"How do we make up a multi-million pound shortfall? Cut the lowest paid members of staff!"

[spindizzy]

In super fun work news: work are apparently trying to get 258 "full-time equivalent" hours of people to take voluntary redundancy, and if they don't get enough takers they will start enforcing redundancy on people. :) :) :) This process has been a shitshow from start to finish.

• They announced this on the 16th of April, opened applications the week after. The original closure date for volunteering was last week, and we're not finding out a damn thing about the structure or proposed changes post-redundancy until tomorrow. They've moved the end date, thankfully, but whose great idea was to get people to apply to lose their jobs with no idea of what it would look like for the survivors?


• This is to make up for CATASTROPHIC financial mismanagement, but everyone responsible for it has already quit and taken their golden handshake. Are the executive board taking pay cuts to mitigate some of the damage to the university's accounts? lolno.


• There were repeated meetings that boiled down to "Stuff is going on, but we can't tell you what it is because HR Won't Let Us." The bosses are still adamant that they can't tell us anything, but at least they're not holding mandatory meetings about it anymore. But don't worry guys, what they CAN tell us is that this process is going to continue for TWO YEARS. If you survive this round, you might still be made redundant later! :D


• The decisions about who is expendable are being made based off competency maps written by people who literally don't know what we do. No really; I've spoken to one of the guys who did the map and he genuinely has no idea what my job involves.


• What is the compensation package if you leave? We don't know! There is a calculator to work out your potential payout, but it says in big letters THIS IS NOT BINDING, DO NOT MAKE ANY DECISIONS BASED ON THIS CALCULATOR. ... What is it for then?


• Apparently the voluntary redundancy is weighted towards people who haven't worked here for long, and the compulsory redundancy is weighted towards people who've been here forever. I've been here for 8 years, so I think I'm going to get the worst of both worlds?


• There is This One Fucking Guy in upper management who loves to crack jokes about making us all reapply for our jobs. Has done for years. He is having a field day with dropping hints about changing everyone's schedules, making us reapply for jobs, no one having a home base library... God, what a ghoul.

About half of my coworkers have put in an application just to buy enough time to make informed decisions... And I joined in on this action! "Do I want to leave my job" is a complicated question. "Do I want to spend two years waiting for the other shoe" is not. Lex has said he can support us if we cut back, and if the redundancy package is what the calculator said, I can probably make it to the end of the year job hunting full-time. There's always a chance I won't get chosen, and I'll keep my job! We just won't know until July.

Emotionally... God, I don't even know. My baby sister says I can have a little mid-life crisis! As a treat! Which is probably what this is, because I'm looking at my job and going "Is this really what I want to do?" Like, academic libraries were never where my heart lay anyway – it has none of the things that I actually enjoy about working in libraries – but this was the only place that offered permanent contracts, so here I stayed.

Genuinely considering moving out of libraries entirely, but all of my experience lends towards generic admin or customer service roles. Part of me wants to see if I can shift sideways into publishing, maybe proofreading or copyediting? Downside is a) those jobs are wildly oversubscribed anyway, and b) my experience is admin and customer service. If I want to actually use the "contributing editor for Hugo-award winning fanzine and reviewer at multiple sites  " thing on my CV, I have to expose my fannish identity and hope that it's not a deal-breaker. (... Possibly lock down EVERYTHING? "What were you doing at the devil's sacrament" is a valid response to someone questioning anything on a logged-in-users-only AO3 account.)

I can probably make it work. There are places that want volunteer slush readers, there are qualifications I can apply for, there's exploitative freelance websites that might give me something I can put on a CV. I can 100% show willing! And I'm going to be applying for admin/customer service jobs anyway so it's not like I'm going to starve because I can't have my ~~one twu job~~! I just need to figure out if any of that will help me on the getting a job front. ... Is it rude to message people you know and be like "CAN I ASK YOU QUESTIONS ABOUT GETTING A JOB?!" Because it feels rude. Even if you're not asking them to get you a job, it still feels rude.

I've got a very rough plan of what I need to do on the job hunt front. I've got a spreadsheet of places to apply, temp agencies, potential freelance sites (if anyone has any recommendations for sites that are Not Scams, please let me know; I am new here), I know where to look for skill-refresher courses, so I just need to rebuild my CV and get on with it.

(The tl;dr section of my CV where I sum up why I'm amazing and should have all of the jobs is stressing me out. "I have been doing this for a thousand years and am not afraid to make phone calls" should be the easiest selling point of all time! Phrasing that so that a recruiter doesn't laugh me out of the building is not!)

So yeah, everything is fine. Got some job hunting to do, and I'm naffed off, but no need to worry about it. If you want to give advice though, I am ALL EARS.