I've been unemployed for a month now.

In late July, I resigned from my corporate job working in technology as a project manager. I had been at the same company on-and-off since 2011, and had worked in a range of roles covering data analytics, data engineering, information security and finally project management.

I had it pretty good. I had over a decade of organisational experience, a solid rapport with all of the senior decision makers in the business, a good sense of what was happening 'on the ground', a comfortable salary, and the opportunity to work on a fairly diverse set of technical projects. Our company was leveraging current AI models to speed up their work (and dealing with the governance, security & quality issues that come with it, just like any other business), so I got good exposure to cutting-edge tools, even if I wasn't a super-user of AI tools directly.

But I had a growing feeling that I needed a break from the corporate world, and I was worried about being in a stale environment for too long. So I gave my two months notice and got out.