“In the security line now. Hopefully I’ll be through by 11,” Zachary Fischer emailed me on a recent morning.
We were scheduled to chat, and he was working in our phone conversation while waiting to catch a flight to his next project, a month-long stint in New Orleans. As a senior IBM technical consultant, Zachary spends a lot of time on the road.
Living out of a suitcase is certainly a change of lifestyle, he says, but it’s one that can come with some great tradeoffs. He’s experienced cities as a local, visited out-of-town family and friends, and of course, scored even more travel opportunities from all the points he’s racked up along the way.
Zachary is one of three Perficient consultants I spoke with recently, and they all say that these are the kinds of job perks they have come to enjoy:
Zachary Fischer, Senior Technical Consultant, IBM Practice
“I have been lucky that all of my projects have been at places I have liked. I’ve been able to become a local in five or six different cities over the past couple years – Philadelphia; Providence, Rhode Island; New Orleans and New York.
“With traveling, sometimes you can take some extra trips and go to extra cities. I have friends all over the country that I wouldn’t have been able to see if wasn’t on travel projects. I’m going to see friends in Kansas City, Santa Cruz and Portland. Through them, I’m a local. And then you rack up all the points, too, and you can do whatever with those points. I got to go to France for $100 with all of my AMEX points.”
Andrew Asadorian, Director, IBM Consulting
“I was on a project in Jersey City, New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan. We were creating a big auto insurance claims intake and processing application leveraging Pega technologies for the client. As disrupting as traveling for work can be, this was a great project to travel. We had a fun team onsite comprised of people traveling from different places. We would frequently have team dinners after work since most people were staying in the same group of hotels.”
“After a while on the project, I started staying in Manhattan and commuting to the office rather than staying in Jersey City. This allowed me to experience more of the city including some of the best comedy clubs I’ve ever been to.
“Being a (somewhat) recent college graduate from a university on the East Coast, I had many friends in New York. I was able to see them frequently during the week for dinner. I was also able to take the Amtrak train up from D.C. as I was living there at the time of this project.”
Andrew Warren-Love, IBM Technical Consultant
“Since I’ve never done much traveling domestically, the biggest perk for me is being able to see new places without having to take time off work or spend a lot of money on vacation.
“Leading from that, another perk is the rewards bonuses that I can later use on my own personal vacation. So while traveling can be stressful at times, it is more than worth it.
“I haven’t yet had the opportunity to use this benefit, but I plan to use the companion travel perk if I end up on a project that involves traveling to Toronto. That is a big benefit for me because it will allow me to offer my travel benefit to other people who, like me, don’t often get the opportunity to travel as much as they would like.”
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