So who is ready for this pandemic to be over?

And is it just me, or does it feel like everyone outside of the events industry has figured out how to get on with their lives in this “new normal” and while they complain a little about things, for the most part, their lives are pretty normal?

Because my life still feels like a hot mess and like being trapped.

It’s funny because there was a phrase I loved for years when I was younger: “trapped in the amber of this moment.” It always had a romantic ring to it to me.

But it’s how I feel now and there is nothing romantic about it.

Everything is just frozen and I am treading water in some weird half life.

And now that you all have a snapshot of my mental state, let’s talk about my current career pivot.

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I lost my job on the faculty of a state university at the end of June. It was my first semester teaching and I loved some things about it and hated other things and overall felt like someday I might love to do this but right now, in a perfect world, I’d rather be stage managing.

But the world is not perfect, and so I spent much of June and July applying to jobs in academia, because I now had experience and academia is one of the few safe arts paychecks right now. Safe-ish I guess, because our theatre management faculty line was the first one cut at my old university.

This did not pan out (unsurprisingly because I’m sure every single person in the arts who was qualified to teach was applying for those positions), so I started to reconsider my options.

What was safe-ish? Which was a new consideration for me because I usually just run whole hog at some real crazy projects.

Clearly the corporate world was safe-ish. And corporate events are a thing, so I started Googling companies who were doing digital conferences, figuring they must have stage manager/production manager positions.

They do – they have a few names but the most common is Digital Event Producer/Digital Technician/Digital XXXX. Also you can substitute digital for virtual – should you want to do some Googling yourself.

I found the Digital Event Planner certification, but at about $1000 for the classes and then the test, I was hesitant. I did not do it. I am still considering possibly doing it if the pandemic continues well into 2021, but for now, I’ve managed to land on my feet without it.

I mostly used LinkedIn in my search. I also used some LinkedIn trainings to get certificates in Zoom, MS Teams, Adobe Connect, WebEx, etc. I took a free introductory course to CVent.

I volunteer stage managed two shows for a friend’s theatre company to build up a digital section of my resume.

I revamped my resume into a Muggle resume. I paid $1 for a week trail at Zety, which I actually thought was worth it because it let me select my skills and gave me prompts that were pre-worded for the corporate world for my bullet points. I just edited them a little.

And after probably 50-70 job applications, including several that took hours because they had extensive questions you had to answer on video before you even talked to a human, I finally got my first interview with Sequence Events.

I thought it went well. They had a few former stage managers on their staff, so my background made sense to them. They promised to let me know by the end of the week.

I never heard back.

Cool. Cool.

Another 20-30 applications out to any combination of “digital event planner” “virtual product manager” “Zoom technician” – literally any combination of skills I had plus the words “digital” and “virtual” – that I could get to come up on Google.

I cold emailed several resumes to any company I could find on the web doing digital seminars, conferences, events, or meetings. I looked up some bigger digital conferences to see if anywhere on the website would point me towards a company name of who was organizing their event.

I also stalked LinkedIn to view anyone who’s profile I could see that was doing a Digital or Virtual Event Production role. I would look at their previous job history, what key points they had written in their current job description, what they studied, and what, if any, certifications they had.

I saw a job posting for a part time job on one of the theatre groups I follow online (Women+ Theatre) that was hiring a role for a tech startup company that they thought would be particularly well suited to stage managers.

I applied and got an interview. It was for a company that claimed they were Zoom meets Zelda and was like a video interface and video game. I thought it went well and made it to the second round of interviews.

Then I didn’t get the job.

Fine, no problem. I’m about five weeks into this journey now. All of the story up to this point covers August into the first week of September.

I finally get another interview with a company that does virtual seminars, and has been doing so for the last decade, so the pandemic doesn’t really matter to them. They present sales seminars to large companies to help train salespeople.

We get through the interview. Again I think it went well, and the woman doing the hiring goes, “oh, I think I forgot to put in your email that we’re fully staffed right now, so this interview would just be for if there’s an opening in the future.”

Fan-flipping-tastic. No problem, I tell her, it was a pleasure to meet her and I hope we can talk again soon. I hang up my Zoom. I beat my head on the table a little bit.

I get an email from someone else at that previous company where I had two interviews and did not get the job saying that the person who didn’t hire me quit and the person in the hiring position now would actually like to interview me again.

We interview. SHE IS A STAGE MANAGER TOO! The pandemic has eaten her life too. We commiserate. We even have an acquaintance in common despite being on opposite sides of America.

She tells me everything looks good and she just wants to send me over a little project that will take me like 30 minutes to complete to make sure I can do this job. I tell her sure, but also that I’m headed on vacation into the woods with no internet for a few days.

She says no problem and it will be waiting for me when I return.

When I return it is not. I email her about the project. No response.

Life is going so well.

I send out another dozen or so job applications – because I have been away from the computer for several days, so there are actually some new ones to apply to.

I get an email from the woman who interviewed me, liked me, but had no jobs, to say there are now jobs! I am hired on as a freelancer with the company.

The job pays $40/hour and in even more exciting news, I can invoice my training, which started the very same day. I took two more LinkedIn courses and did a few mock events before my final certifying event, which was running one of the seminars while my trainer was in the background to help if necessary.

And, in what I feel is typical of my whole career (my first show I SMed in college several of the crew got a nasty stomach bug on opening night and later in that run a fraternity broke into the theater and destroyed the set, my first week on a cruise ship there was a fire under the stage during an event, etc.) one of the breakout rooms crashed – super weird, only one, all the others worked fine.

But we managed to problem solve that sucker fairly well and I was calm the whole time and my trainer wrote a glowing note about it in my final review. So yay?

I was a little concerned with the freelance nature – will there really be work? But I am literally booked on every free day I put in the schedule for the next month. So this worked out very well.

Partway through the first week of training with that company, another person at that previous company reached out to me and just straight up offered me a job on the Customer Service Team, which are people who troubleshoot A/V issues during events on that platform. The previous woman had been promoted. He looked at my interview notes on how many times I had been interviewed and decided this was a bit nuts and hired me without even interviewing me.

So now I work there for a guaranteed 12 hours a week at $25/hour with the occasional opportunity to pick up more hours. This is also awesome because they are based out of California, so their evening events are often after my work day ends at the other company and I can occasionally pick up an additional few hours of work in the evening.

Earlier in September, I also saw a woman post in one of the theater groups that they were looking for a consultant to talk one of their students through the tech side of how to put a basic Zoom/OBS show online and I offered to do it and never heard back.

She responded in October and I arranged an hour Zoom meeting and unlimited email access for her and the student during the production for $100/fee and walked them through their questions.

So hopefully this new life as a freelance Digital Event Producer and A/V Troubleshooter will get me through until life goes back to normal and I can run off and join a circus somewhere. I’m also excited about the possibility of becoming a digital nomad. I am strongly considering it.

And if this is a career path you’re also trying to pivot into, well, it wasn’t exactly a glamorous path that got me here, but I did lay it out for your step by step above.

If you have any other questions, drop them in the comments below.