For those who don’t feel like reading through my prior ramblings, the gist is that by all accounts, my job has been going pretty well since I joined. At yet, in the back of my mind something always seemed amiss.
Yep…everything has gone to crap now.
Business is in the toilet. I’ve gone from planning my next promotion to wondering if I’ll have a job in a month. The firm has already been quietly laying people off. The whole mood just seems really shitty.
Which sucks, because one way or another, I need to find a new job which means starting over again, with no real advancement in my career.
It sucks, definitely, but it’s the reality of your situation so suck it up and move to action. You’re in a position of strength right now because if you start searching for another job, you remain currently employed. You could play that to a strength in interviews by sharing that while you are employed, you are looking into other possible opportunities. As long as it’s not widely known that your company is in dire straits and everyone is bailing. You have to present the situation in terms a new employer will admire — looking for new challenges; growth opportunities have disappeared; etc.
Losing a job can be like grieving a loss. But don’t wallow in it. Assess your situation and take note of your positives. And move!
The key part will be to not jeopardize your current job while searching for a new one. Who knows? Your current job might never get cut. And once you have a new job offer you’ll be in a position of strength because then you’ll get to choose from two opportunities.
But still. I don’t know what it is about the companies I seem to join. Like when I join them (or at least the team I’m on) they seem like regular professional services organizations selling professional services. There is leadership providing goals and plans and whatnot. There are salespeople, they bring in projects that roughly align with my background or the background of what my group says they do. I think, "cool. I’ll learn how this business works, become an expert or whatever, work my way up the ladder or make a career out of doing that for awhile, etc. And we seem to spend a lot of time working on ways to improve the group, increase revenue, etc.
You know, like a real working company.
And then little by little the whole thing seems to unravel.
It’s like, imagine going to law school, getting a great job with a prestigious law firm, then 2 years later people stop committing crimes of any kind. It’s like that.
I think it’s less about losing my job as it is what the fuck did I waste my time for years on, only to come away with vague “IT project management / business analyst work for a bank” experience that doesn’t seem to position me for anything better or even different in my next job.
And yet, some people seem to manage to spend a sizable portion of their career working for these companies. Although admittedly most seem like they last 2-4 years then go do something else.
See? Two and a half years is too long. Never stay at a job for longer than 2 years unless they’re paying you way too much and guarantee you a big severance package if you do leave some day when even considerable disposable income is insufficient to distract your from your mind numbing professional responsibilities.
But you’ll find something else soon so it won’t be a regression in you career either. I can tell because you have posted about your work for many years and I can tell that you understand business and corporate structure well which is actually a valuable skill. It’s the reason some people are always employed. It’s the ability to look and sound like you’re the right person for the job. The specific job skills have to be met, but after that it’s something about the people hiring you feeling comfortable with the person you are, the person they’ll have to communicate with all the time. There is something about appearing to be someone who doesn’t need every detail spelled out in order to understand the bigger picture, someone with the experience to know how things work, who doesn’t need constant handholding. I think you’ve got those qualities so if you find an opening that requires your professional skills you’ll be higher ranked among all those who meet the basic requirements. However, if that’s what gets you a good job, you are bound by honor to teach those qualities to some young fool who will some day need them too.
I’d like to challenge that … (I work in the HR-industry (but not as a recruiter)) … but a guy with 4 different companies in 8 years def. raises a lot of questions to be asked and is def. a red flag - esp. if there seems to be a pattern. If you mix 2.5 years with a job of 6, than that is a different kettle.
may I ask the OP his age (cohort)? … as that is somewhat of an invisible elephant in the room…
Wish I could help but I am retired. My job as a baker, while not making me rich, meant I almost always had work, as not so many people can do scratch work or special orders. I had a high school friend who was a librarian, and always had a job although she had to move a lot, following her husband who was in the Air Force.
In the federal contracting world, that’s not unusual at all — in fact, 2 years at each job would be on the better side of average. I know the OP isn’t in federal contracting, I’m just sayin’ this could vary depending on the industry.
(I’m a project manager with one of the largest federal contractors in the US and — among other things — I manage the staffing for my program. I’m also a hiring manager, myself. I happen to be an exception to the above, having been on my current contract for 3.5 years and with my company for 5 years, but 2-year-or-less tenures are super common among nonmanagers. Repeated tenures of less than 1 year will raise some eyebrows, though.)
It is if the bank doesn’t want to conduct all their operations using olde tymie quill pens and paper ledgers.
I’m not sure I understand the question. Financial services companies have massively complex IT infrastructure. They are highly regulated and have high standards for reliability and the subject matter is often complex and esoteric.
I’m 50. Which I know is a red flag in the HR-industry because as I understand it, employees aren’t supposed to be over 40 and are expected to have 15 years of experience at 25.
Similar to @Misnomer, changing jobs in consulting and tech every couple of years isn’t unusual. It’s all very project based and transactional. But that said, it’s hard to really move up in your career, even in consulting, unless you stay at a firm for some time and demonstrate some longevity.
My frustration is that I’m still experiencing the same stupid pattern at 50 where every time I get settled into a job that seems to be going well, suddenly it seems to go to shit. Everyone else I know seems to be able to just go to work and do their job for years. Maybe get promoted a few times. Or at the very least, work out something better to do for a living.
Like around 5 years ago, I was laid off from a similar consulting firm (much smaller, only 30 or so people). Similar situation. It was a great place to work with great people for about 4 years, then all of a sudden they ran out of work. My only option was taking over part of some other company’s disaster of a project requiring a 2 hour commute each way every morning and travel to Atlanta every other week. I was like the sixth person in this role and when they suddenly ended it after a few months (as they did with they other five), my firm had to let me go.
After a somewhat painful and extended job search I found a great job with a software company that sold big data and cloud systems (similar to AWS and Databricks). That went really well for about a year until COVID happened and my entire professional services department was laid off.
A short time alter I then found a job with a no-code software startup, but that ended after nine months.
And now I am at my current gig where as much as I would like to stay there, I’m wondering if I’m doing myself a career a disservice by doing so.
Of course this is a much bigger deal than the average length of time you stay at jobs. You’re 50 and you’ve got a resume full of experience but you can’t possibly be as smart and quick as those recent grads who will be just as out of work in another 2 years. All I can say is keep building up that 401K, buy real estate if you can afford it, and after another 7 or 8 jobs you can retire, or if you’re lucky you’ll get one that does pay you way too much and you can just ride it out. I sounded like you guys when I was 50, now a couple of decades have gone by, I’m retired and can look out on the world of jobs and careers as an outsider. What I see is that I was lucky to start my career as a simple country programmer, hit the thrilling highs and gut wrenching lows of a roller coaster career, and finally end up working as a simple country programmer again until it was time to put down the keyboard. Hope after it’s over you guys can look back and see it all from a better perspective too.
I work for a consulting firm. You don’t think I’m awash with 20-something techies? A lot of them are smart. Probably not as smart as they think they are. Clients like them because they have low bill rates and are eager to work and don’t have a lot of outside commitments like family or kids. For them job hopping works because they are basically doing the same thing, regardless of whether they are called “associate”, “senior consultant”, “analyst” or whatever.
My jobs a bit different as I get paid to leverage my decades of experience (and still impressive smarts), not just my ability to quickly code in the latest and greatest tech.
Have you looked into government jobs? City/county/state/federal? Working for the gummint has its own set of headaches and frustrations, but job security may be better and they can frequently provide a nice pension upon retirement, along with some other decent benefits.
I left the private sector for a state job at age 44, retired at 65, and that pension is sweet.
I’m going to assume the ageism here is an attempt at sarcasm. I hope…
I interviewed a ton of entry-level people (at an ad agency). We hired kids still in college, and we hired PhDs in their high 50s. (And guess what, the Doctor of Classical Literature was indeed smarter… but was clueless when it came to hip-hop.)
We didn’t care what someone’s diploma said, or how old they were, or how dysfunctional their current company was. All we cared about was “What can this employee do for us?”
That selfishness made for very egalitarian hiring practices:
Race? Religion? Age? Gender fluidity? Musical tastes? Fashion sense? We. Don’t. Care.
Just show up, be a decent person, and do a good job!
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ps, I, too, left that ad job (50-70 hrs/week was ok, but not once we had kids) and got a public sector job. In my case, I started teaching part time at the local tech school, and eventually I got to teach full time (at almost 50 yrs old). The pension was great, and meant I could retire!
I apologize because that was not clear. I had intended something else to make it obvious satire and I must have screwed it up in editing.
It is absurd that some people actually say it, and some of those might even believe it. I hope @msmith537 understands I didn’t mean that to be taken literally.