Day 3 continued in the same vein — get up, get kid to school, and go to work getting work.

The night before I was considering how to jumpstart my Photoshop and Lightroom teaching opportunities.  I was a bit rueful that I had lost my Acrobat Connect Pro account with my Adobe job; it has a REALLY cool system for doing online training.  I even looked into paying for it out of pocket.  But it’s like $55 a month and that version doesn’t appear to have some of the features I wanted, like being able to create breakout sessions and stuff.  The one that does, they don’t even quote a price, you have to talk to Adobe.

So I created an Acrobat.com account and tried out their ConnectNow module with a friend in a faraway land.  It’s not as slick as Connect Pro but I think it will work.  The 2-way webcam/voice chat thing worked, cross-platform, and I was able to let her take over my computer and operate Photoshop.  There’s a little chat thingy and a whiteboard.  And to get more users it’s just $15/month.  So that’s pretty cool, I’ll probably start doing that pretty soon.

Also, I take back the mean things I said about Adobe’s chosen outplacement service.  It’s more elaborate than it seemed at first blush; I had just expected them to be a kind of employment agency, which they aren’t.  They do, however, give you access to something similar called JobScout. The first thing I got enthused about was was the 2½ months of technical and business training at skillsoft.com.  (I also found out that if you start in December you get another 2 weeks.)

I’d prefer Lynda.com (or Total Training, but they’re more exclusively about creative apps), since skillsoft.com is so Microsoft-centric.  But it’s still pretty cool, and the business stuff might be useful if I can stomach it.  I’ll probably try to suck that site dry.  I called the company to suss out how much SkillSoft costs.  I never got an answer, but it’s definitely in the four figures per month. (The other two are $3-400 a YEAR.)

But the service comes with other stuff. I guess you can go there and get a little workspace to squat in; desk, computer, phones, printer, fax, whatever.  I’ve got most of that at home (except for the solitude), and if a company wants me to fax something ferchrissakes I’m not sure I want to work for them.  (Seriously, faxes?  Seemed like magic 25 years ago but come on…)  But they do have topic-specific experts who can help you find places to look for jobs, might be helpful, I don’t know.  And there’s training in a bunch of things like how to negotiate salary, can’t hurt, right?

And with the good news comes the bad.  It turns out that, although my title is “Technical Project Manager” I am not classified as a manager.  This is important because when it comes to layoffs there are four classifications: “Individual Contributor,” “Manager”, “Director” and “Vice President”.  This classification determines much of your package — the base severance (in months) and the “service recognition” maximum.  A VP who has been around for 10 years and gets sacked gets 10 months on top of his base severance.  But the maximum for directors is I think 5, and for managers is 2.  For individual contributors it’s 1.  In other words, as an individual contributor, my ten years gets me the same one month that some one-yer newbie gets.  But wait, there’s more!  The manager also gets 2½ months as a base severance, to my 1½.

Because I don’t happen to have any direct reports at this moment I’m in the second-from-the-bottom tier for severance, despite my ten years and the title and the fact that I’ve had direct reports in the past.