At the Crossroads - Part 4

The third (or should I say, fourth based on placement) job was rather a short one - or rather the shortest stint in my entire career - lasted about 1 1/2 years. But even so, I was surprised that I actually stayed that long.

A similar support role, just that this time it involved sales - as in selling products and services to external customers. A system integrator, to put it simply. The real reason I left was that the team size was just too small to be able to support the number of customers that the company had committed to. The commitment was based on the number of support hours, and after the hours had been used up, they had to renew. So imagine, if one issue took up many hours (and days, I’ll come to that later) to resolve, thus depleting the remaining hours until the customer was forced to renew. Certainly in terms of financial costs it’s not cost-effective to customers.

Then, there’s the issue of scheduling. There were certain customers which the company had committed specific days for onsite support, meaning we had to be physically present in the premise itself to provide support. Typically we’d be there for 4 hours and then move on to another site. The issue is already apparent.

If you had customers who have problems at the same time on the same day, how do you manage that and how do you tell customers that you have issues to attend to when you’re supposed to attend to another customer? The management somehow failed to see our issues. It was already tiring to travel from one place to another while raking up taxi claims to about $500 per month, it didn’t help that customers were getting irritated by our inability to respond as per the service level agreement. Imagine you were assigned to be in one company located in the eastern side in the morning half, and then headed over to another located in the western side for the afternoon half.

I decided to leave after much thought, despite my manager’s attempts to persuade me to stay by promoting me. I would be stupid if I had chosen to stay.

The terms of the contract indicated that I would be required to serve 2 months’ notice before I could move on to another employment. But it was tough to find one since not many companies were willing to wait. Therefore, I tendered my resignation first, and then in the 2nd month of my notice, I decided to aggressively send out resumes each and every day while agreeing to turn up for interviews regardless of location.

Lucky break - HR from the company emailed me to confirm my application. Which now brings me to my current job. This year marks my 4th year here - the longest tenure in my entire career now.  I don’t know how I lasted this long but wow, I made it.

Firstly positive notes: being here exposed me to various types of products and players in the IT market, thus further allowing me to have hands-on experience as well as control over the infrastructure as well as to build and develop relationships not just with colleagues across departments but also with existing new and potential vendors, distributors and resellers. I’ve got to say, the colleagues I’m with right now, are the best I’ve ever worked with.

Now, negative notes: my main duties are still the same as ever (it was probably the main scope of the person that they were initially looking for), and because most of the time is focused on those main duties, there are times I had difficulties struggling to manage my time to learn and catch up on new things or even attending courses.

In addition, I’m not sure if it’s me or the environment but I do feel that there is a lack of communication within the team itself. I mean, there were times I felt left out, in the dark about things or projects only to find myself given tasks which i had no knowledge of previous meetings or discussions that occurred prior. I had to keep asking to find out these sort of things - it can be get quite annoying.

Probably the last, it would be about career progression and, more importantly, pay grade. Am I just going to be stuck at this position without any sort of increment? (It's been frozen for consecutive years). If I think of it this way, then somehow the option available for me is to leave.

The question is, when?