So, it has been a while since I started working as a consultant being almost a year today since I resigned from my old job at COCESNA and it has been a wonderful roller coaster. So why writing this blog post? Well just recently we have this pandemic all over us which is the COVID-19 which has a lot of people working from home and/or remotely and not at the office so you might start thinking well I could do this full time I could just work from home; also because I have been working closely for the last year with Scottish company called Managed-AIS which are an aeronautical information management that deals with electronic aeronautical information publication (eAIP), Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM) in any flavour from 4.5 to 5.1+ and we have done some webinars about aeronautical charting and AIXM and related things.
There is a cool question on their Q&A forum that has started at their website which asked that question which was an let me to write a bit about it here. To quote exactly “How can I become an AI M consultant?” and this is honestly something that I myself asked to myself before taking the jump and sometimes it’s really, really difficult.
How do I become an aeronautical information management, aeronautical charting or pans-ops consultant? The first thing to consider is how risk adverse you are because when you’re working the consultant life you’re definitely not going from paycheck to paycheck that you got from your company but you’re actually chasing people to pay you off and getting new jobs each time an each time you want to get better jobs with a longer term duration or better payments so you can have better personal security, healthy cash flow and sane life without a melt-down. So that is something that you need to consider, the risk adverse part of it.
Second is “What can you bring into the table? what are you capable of delivering?” because honestly when you’re hiring a consultant you want somebody that is going to be able to just fix whatever problem that you got and bring value and that value is something that can be brought only by someone that has engaged for this for a while, has performed a few different jobs, is very knowledgeable about the things, is someone that is going to deliver an has some network and social skills because at the end of this you need to know the right people so you can get a lot of things done
So what about me? OK so for the last year I have traveled all around the world (literally completely around the globe with the kids and my wife). Went to Singapore where I’m doing guest lecturing there at Singapore Aviation Academy for the PANS OPS class being about three years and it’s going; I think really good well and hopefully this can last for more time. I went to Italy where I intended to live and I was there for about three months I think, lived in nice apartment towards the Parco Ducale, Parma is a nice city but a bit small from what I’m used to. It is about 120,000 people and I come from a big city of about more than a million so it was more slow, Italy was nice but it’s just not what I was looking for and for my family uh I have two small kids so it’s was a little bit a cultural shock decided to come back to my birth country which is Honduras.
Being also Italian besides Honduran I could have looked anywhere in Europe but I just decided it was nice to go back to family my kids are small they need their big family in Honduras they are happy which makes me happy and who knows what the future will say maybe when they are bigger they will want to explore again or just stay put.
I have been working with Managed-AIS for about a year, almost a year already? Wow time really goes fast when you are doing nice and interesting stuff. We did some courses like Advanced NOTAM course which focused more on the SWIM capabilities that was during the early days of September, we did an Advanced Aeronautical charting course just a few months ago in February and we are working right now on new courses including dealing with PBN and Instrument Flight Procedure Datasets from an AIM perspective. We have done a few webinars and live sessions during this lockdown so I think that’s good and think it’s going in the right direction!
What else? Went to Montreal to participate in an Instructional Training Standards Workshop at IATA, made my first Instrument Flight Procedure consulting for Belize VFR routes, worked with Honduras colleagues on Drones! OK there are a few more things that I’m doing like participating at add the ICAO Regional SAM AIM meeting, I am looking into a few more things that I want to do, I’m not still sure about some of them but I am going to announce a few of them in the future weeks hopefully I can pick up the podcast finally on a more regular basis the AIM101 podcast which I think I’m going to need to switch platform or something else but I’m thinking about that still or I’m probably going to do a YouTube channel instead because I’m getting addicted to watching YouTube things and tutorials and I think it’s a good platform. I am still debating about if I am doing the podcast or YouTube channel or both! I might even change the focus from AIM to PANS OPS who knows.
I have being reading some books, books from Tom Clancy if you like into fiction, biography like Elon Musk ones although he has said some things that I don’t agree lately but the book is good, I have being doing some tutorials online learning about Adobe premiere Pro, making videos, how to take better photos. I am being doing a schooling for my older kid at home because we are on lockdown. I bought a new microphone so that’s why I had the idea about the YouTube video and stuff but I need to check my studio settings which not so nice at the moment so that’s the update keep posted.
If you have something else that you want to know about or that you want me to be writing just drop a line in the comments section and I’ll try to pick it up either here YouTube whatever platform I decide but just keep informed an if you want to learn more about AIM, AIXM, data sets and System Wide Information Management (SWIM) just follow this site.
0 Comments