Change in career path

Switching the line of work is not common and most of the time is not appreciated by employers either. Patience is the key and self-confidence is essential. Freelance work is treated as trivial and inconsequential during most interviews. To work on your own (as a freelancer or contractor) is not an easy task. Good researching skills, work independently, take ownership of projects and deliverables etc are seen under Ideal Candidate or Required Skills section. These are what one develops while working as freelancer. Lucky are the ones who get to work with someone who understands this. We have a long way to go in accepting freelance jobs or freelancers as mainstream professionals.

I create user guides for a web - Hospital Management System (HMS) application. The pages of knowledge base are currently in Xwiki. Part of creating user guide is to make training videos, or how-to videos. The company I work for use Linux as OS (Operating System). I on the other hand work on a Windows machine. The tools used in making videos are all open source. Some of the software (applications) I tried was not working well on Windows platform, while OBS Studio was not capturing the drop-down list in the videos. Trying my hands on various tools, I found three that fulfilled my requirements

Share X (to record the screen)

Audacity (to record the voice over)

Open Shot Video Editor (to combine audio and video, also to edit the final video and add effects)

Summing up

The advantages of using some of these open source tools are

• The limitless tutorials, guides to learn how to use them.

• The tools I used are light and don't guzzle down the space on hard disk.