So, it finally happened. A few weeks ago, I was offered a new position. Surprisingly, it was exactly the position I wanted, but didn't think I could have. I literally had a five year plan to get this role and I cannot express my glee when it was offered to me five years before I expected it!
It's a policy position and I am stoked! The entire reason why I went back to school to get my masters was to work in policy. It's why I chose to get the degree I did instead of going to law school. After working for years as a paralegal, I realized that I was tired of defending bad laws and I wanted to do more to create good ones. That said, I didn't want to be a politician, so policy work seemed the best option.
For the last three years, I've worked in compliance enforcement, which means that I was still at the end of the line. Insurance plans came to my division when they'd done something wrong, and our focus was on punishing them for not fixing it timely, or in some cases, helping them to come into compliance. The analysis part was interesting, but the work was really demoralizing for me. I think I realized that I needed a new job after I had to take an action against a plan with which I heavily sympathized. It was in a region that had been devastated by natural disasters, but nobody in my division or group was willing to consider these events as mitigating factors. I realized then that I was still doing what I had wanted to move away from: enforcing bad laws or regulations.
I had multiple interviews for various positions in my agency, but none of them panned out and, truthfully, none of them were really interesting to me. I mean, a part of me would have jumped at the chance to just get out of compliance, but I knew, deep down, that accepting a job just to get out of the job I had started to hate wasn't a wise choice. Talk about the possibility of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire! So, when I received an interview request for the position I've accepted, it felt like my stars were aligning. The interview went well and within two weeks, I had the offer and I was making plans for my departure with my boss.
Since then, I've really started to have issues with my current position, and my initial feelings of regret for leaving my team are quickly morphing into indifference. For starters, my boss insisted I needed to stay on for four weeks, which unfortunately put me starting my new position while on vacation that was already approved. I thought about altering the vacation as I'm not actually going anywhere, but I am attending an online residency, and I didn't want to have a hectic schedule my first week in trying to work around attending the seminars.
Then, my boss asked me to create a summary of my current projects so he could reassign them, which I did. We were supposed to discuss them at a meeting, but then he was out the day of the meeting. Since he had scheduled the meeting, I assumed he would schedule another one. This was my mistake, I should have been more proactive, but then he announced he was taking vacation during my last week and, as far as I can tell, only one of my current projects was reassigned.
It's also felt like he's been in denial the last few weeks. I gave a briefing to our group director and received high praise from multiple people for how I handled it. He started to say how well that would serve me in my future, but then seemed to realize that my future wasn't here, and finished his sentence with something like "wherever you end up." This was after he condescendingly said in a meeting before I told him I was leaving that my projects were really just "juggling balls" and that none of them required a lot of attention. After the latter comment, I started to feel unvalued, which just further supported my decision to leave.
I'm disheartened as I really liked my boss and my team. It would be nice to leave a job simply for a better opportunity and not because I desperately want to get out, but that's really only happened once or twice before. Similar to how I am with relationships, I'm usually well over a job by the time I leave it. It's just that I've been strategizing how to get out of something for so long.
There are some downsides to the new job, so don't go thinking I am expecting everything to be perfect there just because I'm disappointed with my current situation. I'm an early bird in my current role and my agency has flexible hours, but when discussing my schedule with my future bosses, they made it clear that those early hours wouldn't work for them, at least not on a daily basis. On the flip side of this, if I continue to get up as early as I do now, I can utilize that time for writing, and maybe finish TWO novels this year instead of just the one.
Another downside is teleworking. While we're still full time telework in my office because of the pandemic, there are signs that will be changing soon. When discussing my telework schedule, my future bosses said that most people in the office telework on Mondays and Fridays, with a few people doing 3 days of telework. That may change due to the pandemic and continuing to social distance (especially with the variants starting to be more concerning), but I had hoped to bump my telework days from 2 to 3. This isn't written in stone, but I get the feeling the new position is more in-person collaborative than virtually collaborative like my old position, so that may impact things. I had considered applying for the full time telework program as most people in my current team do that, but it doesn't sound like that's an option for the new job. I am hoping I can at least keep my telework days (Thursday and Friday) because I prefer working in the office on Mondays when traffic is light and no one is there!
The last downside is one I chose with the full knowledge of what I was giving up. Before I had this offer, my boss had told me of an opportunity for a promotion that would be coming right around the time I got this offer; however, I had already been interviewing when he told me about it. After thinking long and hard about it, I ultimately decided that if the right job was offered to me, I would be willing to forego the promotion because, at this point in my career, I'm more interested in enjoying what I do than making more money doing something I don't enjoy. If I was still making the salary I did at the state, I might have felt differently, but at the end of the day, if I'm going to spend 40+ hours a week doing a job, it'd be nice if I didn't dread it. Besides, while it may take longer to bump up to that higher salary in the new position, it's not like I'll never qualify for it again.
Next week is my final week in this position and I'm definitely looking forward to moving on, but I'm trying not to check out before I'm gone. I worked hard to prove myself in this position and built my reputation on my willingness to learn and pitch in, so I'm not about to ruin it by screwing around now. But I will say, after some of the things that have happened with my boss in my last few weeks, it's difficult to motivate myself not to check out. I'm optimistic though that my respect for my colleagues will win out over my irritation at his behavior.
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