It’s been suggested on several occasions that I have somehow not earned my academic qualifications. Or, they are somehow invalidated or were given to me. Something I find a little offensive. I qualified to enter both my university degrees and worked particularly hard during both. In fact, I worked part time through the Bachelor of Computing as a web professional (ending in 2008) and chose to enter the MBAS Program (which I also qualified to undertake) full time in 2009-2010.

As a web professional I have worked for private and public clients both as a contractor and occasionally as an in-house employee. I have had private sector clients from Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, the United Kingdom and Dubai. I’ve worked for the Tasmanian Education Department’s Web Strategy & Support Unit, I’ve taught hand coded web design for a semester at TAFE College and worked as a web developer on contract, then in-house, at the now defunct Tasmanian Department of Environment, Parks, Heritage and the Arts. I also spent a semester at the Tasmanian Department of Economic Development as an undergrad working on an internal paper to assess the cost value of the unemployed.
The vast majority of the work that I’ve undertaken as a web professional was by invitation. However, since I graduated in 2010 from the MBAS Program there has been no real interest on my part to go back to plod coding websites. Yes, I could probably scrape a crap spare change from it but the market is over-saturated with a constant race to the bottom and a need to pull about $100,000 in the door to achieve a decent wage. So there… I’m currently one of the 800,000 Australians collecting a Disability Support Pension. A pension that underpinned my university education as work came and went.
Read the rest of this entry »