience with media when it comes to troubleshooting edit systems, or converting proprietary media formats for ingest for the post team. A lifetime of computer experience and 12 years of using Macs means I was able to hit the ground running, but also gave me a solid foundation on which to build a host of new skills.
I don't know what the future holds for me or my career, but I'm excited to be at the start something new and different. It's a good feeling, and one that for a couple of years I'd missed. Here's to another decade of growth.