my reach is global, my tower secure....

I’m changing jobs on Monday.

After fourteen months working with my little team on a project, next week I will be taking up a new position somewhere else in the organisation. I'm on secondment, and because secondments are in theory capped to a year, this was always going to happen sooner or later. What’s exciting for me this time around is that I won’t just be returning to my old job in IT. In fact, I won’t be returning to IT at all: I’ve got a completely different job.

I was in a bad place when I started this job. An incompetent line manager had taken a personal dislike to me and was making my life as difficult as he possibly could and marginalising me wherever possible. Taking this secondment quickly made all of those problems irrelevant (and the line manager left the business around March this year anyway, but even before then the clouds lifted and I was really starting to enjoy work again). Having my own little team to manage was a real lifeline for me: I’ve loved working in a different part of the organisation and taking on a much more pastoral role than I ever had – formally, at least – within IT. Whisper it quietly, but I’ve thrived having more of a leadership role too. I no longer feel like I’m outside the tent pissing in, and being able to tangibly influence things seems to have brought the best out of me.

You might not have noticed, but I’ve been moaning a lot less about work here too …. Which benefits you, dear reader. (Unless you hate me drivelling on about music instead and took a perverse kind of pleasure in my descriptions of our Dilbert-like organisation.  Each to their own).

Luckily for me, I made enough of an impression on my bosses in this job for them to actively seek me out and encourage me to apply for another job in their wider team. It’s sort of related to what I’ve been doing over the last year or so, but it’s a much more prominent role with a lot more accountability. I’m not getting any more money, but if I’ve learned anything over the last couple of years, it’s that a sense of self-worth is a lot more important to me in my job than the money I earn.

I’m a little bit daunted by my new job because there’s so much that I don’t know and I’m being thrown right in at the deep-end, starting on Monday. It’s good to be a little bit nervous though, I think. It shows I'm out of my comfort zone. It might have been easier to slip back into my old job, but I’m fairly sure that sooner or later it would have driven me back to where I was a year or so ago, and I don’t think anyone wants that.

I’ll be sad to leave my team, for sure, but I’m not going far away and they’ll have to work with me every week anyway. They’re all wearing black tomorrow and they’re taking me out for a farewell lunch, which is very sweet of them. It’s nice to know that you’ve made a difference to some people, even if only in a small way.

When I first started work, I used to think that I had the talent and desire to make it all the way to the top.  Perhaps I've got the talent, but luckily for me, I realised somewhere along the way that other things are simply more important.

[I've been in this meeting.  Have you?]