Can I ask what it was like going back into an educational setting? You seem the absolute opposite of me in that you had a good experience of what it was like outside the system before going back in and I'm just interested.
Of course dude. You're right, all my employment prior to this has been private sector; making a man a $.
I'm not involved in teaching or academia at all, I function as the lead of a small group of web developers within the "external relations" (marketing) department. Even so it has been a massive shock to me how commercially naïve seemingly everything about the place is.
In general it feels like there is somehow loads of people and yet seemingly key responsibilities are not really defined, so a few people (trying their best in fairness) sort of make it up and end up doing something completely different to what their job actually is. Those people then tend to end up utterly burnt out trying to carry things along singlehandedly while other people float along delivering little value fairly unchallenged.
There is an institutional fear of making decisions which leads to everything being decided by committee and people who have, frankly, no idea what they're talking about being involved in those decisions. This means that critical decisions are poor quality and take ages. They are also subject to change or being overridden if the output does not please senior person xyz or random-hitherto-unknown-academic abc, so man-weeks of work is binned fairly often. Agile it most certainly is not.
I only joined in Summer last year so I don't have all that much experience working in and about the place, it's mostly been remote. In one way this is a shame, as the campuses are a nice place to be. In another way, it's probably a good thing because there's a whiff of privilege/elitism to the whole place which I can't say I really identify with at all, in fact it actually grates on me.
It perhaps wont come as a surprise to you that I'm currently serving my notice. If I cared less about my career prospects in general and I was a less honest person than I am, I could stay in the position I'm in, work a lot less harder than I have done and coast through several years of fairly easy work on too much money and a ridiculously good pension and annual leave entitlement, before eventually being made redundant. I'm not that guy tho (at least not yet).
This is an old red-brick Russell Group university, I'm quite sure things are different in other/newer universities.
Like you I had a similarly horrible experience of secondary school in particular. By some quirk of I ended up doing an 'industry day' type experience in another secondary school in another city while I was freelancing after university about a decade ago, and I found that experience to be quite triggering for want of a better term. I'm not sure I could stand to be in an environment like that where disciplining children is quite such a feature.
In truth I think one of the reasons I'm not keen on having children myself is having to indirectly live through that again. It's some reassurance that you feel things have changed for your own, that said.
I ran away as far as I could and still shy away from any sort of class or training course to this day. I feel that my bad experiences of secondary school as it was over 2 decades ago have clouded my judgement. I can only learn by being thrown into the deep end and making hands on mistakes with he threat of loosing my job and letting my family down as the main driver for learning new things. I've been at it for so long, I surprised myself when I was able to fully help my year 8 son with loads of his homework by basically putting it into to "shop" terms. Basically, put a £ sign in front of some maths work and frame it as a profit and loss or payroll/sales/customer satisfaction/waste or whatever and I can understand it. Make it random numbers and I just don't. I surprised myself because I was never able to do any of this stuff at school but as soon as someone I love needed help, I felt the pressure and could leap into action with solutions.
On the other side, I employ people who's only experience other than this job is education. I don't want to offend anyone by saying that I often find them in complete denial about the real world. Some of them suffer real problems where the world doesn't turn out as they seem convinced it would. I don't want to stereotype but many seem to be unaware of just how ruthless the outside world is and somehow seem to be delusional about what things are actually like out there. Seeing them come to terms with this can often be a painful process where you see a decline in there mental health as they reach the cross roads and realise things aren't all they seem to think they were cracked up to be. This seems to be becoming more and more prominent as mandatory full time education to 18 has been introduced and record levels of people are going to university, racking up masses of dept just to keep their heads above water.
Yes, it seems to be more and more of a culture shock to people coming out of education, people are seemingly totally unprepared for the realities of a work environment.
Good on you for giving people in that situation the opportunity though.
For what it's worth, I really value the time I did in retail alongside my studies. I think you learn a lot both in terms of what hard work looks like and in terms of interaction with people, in particular an appreciation for how being pleasant really goes a very long way. Whenever I'm having what I feel like is a crazy day I remind myself of a long Saturday in December on the tills at The Entertainer, or an evening shift during freshers week (urgh) at Sainsburys Local. Suddenly whatever I'm doing sat on my arse with a computer feels cushy after that.
I honestly look back on going in to town with my pile of CVs after my 16th birthday, getting a job and the graft I put in at that time being quite defining events for me as a person. No regrets at all.
It's a shame that this sort of work-alongside-study thing appears to be something happening less and less for whatever reason. When I'm recruiting I look out for these sort of candidates especially because of that work ethic I think it suggests.
