In the April issue of the quarterly newsletter "People Matters" you may have read of the partner in a City firm who changed directions to become a multilingual tour guide. In the continuation of this theme, we look at another case study
Compare the case of Tom, who moved to a similar job in a very different working environment. Tom was a supplies manager for the NHS for more than 20 years, with a special interest in computers. He became director of IT supply for the North East division; then, in one of the NHS's periodic reorganisations, he found himself also responsible for the North-West, so that he was in charge of two out of six national areas. For this effective doubling of his workload he received a token salary increase of £1000 a year. When he was promoted to national IT manager, he actually had to take a pay cut.
As well as suffering the vagaries of this novel reward system, Tom felt unhappy about his own career development. His job became increasingly specialised: "I was getting more and more expert on less and less." At the same time there was a lack of job security in the organisation which made it quite possible that after the next reshuffle, he would be trying to market his over-specialised expertise elsewhere. Even worse was the management's insistence that he should be a mobile troubleshooter, personally attending the sites of IT crises nationwide.
Tom spent half his time on the road, clocking up about 40,000 business miles a year. His road-to-Damascus moment, he says, came at the end of one particularly awful day; getting up at 5 am, he left his home in Yorkshire to attend a meeting in Worcester. His boss contacted him there at 11 am to say they were having some problems in Bury St Edmunds, so please could Tom get over there as soon as possible? By the time Tom got home that night, he'd driven 500 miles, and he'd had enough.
Having spent some time reflecting and networking, today Tom is materials manager for a leading Northern university. He feels the substantial drop in salary he has had to adjust to is more than compensated by the saner working environment and more flexible lifestyle. He is responsible for all the university's supplies, "Everything from highly specialised research equipment to bog roll," as he puts it succinctly, with an annual budget of £100 million. The work is varied and interesting, and as the job was previously held by a former catering manager with no purchasing experience, his colleagues are delighted to have a trained professional in the post.
Tom admits that working with academics can have its downside too; "They positively enjoy argument, and they take everything back to first principles. And they aren't immune from the long hours culture either." But Tom is able to organise his own working day so that he is home by six, and no longer spends two nights a week away from his family. "Of course, no one should make a decision like this without serious reflection," he says. "In the end, when you make career decisions, you are making a value judgement, and you have to be very sure about what your values are."