Here are three updates from past letter-writers.
1. How do you learn what types of jobs exist?
It’s been a little over four months since I sent in my question, I’m still at the retail job, and I have so much good news I barely know where to start.
To clarify my situation a little more, I’m a bottom-rung manager, and at the time I wrote in, I had been dealing with three major challenges for the entire duration of my employment: lean staffing, weak managerial oversight (in the end I effectively went without a direct manager for nine months), and a problem employee who exacerbated the former and exploited the latter. When I wrote in I was hitting rock bottom. It seemed clear to me that I was never going to have the staff I needed because I didn’t have the support from upper management to get rid of the person who was driving all my good employees to quit. The only way out I could see was to quit myself.
But a few months ago, I finally got a proper direct manager, and their arrival saved the department. I’m sure some things had been at work behind the scenes beforehand, but the fact is, my entire team and I were in open despair at things ever improving, and no one ever seemed to respond with any urgency until they arrived. It was their support, transparency, and consistent advocacy on our behalf that convinced us to hold out one last time for things to get better. And finally, finally things did. Extra hours materialized and additional hires were made. The problem employee was removed from my department and is finally seeing disciplinary action. My team and I are coming to work energized for maybe the first time since any of us were hired, and we’re excited to make our department a place we can be proud of.
I do also want to thank everyone for the comments! While I’m happily staying on in my current position for now, I definitely don’t see myself doing this forever, and now I have lots of ideas for what I could do next.
2. Clothes for exercising during work breaks (#5 at the link)
I chickened out, and just got up extra extra early to work out at home before work. Not the most exciting update, I know. I really appreciated all the suggestions from the commentariat. At the end of the day though, I’m a fat, minority, woman in a field dominated by conservative white men, with lots of ex-military who still maintain the physical standards of their enlisted days. And I just couldn’t overcome the self-consciousness around my body, which I know is an artifact of living in a patriarchal society. Luckily, my regular gym got retrofitted with a more powerful HVAC and reopened with strict covid protocols a few months after I wrote, so I’m back to my pre-pandemic workout plan.
3. How can I increase my chances when I’m under-qualified for a job? (first update)
I wonder how it feels to get work bulletins through many phases of someone’s career? I wanted to let commenters know that years after my previous move, two very predictable paths have played out:
1) It turns out that people who want to hire junior employees in a small organization based on personal relationships to let them grow into bigger roles can sometimes avoid paying them more or making space for new responsibilities in a graceful, collaborative way as time goes on. But…
2) I was 100% right that the greater responsibility and scope of the role I took positioned me for better things anyway.
Long story short, I was sincerely happy in my new job in 2018 and sincerely very frustrated by 2021. Then, after a few months of job searching and a flirtation with freelancing, the skills I needed to develop at that same job and a million Ask A Manager advice posts snagged me a significant raise at a new organization that comes with huge opportunity to be more visible in my field.
Now I’ve been *there* for a few months, and found this place of course has its own wrinkles! What I’m taking from all this is that it’s fine if your individual jobs are “good enough to grow in” or “good for now” rather than perfect. I look back at my letter from 2017 and remember how hung up I was on that one job. It’s not worth it, new grads! Look for where you’ll grow and make sure you’re still growing. If it stops being good, take care of yourself. There is someone out there who needs you to fix a problem for them.
It’s been stressful couple of years, huh? Everyone hang in there for the rest of 2022.
