Wendy's Letter

“ I can't even get a job as an office junior. I don't even get asked to interviews. I've sent off hundreds of applications. There are jobs out there that I could do with one hand tied behind my back... ”

There are lots of us in that situation and we hear the same complaints all the time. I had a very successful career in IT both as a technical specialist and a manager but it ended in May 2009 and there was no going back to that particular path. At first I tried to retrain as a project manager, but my heart wasn't really in it. I didn't actually want to go back to the 70 hours a week high pressured environment focussed solely on company profit. I also tried setting up my own business but, again, I wasn't in love with the ideas I was trying to sell so I failed. (If you are infatuated with an idea, self-employment is very much an option - I just wasn't.)

By now I was very, very heavily in debt and nothing was working for me. Finally in March this year, I decided to face my financial situation. I went to Citizens Advice for financial advice, which I got, and was referred to Women and Work for help with employment.

I attended my first drop in with my wonderful CV that I was so proud of. All my technical and team leading successes and my high powered customer negotiations were in it.

I signed on to the Recruiting Older Workers (ROW) project and started working with Libby and others. I had no idea then where I was going to end up.

Over the next few weeks, I learnt to grieve for my former career and bury it and say goodbye - which is what I really wanted, I just had to learn to do without all the labels that came with it. It used to be important to me to be known as “ a good to work for manager”, “ a unique combination of technical and business savvy” and other past accolades. I learnt to accept that I had skills that could be used elsewhere, that the past still existed but it was now the past. When I attended courses with other women, I learnt from them all the possibilities I could be in my new life.

Through work placements at Women and Work and starting to volunteer for Citizens Advice (CAB), I built up a CV, all of it unpaid work, that got noticed. My IT career now starts on the second page and only the parts relevant to the job application are highlighted. I took every training opportunity that was offered from Women and Work (and these were many and varied), the Skills Centre and CAB. I was focussed on getting off Job Seekers Allowance as soon as possible.

Getting into work, is, in my experience, a unique combination of reassessment, confidence building and the generation of a sense of purpose. The training, the work placements and the volunteering were fundamental to this.

One of the most significant lessons for me from all this process is that sometimes you can be in too much of a hurry to get somewhere without really finding where it is you want to be. If life offers you the chance to reassess, take it and live it. It will probably be painful but it is a liberating opportunity to widen your horizons. Meeting other women at Women and Work, certainly helped with that.

The most important course I attended at Women and Work was the interpersonal skills course (IPS). I didn't finish it because I found work before it ended but through that course and through reading Susan Jeffers “ Feel the fear and do it anyway”, my panorama expanded.

I now have an aim and I am working towards it. Financially, I am selling my house, which will cover a large part of my debts, and I am downsizing to being a lodger in a friend's house. I am investigating training as a mediator, eventually in family mediation, I hope. I love volunteering at CAB and my old skills are very useful there. So I am looking for part-time work that allows me to continue to do that. So far, I have two jobs, one as a carer and one as an office cleaner. I am continuing to look for part-time work that makes better use of my skills and know that I will find it.

I must emphasise that through Women and Work and my own personal journey, I have found an aim that I feel is right for me. The point is that I could have decided on a completely different aim, maybe to become a retail manager, maybe to work in recruitment, I don't know. You may start off feeling washed up, frustrated and worthless but if you're willing to change that, and to be open, you can find out that life offers some surprising opportunities and that the support is there to work towards them.

Wendy
July 2010.