16 Band Aurora by Image Editor

Have you ever tried to change your home, your car, your job, your team, even your country, and just move somewhere else and do something new? Well, I have. And here I go again.

After 3.5 great years I have decided to leave my current job at Profero. Actually, after 10.5 years I have decided to leave the UK and London, but seeing as me and my little family will be moving back to our native Sweden, further employment with Profero would have been complicated to say the least, so leaving the great team at Profero, where we have been doing some really great work, hired some awesome people, particularly lately, and over the years won a truckload of awards, is one of the necessary sacrifices I have to make.

Weighing things up

Even though we, me and my family, really like it here in London, having made some great friends over the years and me being in a really nice job, there are these days several reasons for us wanting to move back. We, as a family, quite simply found we had more reasons to be in Sweden than we had for staying in the UK.

Closeness to family and friends, or lack thereof, is obviously always a thing anyone who has moved countries will experience, but it really gets emphasized when you get kids of your own, and grand parents and cousins are in a different country. We currently have one boy, going on 3 in December, but we are also expecting a new little baby in January. All these things of course had something to do with where we had our mind set of late as well.

It is obviously going to be sad leaving London after 10 years, and there will be lots of things we will miss when we go back, most notably people, but we also see this as a new great re-start for us, and to match that up I have found an great new challenge when it comes to work.

Reboot

I will be starting at Tieto, working in a really exciting team with lots of challenges, some great people and some excellent clients. The overall team is called Digital Service Design (they used to be called Digital Innovations until they changed name) and that should give you an idea of the direction of the department in any case.

It is really exciting, and I am really looking forward to it as I have heard so many good things about Tieto in general, and DSD in particular, from several of my friends who either work there directly, or from people who are working with Tieto indirectly. Besides, it sounds like an excellent new challenge in a direction I have been leaning more and more towards of late after having spent 16 years in online advertising/marketing, as Tieto not being online advertising per se is something “new”, but still using my skillset well.

Destroy, Erase, Improve

To be honest, having spent the last 3.5 years with top UK agency Profero, and prior to that 5.5 years with top UK agency Dare, winning all online advertising awards there is I think (as a team obviously, not me personally), I was struggling in finding reasons, for whatever my next challenge would be (which is always wise to be on the lookout for), to stay as head tech body for any agency within advertising.

Without wanting to sound too brash, it felt a little bit like “been there, done that, seen it”, and we all need new challenges now and then to keep stretching our capabilities and to keep things interesting. It quite simply doesn’t get much bigger or better within online advertising/marketing, than working with award winning global clients at the top agencies around. I was therefore looking for something different, a new challenge, to get me out of my immediate comfort zone a little and still know I will be able to do a great job. Tieto will fill all those needs for me I suspect, and it is going to be great fun.

So…if you have ever wondered what it would be like to do a complete reboot of your life, stay tuned, I will be updating you with the best bits of it, mixed in with my reflections on what is different between UK and Sweden, both for good and for bad.