Charles: United Kingdom: Jun 25, 2025

After being made redundant from my job at World Digital Foundation in October 2023, I moved to East Sussex with my father and extended family. During this period, I worked on a number of building/labouring projects with family friends while searching for a new job in digital marketing (previously held job, and field of study at university) as I believed that this would be the best way to further my 'career'. However, after a number of months spent applying for jobs, I was beginning to become disillusioned with the 'world' of digital marketing/online networking etc…
Skipping forward into March/April of 2024, while weighing options for other types of employment outside of the digital marketing landscape, the amount of manual labouring work began to pick up dramatically in the spring/summer of 2024. This was a result of living in East Sussex whilst job searching (a countryside region of the UK) and had a number of friends and family who worked in roofing, fencing, landscaping, scaffolding and general building projects.
During this period, I was doing a lot of writing which had been a passion that I developed during and post university. This in combination with a conversation I had with a friend about their travels abroad led me to looking into teaching English as a foreign language. I have always wanted to travel but lacked the means to go backpacking or on holiday and thought that I could do something more meaningful with my time by completing a TEFL course and teaching abroad. This was in October 2024, when I signed up for the Highfield level 5 Diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language 180hr (TEFL) qualification.
To bring us into the present, I finished studying and passed my TEFL certification on the 4th April 2025 and have been looking for employment abroad for the past couple of months.