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.
