12 months ago I started into self employment. Time to reflect upon my journey.
“Grow excellence in software engineering
to support leadership building high performing teams”
This mission statement really is at the heart of my business: it’s all about teaching and supporting and this is what I love to do.
It makes me so happy to teach young soon to be professionals.
I always wanted to go into teaching part time and being self-employed made it possible. It adds very well into my mission to grow excellence: I can help building a solid foundation for the next generation of software engineers.
This year, I am a guest lecturer for three different universities and have different teaching assignments. As diverse as they are, I enjoy all of them and will continue to work with these universities.
When I wrote my business plan, I put “own products” into the section that described my long term vision.
At the beginning of this year however, I understood that there was no risk in offering the “Software Engineering Leadership Lab” already now and see if this programme gets purchased.
Turned out, seven people trusted in my concept and I could run the first iteration with them.
I really enjoy having deep conversations with other people.
As networking is now no longer a leisure activity but central to my business, I can have a coffee with inspiring people and call this work. Will definitely keep this habit - if you live in Hamburg and we haven’t had a coffee for some time, reach out!
The usual freelance project on these sites is 100% of your time for about a year. Imho, that’s just serial employment.
I haven’t found any fractional, part time roles there. So I applied to full time projects with an availability of 3-4 days and got rejected every time. Committing full time to one company only would mean I could not do small scale long-term mentoring, occasional full day training and guest lectures.
This model might work for many, but it’s not mine and I’m really wondering if companies hiring freelancers for 5 days a week are leveraging the full potential of temporary contracts.
As this channel doesn’t work for me, I’ve dropped it.
I started offering mentoring and training for leaders and teams in Software Engineering as well as Interim Engineering Management.
As the benefit is clear to me, I had expected that companies see the need to hire an interim manager if they have open leadership positions in their Software Engineering department:
This has the potential to unburden overloaded leaders, create stability for the team(s) and facilitate the hiring and onboarding of the permanent leadership position.
Speaking to companies in this situation, they were not willing to invest in these benefits but chose to bear with the pain of a leadership vacuum a little longer.
As mentoring and training on the other hand are well received, I will focus on acquiring such projects and drop offering Interim Engineering Management.
I’ve started two professional blogs in the past and have always stopped writing when I reached the point that I couldn’t squeeze in the time needed anymore.
As a solopreneur, I own my time budgets and also need to invest into Content Marketing so I'm planning to blog regularly.
Originally, this first blogpost was intended as a LinkedIn Post only. But when I copied it into LinkedIn, I realised that I had exceeded the character limit by far. Taking this as an opportunity, this now got me started.
What a year. Looking forward to the next 12 months!