Eventually the realisation sets in that your holiday must come to an end and you need to set forth and enter the working world. This was achieved on Monday. I joined a UK agency. They found me a job inside their own company. I won’t go into too many details about the job on the blog as it is a new service being set up within this particular style of industry (I’m handling the building of my department).
I will however comment on first impressions (from a week) of working in the British system. First and most important, 25 days of annual leave per year. Heck yes!!! Add on to this the bank holidays (we would call these public holidays).
The hours are a traditional 40 hour working week. In reality it is 45 hours (take into account the hour for lunch each day). Believe me this is a long day. We have been very spoilt in Australia working a 37.5 hour week. The day starts at 9am with an hour for lunch and finishes at 6pm. After 2 days of this I was incredibly brain dead!
The induction process and even OHS does not seem to rate highly in this company. I must say I am very proud of the systems we developed in my last job to induct our staff properly into work. On my first week working in England it was a matter of finding a pen, paper and all that you needed yourself which basically involved collecting items off the desks of people that were leaving.
I am not sure they have ever heard of ergonomics or that there are chairs out there with lumbar support! Ouch. Seriously I think we have been treated well in Australia.
Possibly it is early days here and it will improve. What ever happens I know my staff, as I recruit them, will benefit from the induction process that I am developing for them.
The people I work with are incredibly busy however are able to take a brief time out to have a bit of fun and conversation. I have been used to working in an open plan office but this is much larger with about 25 people in one room. It can get a bit noisy so thankfully I am quite capable of “tuning out”.
When I started looking for work it was an incredibly scary process. After having spent 10 years in one industry it was difficult trying to think outside of that box. However, I think this place has a great amount of potential both for myself and the industry it is in and I am excited about the new service being developed. As usual I am impatient to learn it all and understand the process so this has been a great challenge this week. We will see what week 2 holds for me. I will keep you up to date on the progress.