Resigning during the pandemic

Your value as an employee in time of crisis

Aaron Albalad, Yuli Wong

• Publisher: Aaron Albalad
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781071576007
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

The end of October 2020 is the date when I start writing this book. Throughout the world we are in a difficult and unstable situation caused by an unprecedented health crisis that has forced states to impose measures such as lockdowns or curfews in an attempt to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This health crisis, and more specifically, the measures put in place as a result, have in turn led to an economic and social crisis whose effects we are beginning to see with people who have lost their jobs or businesses that have been forced to close…
Many will think that this book is nonsense because with all that is going wrong at the moment we don't need someone to tell us how they have taken advantage of this crisis to discover what they want after seeing what they don't want.
The pages you will read below are simply a lesson I have learned from living this crisis and may serve as an inspiration for you to re-evaluate your qualities and face the next years of both your professional and personal life with something good from all the past experience.
Without a doubt I feel lucky to be able to tell you about my experience and to have been able to make the decisions I have made. But what I am most grateful for is having lived what I have lived to learn what I will try to convey in the following pages.

First resignation

Better the devil you know than

the devil you don´t?

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A few years ago I started a new working adventure abroad working for a multinational in their customer service area. When I started working with them, I had a temporary contract of a few months and I felt lucky to be able to live that experience. I was happy about this new phase that was beginning and I was open to learn as much as I could, whether I continued working with them or left the company and found another job.

As the weeks went by, an idea was born in me to try and stay in that company with an indefinite contract. I rewrote my CV and a letter of motivation for my incorporation into the staff and gave it to my bosses for their consideration.

A few weeks later, I was called into the office to report that unfortunately they did not have any vacancies for me to continue working with them. I thanked them for considering my application and continued to work with them until the end of the temporary contract.

When I was told that there was no possibility of staying in the company with an indefinite contract I did not worry. I was counting on the experience of those months to look for another job and on the income saved to make a calm job search.

Surprise! Less than a month later I had returned to the company with another temporary contract of a few weeks. The same thing happened a month and a half after this contract ended. So I kept on stringing together several temporary contracts until I got an indefinite contract. As time went by, I realized that perhaps this was not the job I wanted to do for many more years, so I decided to take a break to clear my head.

I asked for a reduction in my weekly working hours so that I could start a master's degree in philosophy, which helped me to adopt a more reflective attitude towards how I wanted my professional life to be in the future. In this way, I made the decision that I wanted to train in another professional sector to try out a new path in my career.

That new field of knowledge was computer science. I had no experience with computers, leaving aside the obligatory ICT classes at school and university. I set out to gradually learn how to fiddle with computer programs and to start programming on a self-taught basis.

As the months went by I managed to obtain some programming certifications from different universities through online training portals. What I was doing was seeing if this world really interested me enough to take the step of leaving a stable job to change into the unknown....

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Resigning during the pandemic
• Introduction
• First resignation | Better the devil you know than | the devil you don´t?
• Second resignation | Patience has a limit
• Rejecting job offers | Choosing what we apply for
• Business ghosting
• Conclusions