What jobs does everyone do post-covid that involve travel?

[JoegilmoreG91]

Fairly self explanatory question.

There's been posts in the past, but I'm curious with so many people still travelling internationally, what you're all doing?
My organisation has basically cut travel completely, in leiu or Teams and Skype.

Interested to know what others experiences are!

 

[Dr Ralph]

Jigalo.

 

[kangarooflyer88]

Graduate student and pre/post-COVID. Conference travel makes up a lot of the "mileage" per se. Some of it is self-funded, some of it is funded by the University/conference organizers. For instance, I'm flying FinnAir next month to Frankfurt to attend a workshop, and all travel is covered by the organizers. The following month I'm off stateside, to present my work at a couple Unis, and that's covered by the Uni. I will admit, however, that a good chunk of my travel is self-funded. As a principle, I'll take a couple days to a week away somewhere in Australia to focus on my writing. The key there is to look for good deals on flights and hotels.

Pre my graduate studies, I worked for a startup in Canada and so much of my travel there was funded by them as I would need to go to Las Vegas to demo our products at the Consumer Electronics Show, or fly around the world to test some of the products in the field. Unfortunately, back then I wasn't aware of things like frequent flyer programs, so wasn't strategic in things like booking and programs. However, I did have the sense to fly on a legacy carrier and not some upshot airline that will leave me stranded in Timbuktu.

-RooFlyer88

 

[NM]

There has been no employer-funded travel for me for about 5 years. Prior to that there were times when I was away more than at home, but the regularity of work travel has been declining for the last 10 years.

Meetings are nearly all virtual. Technology and work practices have changed significantly resulting in considerably less business travel across our entire organisation. All my travel in the last 5 years has been personal/leisure and self-funded. Thankfully I have Lifetime status to fall back on.

 

[tdimdad]

Work-related travel is only 10% of what it was pre-pandemic. Back then, I used to spend a few days interstate, at least once a month, for work. Virtually all of this has now been replaced by Teams. On top of that, our COO & CFO are brutally minimising the travel budgets and they allow only business critical trips.

It's actually pretty nice to live calmer life and travel less. Gives more time for many other fun things.

Edit: To answer the question, too. A mix of project portfolio management, process management, training, etc. I see myself as an internal consultant, guiding others in excelling their jobs (and trying to keep the execs honest about project governance, decisions & funding and the like).

 

[Cruiser Elite]

I have the greatest boss of all time and he works tirelessly to send me on as many needed AND unneeded international trips as possible

He has not quite gotten me back to the busy schedule I deserve but he is working on it

 

[NM]

I have the greatest boss of all time and he works tirelessly to send me on as many needed AND unneeded international trips as possible

He has not quite gotten me back to the busy schedule I deserve but he is working on it

Maybe you need to buy him a special gift for being such a nice bloke

 

[Cruiser Elite]

Maybe you need to buy him a special gift for being such a nice bloke

Good idea - what do you suggest? Grange? Krug?

 

[NM]

Good idea - what do you suggest? Grange? Krug?

Either ... Both, perhaps. I am sure he will give you some guidance

 

[Cruiser Elite]

Done

On a serious note I am close to pre-Covid travel levels just short a couple trips to China - biggest fall is in availability R and F cabin on MEL-SIN-PVG/PEK vv flts - J pretty well the norm now and all flts this year and into early next have necessitated o/n SIN to/fro

 

[Forg]

Some stuff works fine via videoconference, other stuff not.
Plus some people simply aren’t aware of which is which … saving the money on travel will sometimes mean spending more overall, and some people can’t see when that’s the case even when they’re a specialist in whatever-it-is.

In the past a really important meeting for an hour or two could be justified ‘cos of how much business it could generate, whereas now customers & co-workers are accustomed to videoconferences so it makes sense that doesn’t have to happen as often.

However, the place I work builds relatively niche asset-management software for companies who can afford & can get a business advantage out of spending tens of millions on software. It’s fairly complex, so a lot of customers want our implementation consultants onsite. So those people are still needing to fly.
We also tried remote training when it was a legal necessity for most customers; we only have the one training specialist in Oz, and he finds in-person training seems to embed info in trainees probably twice as effectively … so there’s value in flying trainers around.

 

[FlyingKangaroo]

I'm a solicitor in-house for a tech company looking after all of APAC.

In the Before Times, I'd travel quarterly somewhere in APAC for APAC-wide leadership teams/QBRs, and was back and forth to the US headquarters several times a year. That's all stopped. Now it's just one annual trip for a team-wide offsite usually in San Francisco and another leadership offsite. This year they've pulled off Brazil -- probably before someone bothered to see how much it would cost to get me there. Other than that, it's just trekking to and from our Melbourne office and that's it.

I've definitely compensated with more purely personal leisure travel given I no longer have excuses to extend work trips into personal ones and thus have those breaks to look forward to, but safe to say the work travel is still a tiny fraction of what it was before. While we've at least restored it a bit in the last 6-12 months, I suspect my days of jaunting around APAC for internal business are done, at least in my current role (which is probably sensible, despite my own disappointment).

Sales and other customer-facing roles, on the other hand, are definitely ramping back up.

 

[tdimdad]

We also tried remote training when it was a legal necessity for most customers; we only have the one training specialist in Oz, and he finds in-person training seems to embed info in trainees probably twice as effectively … so there’s value in flying trainers around.

Agreed. I've also tried remote training workshops and it gets a clear resounding "yeah no" from me. Either in person, please, or we wait until it can be done in person. It probably gets compounded by my style which is more of conversation around the topics than a strict reading of a textbook. Routine reinforcement of topics via video calls after the training is OK but sharing knowledge & experiences for the first time is by far superior in person.

 

[Forg]

Agreed. I've also tried remote training workshops and it gets a clear resounding "yeah no" from me. Either in person, please, or we wait until it can be done in person. It probably gets compounded by my style which is more of conversation around the topics than a strict reading of a textbook. Routine reinforcement of topics via video calls after the training is OK but sharing knowledge & experiences for the first time is by far superior in person.

Dunno whether your organisation is focused on training, but ours is definitely a software house & the training is a bit of an afterthought (it saves us money if our customers know what they’re doing & don’t cough*-up so often, plus there’s the profit on training them in the first place) … our trainer struggles with that a little, because nobody else in the entire company has his experience with what doesn’t work & they only see the immediate bottom-line (the positives of smart customers are apparently a hard sell to coders masquerading as managers that need to make financial decisions).