Why have one job when you could have more fun doing 3?

The last couple of weeks have been pretty manic, without even time for blog posting which is always a shame. The main reason being that I acquired a couple of other jobs as well as the day job for EAI. Our CEO is also Chair of the Board of the Institutes of Applied Technology, a unique organization which provides technological education in a variety of different ways. The IAT schools in Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah take students at Year 10 and teach them in 'clusters' which focus on science, engineering and ICT alongside the normal high school subjects. It's a novel approach which encourages early specialization in these important areas and they teach in English which fits students better for higher education. They also have a mandatory community programme and every student has a Mac laptop and an on line education system. Under the umbrella are two specialist academies in Aviation and Logistics, which offer tertiary education, an HE nursing college and a boarding school for boys interesting in vocational subjects who struggle with conventional education. IAT were keen to develop a cohesive strategy to marketing and had approached a number of professional consultancies in this area. Our CEO discovered my education marketing background and offered my services to develop this project on a pro bono basis - several of the EAI professionals offer this kind of support to IAT and other Not for Profit organizations which the CEO is involved with. It's a great opportunity and my kind of thing - it's certainly made a change from careers fairs, gifts and business cards. The biggest difficulty is that I still need to do everything else as well so it's been hard to squash it all in. In the meantime the CEO lined me up for another freebie for Emirates Skills, again right up my street but we are running out of hours in the day!
Meanwhile we won a contract as an organization to recruit soldiers and technicians for SOC, the special ops for the UAE military and yet another organization to provide a marketing plan and talent acquisition strategy for! I took a brief about 3ish on a Sunday, having already worked up a plan but the plan was of no use as they'd decided to attend a recruitment event the following Sunday so, from a standing start we had to produce a pop up stand, a brochure and 700 gift items by Thursday. Unsurprisingly it did all get done - I wrote copy for a brochure which we translated into Arabic and we managed to sort out a stand and 700 credit card USBs with their logo on. In the real world this might be cause for celebration but here I am still struggling to get the supplier order signed off for the USBs (fortunate that he and I went ahead without one!) because I don't have a piece of paper with the SOC logo on signed by them to say I can use it, even though they gave it to me in the first place and I have emails from the Colonel, no less, approving the designs! We also got into trouble because we didn't actually go to all the exhibitions and 'pop up' the stand for them. Since we weren't given the information about when and where the exhibitions were it would have been tricky but I expect we just weren't making enough of an effort. I also got called to a meeting by the CEO in order for a large number of us to work up the overall recruitment, assessment and training plan for this project - seemed a bit late in the day to me since we not only had a plan ready, but also gifts, stands and brochures but there we are. There were at least 20 people in this room, some of whom were not altogether sure why they were there and I was the only non Emirati present although not the only woman. Once we'd had the briefing from the CEO no further action appeared to be taken, no minutes were taken and there has been no follow up. I assume once we'd had this meeting we all go off and do our separate things and never see each other again! Still there were a lot of very nice dates and I felt very honored to be included in such an august gathering, even if I didn't feel it would be appropriate for me to contribute.
The National, the main English newspaper for Abu Dhabi is very keen to talk about us (nice things, you don't get too much nasty stuff in the press round here). This is another source of amusement and frustration for me as we have a very definite 'no comment' approach. This can be partly explained by the defence nature of much of our work and partly the natural reticence of our senior managers, but even when things are in the public domain they refuse to say anything. The media were invited to the recruitment events so they were very keen to run a story about the SOC campaign - I've spent most of my career begging media to run stories relating to recruitment and now I'm having to fight them off! Despite the fact that we were actually exhibiting I was told that it was far too early to run a story in the media! This week the National ran a story about local companies working with the defence sector - and yes there are others - of course we got a large mention via our partners Raytheon, EADS and Thales but my carefully constructed words, aimed at telling people about the breadth of our work and our ambitions were given the red light. It'll be funny to go back to the opposite and remember how easy it would have been to get coverage if only I'd been allowed to!