What I Learned From Being Unemployed

I'm in the last few months of my degree and things are getting manic! I can see the finish line now, so all my energy is going towards not tripping over before I reach it. I'm doing a full time degree (do not recommend), a full time job, and a fortnightly weekend job. As a result, I'm not able to add new posts every single month. However, I did get a few minutes of down time last week while stuck in bed with some weird gunky infection disease thing (think that was my brain exploding), and managed to type out some wordage in my drugged-up state. Reading back, most of it makes sense. So I'm going to post it here.




In 2007 I was doing pretty well. I had a nice office job working for a property management firm that was only half an hour walk from my house. The pay wasn't terrible for a junior role, and I was only 21 so hadn't yet figured out what I wanted or could do career-wise. The only things I loved were writing books, maths and painting, all of which I was steered away from at school. My previous summer/gap year jobs had mostly involved finance, so getting a permanent role as an accounts clerk was fairly easy. I remember thinking how great it was that my office had a free vending machine where I could get tea, and the library was only a short stroll across the road.

In 2010 the big boss announced that our jobs would now be moving over to India. That summer I was out of work. Just in time for the recession to really hit.

Lesson 1: Ego. Remove.

I collected over 200 rejection emails/letters/calls that year (that doesn't include all the companies that never replied). At 24, to be told unanimously that you are basically crap and unemployable isn't a great feeling. I was barely out of the awkward I-hate-my-face teenager stage. After a few months I had run out of savings, so had to drag my pathetic behind into the job centre and beg for mercy (an experience I hope never to repeat).

It quickly destroyed any preconceptions I had about my own worth and any leftover grammar-school bred entitledness. These days I don't take myself so seriously and never expect automatic favours. I work hard, do the best I can, and have learned not to take it personally if other people don't always respond in a positive way. It has toughened me up. I'm like Lara bloody Croft now (okay, maybe without the humongous bank account and holographic personal butler - although I do have a crazy tech-genius brother and one day I will have that indoor bungee rope. One day!)

Lesson 2: Your parents and teachers are not always right.

Doing well at school, studying hard, getting good grades and regular work experience does NOT guarantee you a job later on. There is no magic formula. Don't be surprised when you discover most of your competitors have all of the above. You need to find a niche. Something you can do better than the majority of your peers.

Lesson 3: Networking. 

A term I didn't discover until I got hold of my own computer and started Googling career sites until the early hours of the morning. It's 90% who you know rather than what you know. With most roles not requiring a PhD or equivalent, you can learn the specifics of the job once you're through the door. You just need to get someone on the inside to open the door for you. Which leads me to...

Lesson 4: Self-promotion.

Again, this was new terminology. I hated salesmen. I remember going to a car showroom with a friend as a teenager and getting more and more wound up by the second as this guy in an oddly coloured suit tried to convince my acquaintance to part with his cash for a set of wheels that was far over his budget. And I mostly avoided watching TV due to the annoying commercials that seemed to jump out and smack you in the brain at full volume. I'm a pretty cold, logical sort of person at heart - a bit like a friendly computer. I can very easily switch into character and be the life and soul of the party, but I generally like to be given the facts, when I ask for them, and then left alone to make a decision. Supermarkets irritate the hell out of me with all their epilepsy-inducing strip lights and bright yellow 'HALF PRICE, MOTHER FUCKER' signs everywhere, and that god-awful background music (I'm getting edgy just typing this). That was my idea of sales. I didn't want to be the cause of someone else's misery. Especially not my friends and family. Even the thought of handing someone my CV to pass onto their boss was nauseating.

Basically, I was being too considerate. The harsh truth is that there are billions of people on this planet battling out an existence. You can be friendly and give back to society once you have something to give back. Until then, you do everything you can to pay the bills, get food, and keep a roof over your head so that you aren't dependant on other people's taxes. Most people are too busy with their own lives to consider helping you (bar people like Oprah and Branson, who have clearly made it to the top of the food chain and can now relax occasionally and think about distributing their spare change whilst sipping a G&T). So if you need help then you have to ask for it. I'm now in a position where I can begin to help other people. However, I'm completely wrapped up in my ridiculously busy life and struggle to notice whether I've remembered to eat, let alone who is and isn't happily employed. If someone wants my help then they need to get in my face (literally - I'm fixated on a screen or running chores on auto-pilot most of the day). I'm more than happy to hand copies of CVs to my boss or give someone a fabulous reference, but if someone wants my help then they need to distract me and ask.

Self-promotion also means treating yourself like a business. Advertise your skills and knowledge everywhere you go. Look for places to go. Get yourself to events, gatherings, groups of like-minded people that you can collaborate with, sign up to trade circles and professional forums where you can talk to and learn from people higher up the ladder than you (or perhaps on a different ladder entirely if you want to jump over into a related field). Many of these events have free booze/munchies and the other attendees are generally clever, talented, awesome people! You can't lose.

Lesson 5: The biggest discovery I made - Understanding how and why I work.

Firstly, I am someone who requires routine. Not everyone does. I hadn't realised this until being forced to spend month after month by myself. Without a routine, I go a bit nut-nut. A payroll job forces you to turn up at a fixed location at a set time every day. Everything else in your life gets scheduled around the edges. Because you're in the office until 6pm, the gym has to wait until 6:30pm. Which means you don't eat dinner until 7pm. Then the housework and shopping have to be squeezed into either your lunch break (if you get one) or before work. Which leaves you an hour or so in the evening to study. Add on commuting if you don't live next door. You don't have time to stop and worry about what you should do next. You just attempt to cram in as much as possible when you get the chance. There is a constantly growing 'To-Do List' that never gets completed. You consider yourself lucky if you manage to book a GP or dentist appointment during the week (why do they all seem to be closed outside of office hours?), and you silently curse when someone decides to get married or keel over and die because it means trying to haggle time off during the exact week that all of your colleagues decide to jet off to Majorca. There is no flexibility. High-school and college were pretty much the same. Other people set the schedule and stole the best hours of the day, so you had to fit everything else in the best you could.

I learned that should I ever be in the position to work for myself, my first task will be to plan the year, the month, the week and the day. I'll invest in one of those phones that shouts at you drill Sargent stylee when anything needs doing. If I can get it to yell like the guy in Full Metal Jacket, even better! I will try to schedule the work into the hours where I am most productive (morning/evening) and make sure I can actually get to dentist and GP appointments (my teeth are full of holes and there are several medical things that could have been treated a lot more easily had they not been left to get worse). I had time to catch up with things like that while I was unemployed, but lacked the finances to get things properly fixed, and this has come back to haunt me (surgery is not fun). Routine is my friend. But a routine that I have control over. I now have a routine that benefits my employer. I get a hell of a lot done, but they profit from my work. This needs to change.

The planning thing also applies to the work itself. It bugs me that I'm not able to organise my actual work during office hours. I get there early in a futile attempt at damage control. I start the day with several hundred bits of work that no one in the team has had time to do (through no one's fault - we are just drastically short on staff). I plan to get some of those completed to minimize the number of shouty clients on the phone. There are 23 people in the team and usually 4 of us taking calls. My boss walks in and hands me 3 projects that will take an hour each to complete if I spend all my time on that one task. After an hour, she gives me another project that will take 2 hours minimum to complete. Every few minutes I have calls from angry clients threatening legal/media action if I don't drop everything and sort out their problem. We've been told to prioritise these calls. I also have multiple email accounts that get filled by the minute and other employees walking over to ask questions that I have to stop and answer. Every day the post comes in with hundreds more of the previously mentioned bits of regular work. Around lunchtime my boss will ask if the projects have been done. They rarely are.

The work that does get completed is generally rushed, and I get really irritated at mistakes. I work with money and it needs to be accurate. Some of the work involves very large sums and requires focus. We never get to focus. Constant mega multi-tasking means that errors are constantly made by everyone, which leads to more angry clients. The office needs someone dedicated to just taking calls, but they won't do this. As a result, work either isn't done or is done inaccurately, nothing is organised so we can't give clients any time-lines (which leads to more calls), and everyone is exhausted and getting ill. Staff keep quitting, so we are constantly re-training rather than catching up on the growing backlog of work. Occasionally there will be a meeting where we all sit down, politely freak out over the situation, come up with strategies that take up even more time than the work itself, avoid the major issues of under-staffing and misplacement of existing staff, and start the whole process all over again. So... I've learned that either employed or otherwise, I prefer to have my day at least partly organised in advance if I want to get anything accomplished!

Another related discovery is that my productivity increases in correlation with the amount of guilt I feel about potentially letting people down. I need some sort of outside pressure to really push myself. If self-employed, I would make use of shared office space (or working lunches - I've seen these advertised near by) and join groups where other people hold me accountable for my work. I tested this recently with a few sole traders in my town. We meet up online roughly every fortnight and it makes me want to work harder so that I have something to show them and talk about. There is an additional social benefit to this. I hated being by myself all the time while unemployed. I had no money to go out and no one to talk to at home. The one thing I appreciate about my payroll job is the team itself. I've always been lucky to work with fantastic colleagues, and I would miss the banter. My job changed drastically at the end of last year, so I don't get to socialise much now (except getting yelled at on the phone), but it beats being completely isolated.

Lesson 6: Think outside of the box.

In fact, run far far away from the box. When the obvious option is moved out of your reach, you are forced to reconsider the problem and look elsewhere for answers. During my 'empty year', I took on any job I could to earn extra money - private tutoring, story-boarding for a small production company, offering my Excel skills and sorting out a local business owner's finances (which I could have charged a lot more for in hindsight). I picked up some very useful skills in the process, and discovered there are other ways to earn money outside of a regular payroll job. I went about finding these jobs in completely the wrong way, and wasted a lot of time and energy as a result. But if I lost my job tomorrow then I could probably survive as a freelancer or start my own company if I could get the funding. In fact, I am tempted to do this at some point in the future anyway.


There are still areas that I am aware I need to develop. Sales and marketing is still not my strong point. I am happy being loud and opinionated in certain environments, but I need to expand on this and build my confidence in any environment. Perhaps I should take up a weekend job as a door to door salesman or join a theatre troupe? I need to develop more ways of walking up to total strangers and telling them 'this thing I can create or do is epic! You need this in your life! Give me money and I will make it happen!' And I need to specialise more. I have a few general areas that I am good at (two of which I love and cannot live without, another that I don't mind, and one that I've learned through necessity) and lots of things I can do fairly well if required. They sort of overlap in places. I need to perfect those skills and focus on maybe a couple that I can throw all my energy into and profit from.

I now regard my unemployed year as having been a wonderful opportunity to test out my ability as a potential business owner! At the time it was one of the worst experiences of my life, but looking back I think it did me a lot of good. When things go wrong, there is always something to learn from the experience.