My company (which I’ve been working at for coming up on 17 years) has a policy where employees can take unpaid leaves of absence. They don’t guarantee you’ll get your exact job back (or even necessarily a job back, if it’s long enough, though they will try to fit you in).
I’m doing pretty well at my writing, and the spouse and I have mostly decided that I’m going to try to make a go of it as my full-time job next year. As kind of a test balloon, I’m going to request a year-long leave of absence next year, so I’ll have a bit of a safety net if I crash and burn. That’s not the point of this post, though. Financially, we’re in about as good a shape as we can reasonably expect to be to do this.
How much notice should I give my boss about my intention to take the leave? We get along great and I don’t anticipate any problems, so I want to give her as much notice as possible. But is there any disadvantage to letting the cat out of the bag too early? Has anyone done this before and had problems with it? Honestly, at this stage of my plans it would probably be a good thing if they laid me off (with appropriate severance pay), so I’m not worried about that. I doubt they will, though. I have a lot of good karma at the company.
Any advice, experience, or tips to pass along? I know a lot of women do this for maternity leave, but is it any different for pursuing personal goals?
If you were going to take a year off without burning bridges I would want a month’s notice, unless your job is so trivial that they can replace you in days without a transition. (I am a senior manager at my company and we allow only short-term LOA, like 1-2 weeks, for extraordinary circumstances where the employee does not have enough vacation time accrued.)
That being said, you should review the written policy for leave of absence, if there is one. Because I’ll bet you cannot just go announce, “I’m taking a one-year leave of absence.” I’m sure that it must be approved; it’s not simply at your discretion. It’s one thing to resign with two weeks’ notice but an employer-sanctioned leave of absence must be negotiated.
CookingWithGas: Oh, absolutely it must be negotiated. I just don’t think they’ll give me much trouble about it, especially if I give them plenty of notice. I want to start the discussion as soon as it’s wise to do so–mostly, I’m looking for any gotchas I’m not seeing about doing it too soon.
Not really. My most productive writing time is in the morning, so giving that up to the day job would be counterproductive to what I’m trying to do (which is see if I can make a go of fiction writing full-time). If I make the break, I want to make it clean, at least as far as not wanting to think about the day job until it’s time to decide if I want to return after the LOA.
If you’re flexible for when you want to start writing, you could go with “want to give you a head’s up, and while ideally I’d like to take the leave of absence starting in 30 days, I’m willing to wait 90 days to get my replacement on board and comfortable in role.”
Not knowing of course if someone has to be hired and trained, and how professional of a role you have…but offering some flexibility for when you go on leave might be taken very well.
Not to pry but what exactly does “I’m doing pretty well at my writing” actually mean? Have you been published and paid any significant amount to date or are we talking more about your personal growth as a writer?
I guess I always thought that most writers really didn’t quit their day jobs and become full time writers unless they had sold enough stories to have some kind of notion that this could be a paying gig. Is that where you are?
Depends on what you do, but you should give at least 30 days notice, more if possible. You don’t want to leave anything undone before your scheduled departure from work.
Good luck, hope this works for you. Don’t make financial success as a writer your goal, make your personal fulfillment the goal and financial rewards as a bonus.
Not going into details, but with five books and a box set released, three more ranging from “currently in editing” to “90% finished,” and ideas for many more in the series, my monthly sales for the past few months have been very good, especially after the box set was released. I am an indie (self-published) author, which means I get to keep 70% of the royalties from my sales, my books never go out of print, and I have full control over things like my release schedules. Last month, I made more from book sales than my monthly day job gross (though that’s a bit of an aberration, I know, related to some big promos I did.)
I’ve got a reasonably decent financial cushion, and plan to add to it for the remainder of this year. I also plan to do some freelance editing and proofreading to supplement my book income, and I’ve got friends who can help me with lining that up. I’ve thought this through, including talking to both a bookkeeper and a friend of my husband’s who did exactly what I did (in the Silicon Valley, even) and everybody I’ve talked to thinks I’m in about as good a position as I can be to make the move. Assuming sales don’t tank between now and next year–and I can’t reasonably see them doing that, since I’ve got a new release planned every three months–I think I’m good. And if things don’t go well, I’ve got a year to find out and I can go back to my job knowing I gave it a good shot.
Don’t saturate the market. Leave 'em wanting more.
I would say a month is good, but as a goodwill gesture, and to keep your name in their ears, offer to do an occasional phone consult with the person who takes your place if they have lots of questions. If you did the job for years, you probably shaped it to a great extent.
It’s not saturating the market. For self-pub, it’s a good idea to keep your name out there, especially with series stuff. Every new book brings in new readers for the rest of the series. A three- to four-month schedule for my genre isn’t too fast by any means. Writing fast (assuming you can also write stuff people want to read) is a huge plus for indie success.
I took a four and a half month leave of absence from my job two years ago for a long honeymoon.
In my case, I mentioned it to my boss well in advance (over a year), as something I wanted to do, and asked if it was workable. He said it was, and to let him know when I had specifics. My wife was also negotiating with her job, so we went back and forth for a bit about specifics.
We were both willing to quit if we couldn’t take leave, so it was more of a “I’m going to be gone for a while, and I’d like to come back; do you want me to come back?” conversation than a request for a leave, but everyone involved was reasonable and we came up with a mutually satisfactory plan.
But our situation was different from yours in a key way: coming back to our jobs was plan A.
I would not mention that you want to take leave for the purposes of switching your side job to your primary career, since you’re really telling them you’d like to be doing something else. No one likes to be second choice, and there’s good reason not to tell your current employer that you’re thinking about making them your former employer. They’re going to start making plans to replace you for good, rather than temporarily. And once they have those plans, why not just act on them?
Yeah, when I bring it up, I’m not going to say anything about being undecided about whether I’ll come back. Since I don’t know myself whether I will or not (it will depend on how successful my writing and side jobs prove to be), I plan to treat it more like maternity leave: I’ll be gone for a year, and as of now, I’m planning to come back. The way the leave works is that you have to give them a certain amount of heads-up about whether you’re going to be returning, but I think it’s only a month or two.
And it shouldn’t be “I want to see if I can’t make writing a full time gig” - or they might think you won’t come back and you need to keep that door open.
I’m not going to lie to them. Probably something more like, “I want to take some time off to recharge and really focus on my writing.” Which is absolutely true. It’s also absolutely true that I might not come back if things work out, but that’s something I can’t determine until I’ve had a chance to see how it goes.
One of my coworkers (much more senior than I am, but in the same department) took a year off last year because she was just burned out and needed some recharge time. After over 25 years in the industry and 16 in the same job, I think “need to recharge from burnout” is a perfectly acceptable reason to take time off.
My completely off-the-top-of-my-head 2 cents: don’t mention the writing. Say burnout, spend time with family, house projects, wife-sister-mother needs help with <whatever>. I’m not saying you should lie… but come up with a realistic, truthful adjunct reason. “I think ‘need to recharge from burnout’ is a perfectly acceptable reason to take time off.” I agree, and people can relate to this. Or even, “I need to take some time off, and fortunately, I’m in a position to do that right now.”
Here’s my possibly cynical reasoning: it opens the door to people checking up on you WRT to the writing, to all kinds of expectations, to snarky “must be nice” comments. I dunno. This is your baby, your heart’s desire, and if it were me, I wouldn’t expose that to the public at large yet. I don’t know your co-workers but human nature is human nature. Maybe they’re all open-hearted generous people who only wish each other well and never have a whisper of *schadenfreude *about them.
I guess it’s kind of like (what I imagine) fertility treatments might be like. Don’t tell people you’re going through all kinds of emotionally and financially draining efforts to get pregnant. It makes your private thing public. It opens the door to them talking to you and about you regarding this very important, very personal goal. Wait until you’re bringing home the bouncing baby Pulitzer or National Book Award or whatever.
Does this make any sense (to anyone)? I realize it might not to the OP.