I wanted to write a blog post yesterday about my experiences playing Crash Bandicoot 4 (it’s a really fun game) but something happened in real life that took over my time and as such I had completely forgotten to post. So I’m making it up today by telling you all what the real life thing was!

I’ve been working at my current department for over 5 years now. I got in on a temporary contract and managed to get a permanent contract in 2019. I also managed to get a promotion twice and the only jump up I can now make is to a fulltime manager position, a jump that I’m probably not able to make for a while yet.
Within those 5 years I’ve seen the department grow increasingly smaller. So many people were let go, partially due to a lighter workload and partially do to automating processes, thus needing less people to do the actual work. However we have hit the point that our team is made up now of the bare minimum amount of people you can possibly have.. And it’s causing a lot of stress. Especially when we are having extremely busy periods it’s all hands on deck and I feel we’re still not getting everything done we should be doing. The last two weeks have been one of those periods where I just shut down at the end of the day and have 0 energy left for anything else. To say I’m exhausted doesn’t even begin to cover it. It makes me resent having to get up in the morning and logging in to work. Something that is a gigantic red flag on it’s own.

However… This week a job application got posted for a job at a department that I have been side eyeing for the past two years now. It’s a department dedicated to implementing Robotic Process Automation throughout the entire organisations and it entails that I would be joining the team that designs and implements “bots”. I’m already in contact with this team due to the bots we have running on our own department and I’ve been developing some of them on my own as a sort of side project. They had put up job applications before but I never felt sure and ready enough to reply, but this time I figured I’d take the jump and just went ahead and turned in my application.

I hope that my familiarity with the team and department will help in my favour. I haven’t heard back anything yet so far but the application is still open to reply untill next Wednesday so I’m not sure when I will be contacted. By taking this step though I would transfer over to a department that has it’s own kind of stress and deadlines but also with a bigger team, less individual responsibilities and more structured systems in place. It’s probably the best step I can take for myself right now and I’m hoping really hard that they’ll consider me for the position. I will keep you all posted how it goes, but this could be the breath of fresh air I need to kickstart other more important life changes.