Recession and redundancy - disaster or opportunity?

My mate Steven's 26th birthday party was on Saturday night, so my boyfriend and I had the perfect excuse to spend the day - well, the whole weekend, really - wandering round in the glorious sunshine before heading over to Covent Garden where the party was. Despite a spate of redundancies at the City law firm he works for, Steven confided cheerfully that he wasn't worried.

"I've decided to take voluntary redundancy," he confessed over his pint of beer. "There's so many people losing their jobs, I'm not going to sit around and wait to see if I'm next."
"You're doing what?!?" I gasped. "I thought you liked your job?"
"Oh, I do like my job," he answered airily, "but I work such long hours all the time, I haven't had a break for years. So the opportunity's come up, and I've decided to take it. Besides which," he added, grinning, "I get a much bigger payoff this way."
"But, mate," I continued to protest. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"
"Well, yeah," he said. "I mean, come on, this is an opportunity, innit? I can sit at home, have a rest, do nothing for a year, maybe I'll even travel a bit, then go back to work somewhere else..."

Now that's a response I haven't often heard this recession: "It's an opportunity". Open any newspaper or turn on any TV, and you'll hear a thousand and one doom-and-gloom articles about the failing economy and the ever-increasing queues outside jobcentres up and down the UK. In the past 18 months the BBC news website has featured stories of despair from people who have either been made redundant, or are under threat of being made redundant. People are worried sick, taking on more work, taking pay cuts, working longer hours, being nice to the boss, all in a desperate scramble to hold onto their jobs as tightly as possible, yet here's my mate Steven jumping at the chance to lose his job - hell, he's even asking his firm to let him go.

While the next few weeks will show if Steven actually meant it (or whether he'd simply drunk too much beer), I couldn't help wondering about both points of view. Clearly the media have painted the credit crunch as an unmitigated disaster, the worst financial crisis for a century; but there is a small crowd who feel that the recession has thrown up plenty of opportunity. In Steven's case, he's 26, single and has no domestic or financial commitments. He went straight into practising law after university, so unlike myself, he didn't have the chance to travel or try something else before embarking on a career. It's easy to see how he'd view this recession as a big opportunity for himself.

But it's not just him, though. Some businesses are taking that view as well. Budget supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl in the UK are apparently having a great time, as is any business marketed for "the credit crunch". Foyles Bookstore in London's Charing Cross Road put up posters listing their examples of businesses that had started in recessions:

• Burger King
• Disney
• FedEx
• Microsoft
• CNN
• General Electric
• MTV
• Sports Illustrated
• Hewlett Packard

among others.
While I am not going to be one of those dismissive or unrealistically "optimistic" people who bray that this recession is nothing to worry about, or who belittle the hardship and distress of many going through tough circumstances, I do feel it's probably worth remembering that there are two sides to every story as with everything else.

Now I just have to sit down with a cup of tea and consider what opportunity my own redundancy has given me!

Holding Back The Fears

I was woken this morning by the ringing of my mobile phone; my ever-charming recruitment consultant James had a potential lead at a financial institution in the City. "I can't promise that it would lead to a vacancy," he told me, "but my contact seemed interested, so can I forward your details to him? It's likely that it'll lead to a temporary job, but like I said, at this stage I can't promise that it definitely will."

I've been hearing this virtually every day in the past two months, so I gave him my usual jaded yes. I hung up and spent the rest of the morning pondering last night's revelation about a colleague of my boyfriend who I know and had been, to everyone's knowledge, happy in his job.

It turns out that all this time he wasn't. My boyfriend (along with his inner circle) has been asked to keep this quiet, but the lad is quitting his job in 3 months, and going back to university to study a degree in politics. Needless to say, it came as a shock.

For me, it also brought home my own fears. I know I've been too scared to take the plunge all these years, but even now, when I am actually taking baby steps towards a career change, the idea of being out of an accountancy job brings me a mixture of relief... and terror. Last week's realisations that I'll have to alter my original game-plan of staying in that field until I'm "ready" to leap should have galvanised me into action, but it left me paralysed with fear.

What is it that I am so scared of? I questioned myself, and came up with the following answers:

1. I am scared of disappointing my family.
2. I am scared that the career change won't work out, and then I'll be left unemployable.
3. I am scared that I will have no money.
4. I am scared that I am being foolish, or expecting far too much from life or from work.
5. I am scared that, for all my overwhelming desire to write, I can't actually write. I am scared that I have no ability in that arena and that no-one would be interested in what I've got to say.
6. I am scared of being considered a failure.

I thought for a moment, then wrote down the following:

1. Striving for what I thought my family would approve of, led me up a path that I hated and felt I didn't fit into for ten years.
2. I won't know that until I try. Besides which, most of the most successful people are unemployable. That's why they've struck out on their own path.
3. My current "career" has actually ended up costing me far more (in expensive suits, training fees, salary deductions, severance fees, and emotional/health issues) than I've got out of it.
4. It's not expecting "far too much" from life to ask that "the good outweighs the bad" about one's job - as my lovely boyfriend constantly reminds me, spending 8 hours of one's waking moments per day (not even including travelling time) is too much time to spend being miserable.
5. According to the author Stephen King, Stephenie Meyer "can't write worth a damn". That hasn't stopped her Twilight series becoming one of the biggest-selling book series around the globe. Madonna (no offence to her fans) hasn't got as good a singing voice as many other pop singers, but hasn't let that stop her becoming the worldwide Queen of Pop.
6. I am fairly resourceful and self-reliant. Anything I've failed at in the past, I've tried harder, tried again or tried something different till I succeeded. Why should this time be any different?

It's not as if I don't have the knowledge or the tools to get writing, or explore other subjects I like (like sociology and English literature), or even to research some more how to break into another field; yet I find that fear is the biggest obstacle to taking any sort of action at all. It can even be worse than having a physical disability: once, when a sports injury meant I could barely walk for a week, it never stopped me showing up to work until I recovered (although my limp caused much amusement in the office). But being scared and fearful stops you from even limping to your destination, let alone walking to it. In fact, it makes you unable to move at all.

I suppose one way of moving forward, in spite of everything I'm afraid of, is to motivate myself by remembering just how bad it got - the searing chest pains, like red-hot knives, that I had before I quit that job last year were one example. How did the rest of you hold back any crippling fears you had?

Quitting your job???? Don't you know there's a recession on????

I swear, if I could have a pound every time I've heard a version of the above question I'd be a seriously rich girl by now. One of the first things you realise - when you first announce your intention to change career - is that not everyone agrees that it's a good idea. I reckon it's fair to say that once you've made that decision, you need a mind of steel to resist some of the doubt and incredulity that comes your way. As if making the decision to do it wasn't hard enough!

Obviously I'm not referring to my closest friends, boyfriend or family; they were relieved as it meant they didn't have to hear me moaning about my job anymore. Well, my mum isn't totally comfortable, bless her, as I explained in my previous post ("Back To The Beginning") but I'm sure she'd want the best for me.

No, the people I'm referring to here were my accountancy colleagues, or friends that had been colleagues, even the ones who'd proclaim (either in the office or at Friday drinks) that they didn't like their jobs either. Many of them thought I was mad. I remember when I handed in my notice last summer at the accountancy firm I worked at: I'm sure my boss just thought I had a bad case of PMT. It took some time for me to convince him I was absolutely serious. "But... but... but..." he spluttered, "don't you know there's a recession on? You won't find another job! Accountancy firms aren't hiring that much at the moment, you know, it's not like two years ago!"

By that stage, I wasn't quite so fussed. I'd been planning this for a good few months, since about Christmas 2007 in fact. Even if I didn't know what career I wanted to change to at that stage, knowing back then that I definitely wanted to change career was enough to galvanise me into taking my first action: sorting out my finances.

What? I hear you cry. You mean like budgets and savings? But that's boring! And you'd be right. It is. But necessary. Who was it who said "when the going gets tough, the tough have cash"? Making a career change isn't always smooth sailing. So, you have to be prepared. That means financially as well as emotionally - the last thing you want to be thinking when you're worried about whether your career change will work or not is "Shit - I'm flat broke!"

After doing some research, I was shocked to discover that I was being vastly underpaid; the market rate for someone of my skills and experience was about 10-15% more than what I was being paid. I asked my boss for a pay rise. He refused. I realised then that I had to leave.

The other factor in my decision to leave was that around this time I started to get sharp pains in my chest, like searing hot knives, on a permanent basis. I was only 26 and in good health. The doctor was convinced it was stress; while I was doubtful of his diagnosis for a while I did notice that as soon as I handed in my resignation notice, the pains magically disappeared. 'Twas a miracle, I tell thee!

Before I handed in my notice, I contacted a recruitment consultant to sound out the job market, and in particular, the market for temporary and contract jobs. In summer 2008, the job market was certainly a lot better than now, so I was able to get a temporary job in commerce rather than an accountancy firm. I figured that, while I had enough savings to last me a few months without work, it wasn't enough to give up accountancy completely. In fact, with a mortgage to pay, it may well take quite a while before I am able to give up accountancy completely. But I'm on the way to doing so, rest assured.

The temp job paid pretty well, which was good as it enabled me to to save more money into the "emergency cash fund". (Also known as "career change fund" or "my boss can shove this job up his arse fund" - take your pick). It was so hard trying not to spend the extra cash I was earning - why is it that the moment you go on a budget, suddenly you are surrounded with so much temptation? I think the only thing that kept me from splurging during this time was the knowledge that the less money I had saved for the career change, the longer I'd have to stay being an accountant!

While I still don't have the financial resources right now to quit accountancy completely, I've had time to read books on changing careers and think about what I want to do. I can't quite sit down and say "OK, I want to do X, and I definitely know that's what I want to do," so what I've decided to do is follow what I'm interested in and actually try it out. My temp contract finished last month, so I'm looking for another accountancy job to continue funding the career change, but in the meantime I have started that English Literature A-Level I wanted to do 10 years ago. I found a place that does distance-learning qualifications - it's called the National Extension College and for those of you in the UK, the website is http://www.nec.ac.uk/. I spent ages looking for a reputable distance-learning company as there's some real scams out there on the Internet, and I found this one on a UK government advice website.

In addition to that English Literature A-Level that I've finally got round to doing, I'm also doing an A-Level in Sociology (opted not to go for Psychology in the end), also by distance-learning with the National Extension College. I had to use some of my savings to pay for all of them, but hopefully it'll be worth it.... when I actually get started on the courses! The good thing about doing it this way is that I get to try out whether it does suit me or not; and if it doesn't, then I suppose I shall retreat back to my accountancy stepping-stone and think again.

So.... that's a potted history of how I started my career change, and where I am at the moment. Obviously it's very much a work in progress and there are topics I've touched on, like personal finance issues and first steps, that I want to go into more detail and share my tips and advice on. Probably the next time I take an afternoon tea break.