Looking For Work

[MisterRoberts]

7000+ heavy equipment operating hours, certified welder specializing in aluminum fabrication, air brake endorsment on driver's licence with clean abstract, traffic control certification, and forklift certification.

Must be someone out there somewhere who can use one or more of my skills.

[jimorsheryl]

Hello Mister Roberts;
I am always curious to know why people who have moved to Nanaimo, chose Nanaimo?? Especially, without having a job lined up first. I am not criticizing, I really want to know what attracts people to Nanaimo.

Thanks
Jim Taylor
www.nanaimo-info-blog.com

[foodfrenzy]

We chose to move to Nanaimo to be closer to our family, but with the lack of available jobs I can see why it would be discerning to people. Nanaimo can be a wonderful place to live if you have a good job, but to those who are unemployed it can be frustrating!

[RyanCoffey]

People move here for a variety of reasons, but I would say that the most common one is the lifestyle. I meet people from here and from everywhere else who mmove here for a variety of reasons but lifestyle definitely stands out. I talk about this on the homepage of my main site actually.

[Madam Mim]

Haha, Mr. Jim Taylor, you are a funny one. Are you going to ask every single individual who is looking to move to Nanaimo without a job lined up first the same question now? You must be getting a lot of new insights... But hey! Can't blame a guy for being curious about the world, really.

Ryan, loved your little essay in the other thread. Summed it up nicely.

I'd move to Nanaimo for the bars - the chocolaty variety that is. *Yum Yum*

[RyanCoffey]

Not which you're referring to, but thanks.

Oh, and BTW Nanaimo bars aren't hard to make and the best ones are homemade. They're available all over the place in factory made form but properly done homemade ones with decent ingredients are awesome. So you can make them wherever you live. I found this site about it recently and it looks legit to me.

[Madam Mim]

Yumm, thanks Ryan! I might give them a try.

You wrote a little essay about why you moved back to the island after having lived in ON I believe it was. You just pretty much listed all the good reasons anybody would consider moving to Nanaimo and you received a few comments from people who fully agreed with you. May have been last year, I don't remember now.

[RyanCoffey]

Ah yes, thank you. It's something that was quite meaningful to me and is something I repeat fairly often in the course of my work. A (probably) similar variation of it is on my main website.

I think the big takeaway for me was that most of us who have only lived here have no idea how good we have it. Could things be better? Yes, no matter what your life situation is, it could be better. However, when you compare our lives with those from almost anywhere else, we're doing pretty darn well overall. I had to work among so many tourists who told me every day how beautiful it was on the west coast and then live on the road away from the area for seven years before it sunk in.

[ElBrad]

Hey Jim...thought I'd throw my tuppence into the discussion.

I moved here when I got custody of my daughter. It was important to me that she grow up knowing her grandparents on both sides of the family. My folks live here in Nanaimo, my ex's are in Victoria, and I was the only one who'd let both sides spend time with their granddaughter.

I was an assistant manager of a Roger's Video & Wireless in Burnaby when I made the move. I gave up that position because I believe family is far more important than money. I moved to Nanaimo and back in with my parents for a short time.

I took the first job I could when I got here, minimum wage working for Eddie Bauer. Met a great girl and after 2 years, we were married. Since then, I've worked a few crummy retail gigs, always trying to improve my pay and position...but then I was let go from my position with Abell Pest Control, at the same time the bottom fell out of the economy.

I've been trying to make ends meet ever since, but you know as well as I do that Nanaimo doesn't have much to offer at the moment. Unfortunately, I'm pretty much "unskilled labour", and though I'm looking for any opportunity to provide a decent living for my family, it's just not working out currently.

I recently had a brainwave, and started crowdsourcing a concept for makerspace here in Nanaimo. There are a few in the US and they've been very successful, I'm hoping to emulate that success here. For info on the project, have a peek at my Indiegogo site. http://www.indiegogo.com/nanaimoopensource or my Facebook page http://on.fb.me/ZQvYMn

In the meantime, I'm going to continue to split my time between job hunting and working on the foundations of OpenSource Nanaimo.

Cheers!

[RyanCoffey]

Neat idea. Why not start it small in someone's private space and keep plugging away at it until it grows into your vision?