finding work after 56 | Not Just a Granny

Posts Tagged ‘finding work after 56’

the price of freedom……

Posted in family and relationships, It's my life, wealth and finance, tagged being employed, finding work after 56, freedom is a sweet word, the price of freedom on September 2, 2011| 4 Comments »

freedom!!!!

Whoo hooooo!!!! I got the job!!!! yes yes yes. With much delight this morning I accepted the position from yesterday’s interview. Mucho magic. I love the sound of the position and was really hoping to get it. What this means is that a) I can ease myself back into the office environment b) I get my evenings and weekends back c) I can learn new systems – in this case SAGE and Mac d) I can freelance now at whatever I want e) I am no longer on duty 22/7 f) I no longer have to put up with shitty family members or friends who treat you like a lower class whatnot g) and as far as banks and such like are concerned, I now have a ‘real’ job. And bonus….I don’t have to go for any more interviews! Wheeee!!!

The funny thing is that the position of ‘Carer’ doesn’t hold much weight in this country and it’s not really viewed as a viable job. I can see their point, working as a self-employed carer is a variable career, any number of things can happen; like you have to sit around and wait for days on end to get the next assignment, you have assignments that you have sat around for a week waiting for get cancelled at the last minute, you have to be on tenterhooks 99% of the time coz if you by so much as a word upset your client in any way….your’e shown the door without so much as a by your leave. So to get back into the office environment is brilliant.

However, there is a price for my freedom……£14,600pa worth of price. Yes! To my dismay they offered me £3000pa less than what I would have expected considering my experience, but have said after the 3 months probation they will increase it to the expected level (not £14,600 worth sadly (I wish)…that amount now includes living expenses such as rent, food and transport etc). What this means is that for the next 3 months+ I am gonna stress out big time!
But!!!! and this is where it gets good…..I will not be ’employed’ but will work on a ‘contractual’ basis and instead of being an employee….I will be freelance and still retain my self-employed status. This is very good on all fronts. It means that I can now do whatever other work I want in the evenings and weekends to generate the discrepancy in my budget! 🙂 yay. So this means I can plan tours for 3 Days in London, I can freelance at other companies in the evenings or weekends, I can take on baby-sitting work, or cleaning (I am a damn good housekeeper) heehee, I can FINALLY get back to the Internet Marketing membership I paid for a year ago and not yet been able to maximise. Actually read ‘not do at all’. So the world is my oyster as they say and I will be a free agent able to work unencumbered by 22/7, and in this way I will be able to generate the short-fall in my budget!
Whew! As they say in the classics!

On the family front….I am delighted to say that I am now an aunty again. My niece finally decided to get herself born and arrived at 01.25 this morning, weighing in at 3.37kgs and 6minutes before I sent an email to my brother and sister-in-law to wish them all the best for the impending arrival.. hee hee she was already here! So welcome to the world Aletta, you are a much anticipated and very welcome member of ‘da family’!
So now I have to plan a trip to Hungary (finally) to go visit and meet my new niece, and of course to also meet the two older children who were adopted at the beginning of the year! Awesome….3x an aunty in one year….not bad eh! It was very special talking to my brother this morning and we were both in tears!! I am so very happy for them. He reminded me that it was exactly 2 years ago to the week that they lost their first baby, which was terribly distressing. But all is good now and they have their delightful daughter to love and enjoy.

I mentioned in my previous blog that I am cat-sitting in Twickenham this weekend for a friend and after my stress at not getting into the flat last night I was exhausted, (I had visions of sleeping on the step!) but hey guess what?….I was free to do whatever I wanted, so I got onto the internet and did some emailing, tweeting, and fb’ing wihtout any worry about having to get up the next day at a specific time……I could get up anytime I pleased. Then finally to bed at about 1am and woke this morning…..free as a butterfly! And hahahaha, at 07:35! can you believe it? Now that I am free to wake up late……I wake up early! Hah!! typical! I spent most of the morning on the internet working for New Media Angels (I am the twitter angel) then met up with my daughter later in the morning and went to Sweetie Pies for tea and yummies to celebrate my new job! Then it was back to her place and work work work for 3.5 hours earning my freedom!

I can now advertise The Money Box in earnest (you can ‘like’ it if you like!) and of course the plan is to get my books up on Amazon and blurb as well as the intineraries onto kindle.

Hooray! I am free, and freedom is a sweet, sweet word! 🙂

Read Full Post »

into the abyss….

Posted in It's my life, tagged being unemployed, employment after 56, finding work after 56, resigning without a job on August 8, 2011| 2 Comments »

hmmmm....

So finally after months of wanting to and not having enough courage to….I finally quit my job! I recall a few months ago when I learned of Elizabeth Taylor’s death, that I wrote in my blog it was time to quit my job, and that I should really look at the prospect of doing just that very seriously now, but I hung on and hung on! Afraid really. In the event it was done in a fit of anger brought about through months of frustration, but I am pleased that I finally took the plunge! So now it’s ‘sink or swim’ 🙂 or become a rubber ball and bounce back!

On the day in question, I had once again been insulted by a visitor to the house and finally enough was enough. One of the things I loath is being talked down to by people, and sadly in this type of job, you are just ‘the carer’, a nothing to most people, just there to pick up and clean up and shut up! I am amazed at my capacity of endurance and by the level of how much I am prepared to endure before I reach my limit! Actually it was quite ironic that just a couple of days before I quit, I had sent my daughter a text that said “Am I just too ingrained for make do and get on with it, or is my discomfort zone not narrow enough?” and the response I got was “In fact here’s a better idea: stop thinking about it in personal development terms….go back to basics: what the %*@ do you want to do with your life?” 🙂 she also reminded me that it was me who taught her how to be a ‘rubber ball’.

So yeah, good idea! Time to bounce back. Now, what do I want to do with my life? I know what I don’t want to do and that is continue working in the same environment I have worked in for the last 10 years. I do want to travel, I do want to get back into an environment where I am exercising my brain, using my skills (of which there are many) and getting my life back. I have become so old and slow in the last few years, and working in that environment has limited my horizons to such an extent that I still feel like there is a box around me. It’s almost a physical feeling of limitations. Limitation of freedom… a huge issue for me, as one of my highest values is freedom! It was in the end horrible to work in an environment where I was unable to just ‘go out’ whenever I felt like it. I realise I had time off and they were generous, but the feelings of being tied-down were most unpleasant, and slowly but surely it wore me down.

Of course there are other considerations; like the financial issues that I wrote about in my book (How to turn 1p into -£50,000), and of course the obligation to meet my debts is very strong. So that was a bit of a deterrant to the ‘jump off the edge and let’s see if I sink or swim’ mindset for which I have been known. However, if I look at the other aspect; the ‘rubber ball’ syndrome then hey I will be just fine! Finances can be sorted, arrangements can be made and I can in fact use my experience and knowledge to generate the necessary!

I phoned my younger sister that evening (thank goodness for skype) to pour out my woes, I was feeling just a bit terrified at the prospect of no money coming in, in the next two weeks (the limit of my current horizons), and she came up with a brilliant idea. Like my daughter she is a font of bright ideas. So here’s the thing! I am 50+, living in a country that to all intents and purposes is going through a recession (or so the papers would lead us to believe), I have been out of my qualified area of expertise for the last 10 years, and in those years have not gained any new quantifiable skills besides all the Personal Development courses I did! Hmmm.

So what to do? Well the first thing she suggested was that I blog about my new journey, about what it’s like for a 56year-old woman to start off afresh at an age where you are no longer considered viable in the Corporate Field, about how I plan to get back into the job market (if that’s what I decided to do), to share my experiences, good and bad of whatever hurdles or successes I may have. To sit down and list any new skills I have gained over the last few years – like figuring out how the internet works, learning how to blog, how to do research on google (at which I am getting pretty good), how to build and manage twitter and facebook profiles/pages, and of course now seriously make the most of creating and conducting London tours. Well thats easy, I love conducting tours!

My first step of course will be to write up a skills based CV, and start advertising my services. No! Cheeky, not those kind of services 🙂 ). hmmmm. Watch this space…….

Read Full Post »