Generation Y are known for their sense of urgency and privilege. You start a job and after 3 months you believe you are ready for your next endeavour.They say it takes 12 months to fully get the hang of any job. This means that Gen Y are ready to move on from a job after having been there for 25% of the time they need to be competent in the role.
I am by definition Gen Y. Born in 1982, so anywhere between 1 and 3 years in, depending on your source, but I have always considered myself to hold the values characterised by Gen X. Despite being clearly defined into Gen Y, I have worked at the same company for over 8 years. I have worked my way up from inbound sales consultant to team leader to project lead to sales manager... It has only been when my career slowed in progression that I have noticed my Gen Y traits coming to the surface.
After 8 years of commitment and dedicated service I find more and more I feel the bar getting higher, the better I do and the more I learn.
I started working there at 21 and was timid but excited to be earning a whole 38k which was a nice jump from my previous salary of 30K. During my 18 or so months in inbound sales, I was content to learn the job and the best ways to assist clients and design our ads. I was encouraged to apply for account management roles but in the end the team that most appealed to me was the ad design team, called ad production.
This role was where I began my path to leadership. I learned over the next year, how to manage a team, coach and develop staff, reporting and analysis, building key relationships and networking. After 18 more months, I was successful in getting the job I had hoped for, managing the Account Management team. I managed this team for 2 years before being successful in my next goal; Team Manager.
I now managed 3 teams of outbound sales staff. Around 30 people, and reported directly to the sales manager. I knew upon applying for this position that it was being phased out, or restructured so to speak, after 6 months. I ended up getting 8 months and a 'projects' role working across 3 mini projects required by the business. I am uncertain on how I performed in these roles, even though I achieved bonus and was always given positive feedback. It's something about this organisation, that you don't seem to know too much about your development areas, if you have not met expectations. From agent to manager level the support and coaching drops to almost nothing. You become too busy to coach competent people, so noticing instead what they have not done right becomes the focus. My job now is to coach and develop people but I have very little of this coaching or support myself. I sometimes believe this should be my job: coaching , because it's what I do best. There just aren't any jobs for it that pay what the job is worth.
So the project role was another 8 months across the 3 projects, then I was focussed on 1 of them for another year, and reported directly to the General Manager. I felt like my career was finally about to go somewhere new. The business I was working with had initiated a sales team to be managed within our business organisation. I moved them over, inducted them in our culture and processes, ran the team, led the board meetings, presented to the CEO and National Sales Manager.
This project began in September 09 and after the end of last financial year, June 2011, they decided to move the team in-house, therefore my career began to halt. After the project I had been on for almost 2 years was no longer available to me I began to worry if I would have a job to go to at the end of it. My General Manager is one of my mentors and had been very positive and reassuring that I'd have a role somewhere, she just wasn't sure what yet. I was given almost 3 months notice that the team would be moving back which gave me plenty of time to worry. At the end of it, when my team was moved back into their head office, the job opportunity that became available was ironically my old team leader job with Account Managers, that I had done for 2 years, almost 3 years earlier. It was great to still have a job, but realistically it has been a career step backwards.
I have learned a few things about myself in my 8 years, but the main one is that in line with my Gen Y characteristics, I need to be feeling like I am moving towards a goal to feel successful. And in line with my Gen X traits, I will always commit while these things are present to keep me motivated valued and challenged. This has forced me to reassess my career. I am now looking for my next challenge, my next home away from home, my next working environment. Having said that, 8 years is the longest relationship I've ever had so the prospect of breaking up with my employer and moving on, is very scary. That's a topic for another story though. Stay tuned...
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