The Dilemmas of Working
I’ve been working for just under three months and am rapidly approaching the end of my probation period. I wish I could tell you that its all its cracked up to be, but frankly I’ve been tempted to just walk out at least twice a week. That isn’t a very good track record.
It sucks because I like the people I work with. They are a good group and I get along with them.
Its the work that’s killing me. I’m a financial analyst doing business case support. But, but, but (there’s always a few of those out there) we’re really just a check in a process. We do business cases but don’t have the authority to say no to a program if the numbers are bad. The numbers we do pull together don’t feed back anywhere (forecasts, planning, budgets, etc.). No one’s held accountable. In fact, our numbers generally aren’t great because we don’t have good data. We don’t understand our customers or their behavior. We don’t really know how previously campaigns turned out. And we don’t know how things are changing (i.e. in a fast moving industry, assumptions from two years ago just don’t cut it).
We got our objectives earlier this month. I’ve been there for just under three months and I’m already 80% to completing them. By the end of next month I will have completed everything on the list. There are no stretch goals. There’s no where to go and nothing to do to get me to the next level. There’s nothing to reach for, to motivate me to try harder. It sucks.
It is really, really demoralizing to have a job that doesn’t do anything. That doesn’t contribute. It makes it hard to stay connected and to care about the quality of your work. It isn’t motivating.
I hate when senior management is so far out there that they bullshit their employees. Please don’t tell me one thing and do another. I’m not stupid and treating me like I can’t put two and two together is belittling. I read through program documents regularly. I get bombarded with marketing jargon telling me how we’re “technology leaders” in our industry. We still use Office ’03 and IE6 (which is so old it doesn’t support tabbed browsing and doesn’t work with some of our own customer facing sites!). I find it hard to believe that we’re leaders in technology when I’m the mayor of our office on Foursquare. Me, a finance analyst for business cases. Not a marketing person. Not a tech person. Not a product person.
I’ve been really struggling with work. I generally have a fair amount of down time (in part because I work fast), which leaves me with a lot of time where I have to look busy. That’s time that I could be spending learning or creating (painting, spinning, knitting, batiking, etc.). Instead, I get home at the end of the day and I’m exhausted. I don’t have the energy to create. It makes me resentful of that time that I spend at my desk. I know that as a salaried employee I’m paid to park my butt at a desk for 7.5 hours but I hate that those 7.5 hours impact the rest of my life.
When I don’t have the energy to create, I’m miserable. And that spills over into everything else as well. It impacts my relationship with Jason and my desire to exercise and to spend time with my friends.
I’m torn. We’re told as employees and good little job searchers that we can’t leave a job after three months. It’ll look bad on our resumes. The next place won’t look twice at us. I’m in an even tougher position because this is my first job after my MBA and I took time off to travel. I have an even bigger gap to explain. This makes me feel like I’m stuck working in this environment where I’m disconnected and bored and resentful.
I know that something has to change because I can’t keep doing this.
I’m not a corporate person. I can’t put in my 7.5 hours every day. I want freedom to be creative. I want a job that wants me to voice my opinion and that will challenge me. I want a job where I care about what I do because its exciting and cutting edge. I want a job that asks me to think and values the fact that I’m not a stereotypical MBA.
It may be time to make the decision that I can’t stay in a job just because I need it to look good on my resume. That my mental health and happiness is more important than making it easy to find my next position. That I’m going to have to bust my ass to convince the next company that I have more to offer than a business degree and analytical skills.
What do you suggest?
9 comments Digg this9 Comments so far
Leave a reply
will you have any opportunity to field your resume or do you have to wait until after you’ve been there long enough to accrue personal days?
assuming that doesn’t take a year…
I have personal days and my vacation kicks in at the end of my probation. Getting time to interview isn’t an issue. Getting my resume past the first glance at another company is.
Include a photograph? Can you include photographs of one of your paintings or some other creative outlet on your cover letter? Go on to describe what you want from your position and link it to the hobby indicated in the photo. I know it’s weird, but getting them to look is a question perhaps some visual marketing is in order.
perhaps that was me taking you too literal.
I’ve never met someone with more creative ambition and the ability to follow through. You get a LOT done in a day when left to your own. How unprofessional would it be to include some of that on your resume?
Maybe including something more personal like a schedule of your average day at work including notes of down time and a comparison schedule of a personal day.
A company would be fortunate to have someone with your work ethic and ability, but getting them to realize those are your characteristic and not just talking points is a challenge.
“Getting time to interview isn’t an issue. Getting my resume past the first glance at another company is.”
It depends how you approach it in the cover letter. First off, only apply to companies/positions you *really* want, at least at first. Then, something like this (the first part may be more of an interview thing, but still…
“I will always be grateful for the time I have spent at [companyX]. It has taught me a lot, and I’ve already built many valuable relationships. It has also shown me that my extensive knowledge and skills are more fully used in a [bla bla bla] environment.”
Even in a cover letter, emphasise how you feel your skills are best used in an [x,y,z] environment that the people you are applying to provide, and your current position blatantly does not. The fact that the company you currently work for is so high profile is, in my mind, an advantage in some ways.
Another possibility: start applying for some awesome internships etc. Like, find some really cool not-for-profit and arrange to even volunteer there for 6 months or something. Not only would this give you an in to the kind of company/organisation you might want to get long-term employment with (NETwrking, baby!), but you also get kind of a ‘get out of jail free’ card wrt your cv if the internship or NPO is awesome enough. If it comes down to volunteering, some financial sacrifice may be involved, but if you save your butt off for a little while (though I imagine you do that anyway) it could be worth it.
Also, the peripatetic resume is more and more common amongst people of our generation, due to various factors. A short stint at a company, especially a large company, is more and more common these days, especially with the prevalence of contract workers. I’m sure you are probably familiar with the idea of a ‘portfolio career’?
Big hearts darlin! Hope you can glean something helpful from all that drivel. I ain’t no MBA, but I’ve honed jobhunting to a fine art
oh, also, if possible call the contact person first before you send your resume & cover letter. If you’ve had a nice conversation and they remember you’re way ahead.
entrepeneurship might be the answer sista. In my opinion you are far too smart and talented to be working for anyone else.
What about job sharing? Where you work 1/2 time or…?
You need to start your own company doing something. I’m quickly finding (ok not quickly, but I’ve known it pretty much since I took my new gig last year) that a lot of my time is done doing bullshit work that 1.) isn’t productive and 2.) is in the way of me doing something that is actually worth anyone’s time. a lot of the place i work is the image of “working.” i’ve joked with a few co-workers that we’re playing work. There’s no manual labor, no real hurdles to jump. It’s just people dressing up and being on time and having meetings and turning in reports of things that anyone could look up and then all of us leaving feeling like nothing happened and collecting a paycheck. Some people take it seriously. Some see it for what it is. Me? I don’t know how long I can take it, either.
Same boat, buddy.