ia play

Lot’s of people are asking how the RNIB compares to the BBC.

My journey is much better for one thing, shorter and simpler. That has a surprisingly big impact on how happily the day goes. Judd Street is also a delight compared to White City- there’s coffee shops, restaurants, bookshops, and loads of parks. Favourite so far is St George’s Garden. Oh and the British Library and the Brunswick Centre are both just a stone’s throw away.

There’s something more office-y about the job. Office wear is smarter, people start and leave earlier, and weirdly quite a number of websites are blocked. That’s quite a change from having porn permissions at the BBC (to monitor the BBC’s websearch, of course).

I’m hands on again, in a very intense way at the moment. As the lone IA there’s lots to do. I thought I might miss the sense of community of a big UX team but the virtual community of other SharePoint and charity IAs has helped loads.

Pleasant surprises were the lack of locked down desktop and Firefox installed as standard.

Something I hadn’t thought about was the extent to which the BBC is a visual culture. At the RNIB  email is plain text as a matter of policy, sketching is rare in meetings and documents are printed in 14 point.

Which makes practicing IA a different kind of process and a topic I expect I’ll be returning to many times.

This is my last week at the BBC. Next week I’ll start my new job at the RNIB in Kings Cross.

I’ve seen lots of people quit the BBC for the wrong reasons. Or at least they don’t resolve those problems with their first new job (the spring board job). The only things you are guaranteed to get when you leave a job are the tangible things, the kind of stuff that is written in your contracts.  So I will definitely be getting:

• a much, much shorter commute
• less money, although pretty much the same benefits otherwise
• no working in the office over the weekends or late nights (they shut the place up)
• a greater variety of places to eat at lunchtime
• to be working for a charity, working for a goal worth getting out of bed for
• proximity to the British Library
• an office with purple floors

This really distills down to “closer to home, for a charity”.

Tangible sacrifices:

• I won’t have a community of IAs immediately around me (although I have high hopes for regular coffees with the lovely folks at the Wellcome Trust in Euston)
• I won’t be managing people (one of my favourite things about my BBC job)
• My projects will be lower profile
• I may end up less well-read (because of the shorter commute)

My intangible but realistic hopes:

• get some energy back. A shot in the arm
• to work with a lovely team of people
• re-apply stuff learnt at the BBC
• learn new things
• to unravel a new organisation and the way it works

I won’t be expecting to get unambiguous and stable strategy, respect that doesn’t have to be earned, and to get away from decision making I disagree with. But I think lots of people fall into that trap.

The RNIB is hiring a number of accessibility roles:
Web Access Centre Blog :: We’re recruiting

And a senior web developer:
Temporary Senior Web Developer