Friday 30 March 2018

Number 59: Leave a Job You Hate


Completed 27 September 2017

Leave a job you hate, this was going to be difficult as I don’t believe in doing something you hate for a long time however I recently took the plunge and left my previous job after more than seven and a half years for something new and while I didn’t hate the entirety of the job, there were some things about it I did.


But let’s roll back to the beginning where it all started…

I moved to Brisbane in 2009 as an internal transfer for the company I was working with at the time, only to have them make the role redundant after about a year. So I was then looking for a new job, where my transferrable skills of profiling and skip tracing could be useful.

One of the jobs I happened to apply for was for a company called Collection House, a finance/debt collection company based in Fortitude Valley. I successfully moved through the interview phase and was offered a full-time position, starting the following week.

I ended up doing a year in general collections for Lion Finance before moving into their newly established skip tracing team, Team Phoenix. An area I personally excelled at and enjoyed immensely, as we had a lot more tools and freedom to be able to work accounts that suited us. After a further 12 months of this, a position became available within the technologies team which I immediately applied for.

I had always been the “Unofficial IT Guy” at the majority of places I worked, so actually having a role in IT would be a dream.

I went through the interview process and was successful in obtaining a position within the technologies team. It was an amazing first couple of years, learning all manner of new systems and processes, expanding my knowledge base to a decent level and learning from those around me.
Learning the basics of Active Directory, Exchange and Cisco systems as well as a deep dive into our internal UNIX based collection system. But after a while, the learning slowed down and eventually stopped.

This was the beginning of completing “Number 59”. I grew bored over the next few years, and while I continued to raise my hand at every opportunity to learn new systems or take ownership of them they were few and far between.

With the lack of engagement from work, I started putting more time, effort and money into my photography skills and used those at work, helping out where I could with photos for out websites, annual reports and social functions. But even that, after some fairly large changes in management and some bad vibes with some “writing on the wall” about the future of our department. It was time to start looking elsewhere.

Luckily I didn’t have to actually look that hard, as I just put some initial feelers out of “Hey if you hear of anything let me know…” and within a few days, I had a contact lined up at a new managed services company.


So from there, it was resume, one-way interview, online interview and in-person interview, before successfully being offered the role, obviously while keeping it all very much on the DL. Once the offer was made and accepted, I drafted my letter of resignation and gave my full 4 weeks’ notice.

My final 4 weeks absolutely flew by, with training, updating documentation and my processes as well as being asked to do lots of photography for CLH before I left.
But I did it, had my last day, said my goodbyes, kept in touch with many people that I enjoyed the company of, left on civil terms in case I’m needed for future.




So not a job I entirely hated, but there were parts of it I did.

The people were great people, and I’ve kept in touch with quite a few of them, caught up on occasion and generally maintained lines of communication via social media and other ways.
My direct managers, throughout my time there were always amazing, Aaron, Beth during my collection days and Adam and Stan during my time in IT. The guys and girls in training, like Luna, Dannielle, Justin and Sarah and the HR team were always amazing to deal with.


The negatives tended to focus around things like lack of growth, stagnation and a possible failure of harnessing individual potential past a certain point. Another factor was the change in senior management, while no fault of their own, it was for me being unfamiliar with a lot of them and not having that kinship I previously knew.


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