Around the middle of December the company I work for had a company wide meeting where we found out several sites were being closed and the site I work at in Bedford is under review. My department was apparently safe but we were to be relocated to the main office in London. Redundancy wasn’t specifically mentioned but it was very likely that with the closure of so many sites there wouldn’t be a need for so many database admins. As I had been in this situation before and had been made redundant as a result I thought I’d start looking for something new.
I applied for a few positions and managed to get an interview in January. I went to the interview and was offered the job there and then. I was happy but the position was based in Northampton which is a good 20-25 miles away and after driving to Bedford for a year I was hoping for something a little closer. Luckily another position came up in Milton Keynes which I applied for and subsequently got. I haven’t e-mailed the first company yet. I think I’ll do that Monday.
The position is relatively similar to my current role. I’ll be doing a lot of database work and manipulating data which I’m pretty good at. It also requires doing a bit of support and possibly visiting companies to implement software. The best part is that I might have to go over to the head office in Rotterdam to do some training. I’ve never been to the Netherlands and I’ve always been quite interested in going to Rotterdam so hurrah!
This time round job hunting has been a pretty positive experience. All of the previous times I’ve had to search for a job I’ve been close to madness. It doesn’t help that when I was first in Brighton I had no proper work experience and was fresh from university. I was also searching for a job in London in 2009 when the downturn had really taken hold. I was applying for jobs that already had 300-1000 applications. And then of course there was the months I was looking for a job in media… not fun.
I think it helps now that I have some marketable skills that are actually pretty desirable. I started my current role in a junior position but was promoted to database administrator. When you mix a pretty good grasp of Microsoft SQL Server with my own personal learning at the Open University and playing with programming at home, it actually makes a half decent candidate. This is great because job hunting has always been so soul destroying as it’s hard to properly prove or even communicate that you have the skills for your average office job. Good organisational or communication skills are far more abstract than a half decent knowledge of database theory and a years experience manipulating data.
The only downside to these experiences is that I just wish I had started all this 5 years ago. I know that hindsight is 20/20 but it just feels like I could have been so much further along if I had just started with this career instead of dabbling in media and everything else. Of course, it could be argued that those experiences put me in this position and maybe I wouldn’t be so passionate about where my career is going without those jobs.
Anyway, I’ll be starting on the 7th February. It’ll be strange starting a new job. I’ve managed to get pretty comfortable where I am and learning everything needed to do a new job is always daunting. It should be exciting though.
Plus… not leaving the house at 7AM is going to be heaven!