I was just thinking, besides the increased salary from my new job there are a few “opportunities” that will come with my job change.

1. No more driving to work
   I’ll be taking Boston’s finest in public transportation – the T. My new company will pay for a large portion of cost of a monthly pass and with Gas prices continuing to rise – this will surely save me some money.

2. Daily Brown Bag Specials
   In my current job, I buy lunch every day. That’s about 7 dollars a day (conservatively), which equals out to $35 a week (almost $2,000 a year). I’m planning on bringing my lunch when I start my new job – sure they’ll be a few days here and there when I buy lunch downtown, but for the most part, I see this as a pretty significant savings.

A little while ago, I posted that I was entering an active job search.
It went VERY well – I went through a recruiter for the first time in my life. And although I wasn’t sure what to expect, the entire process was fairly easy, very quick and extremely successful.

The entire process went about 3 days (I know – I was shocked too).

Why is it relevant to this blog?
Well, there’s some more money coming my way and that means I can pay off my debts faster.

Very exciting. In fact, I’m not sure what I’m more excited about? The new job or the bigger debt payments. Either way, it’s close.

Thanks to everyone that wished me luck on the job search – either through a comment or an e-mail – it worked!

For the past month or so, I’ve been passively looking at online job posts and updating my resume on monster (which has only seemed to garner more spam). But, it’s becoming very clear that things are not going to be getting better not only for me within my company – but for my company as a whole.

I don’t know a lot about management as of yet. Nor will I pretend to know all of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ decisions that the executives in my company are making. But being involved on the ground-level you definitely hear things.

A small sample of some of the warning signs:

• Bills don’t seem to be getting paid
• For a while now, vendors and clients have called asking why such-and-such bill, person or company hasn’t received payment yet. Sometimes these calls come even after the company has been told (in some form of company meeting) that ‘things are going really well financially’. – maybe ’cause we have all that extra money we’re not paying people with, huh?
• Massive Turnover
• Since December of 2006, 16 people have left. If it were a big company, that number may not be significant. But in my company, 16 people equaled 33% – yes 1/3rd of the employees.
• Have we added people? Yes, but only in a defensive way – and definitely not enough to replace whom we’ve lost.
• Going after new business that’s WAY out of our league
• As mentioned previously, I work at a small company. Employees are leaving left and right, management has basically said they don’t care. And rather than try to attack the problems in manageable chunks, they’re trying to hit home runs by going pitching to massive multi-million dollar companies. Honestly, even if we somehow were able to fool them into thinking that we had the bandwidth to handle their budget/workload – they would soon realize that we did not and would take their business elsewhere. This would leave us in the whole – since you can’t bill people for pitching for their business. A waste of time, resources and money all for the chance of a quick, large, payout.

I could go on, but there’s really no use. I have to leave.

So, this week and weekend, I’m focusing on updating my resume. Currently, I don’t think it speaks well to the type of job and responsibilities I’d be applying for. So I need to update it, add some more accomplishments and remove a lot of the college items.

I’ve already identified a few contacts to pass along my resume to – now I just have to create it.

I’ll keep you posted…

I’m beginning to hate my job more and more each day. I’ve been at this company about three years now and I feel like I’m doing less now than when I started.

I’m definitely not being “challenged” and the pay isn’t even that great. I don’t really see any clear room for advancement. The only thing keeping me is an odd sense of loyalty to a company that hasn’t really done much to earn it and the feeling that I’d like to try something slightly outside of my current industry.

I’m young enough where I think I can pull off a switch of that kind. And it helps that my career so far lends itself to what I’m thinking of trying for. But it’s just sad when you come to a realization that the place you’re at isn’t what it used to be and you may never find something like that again.

It was a great work environment with great people – most of whom have already left.

Too bad.