Simon's job log: 11

The story so far... Simon works for a small IT firm in North Yorkshire, and runs marathons to raise cash for Alzheimer's research. 

The recession

The more people talk about it, the worst it appears to get. Record levels of national debt. Trillions spent on bailing out teetering banks. We’ve had a year of it already and we’ll probably have another year of it before things improve. Yet I don’t seem to be feeling the pinch yet.

There are the obvious effects I’ve seen - supermarkets have introduced a new line of discount brands to pull shoppers away from the deep discounter chains and there have been several promotions in the shop windows of national chain stores. I’ve also noticed several shops which have closed and there are plenty of empty shop window in my high street. None of this really affects me that much.

Perhaps this feeling of living in economic cotton-wool comes from our recent history. My generation has never known recession. There was one in the early Nineties, when we were kicked out of the ERM and everyone lost faith in the value of the pound (not for the first time, it seems). I was only nine years old at the time and my parents obviously did a good job of protecting us from money worries, as it was only about a decade later that I realised how much in financial dire straits we were at the time.

So I’ve never had to make the really hard decisions of ‘heat or eat’ or to stay in a job I hate just for the money, or even to lose my job altogether.

Where it has hit most was with recent (running) holidays abroad. Last October I spent the weekend in Dublin, to run the marathon. At that time, the Pound-Euro exchange rates were still fairly favourable and made holidays in the Euro zone quite an attractive option.

Fast forward just six months, however, to my Paris Marathon excursion and things had deteriorated quite substantially. The exchange rate was about one-to-one for a while, which made France just as expensive - even a little bit more - than England. Paris is not usually a cheap city anyway, so even basics like a bottle of water could cost two to three Euros - nearly twice as much as over here!

However, I rarely go on holiday anyway - let alone go abroad (though I will be returning to Dublin for the marathon later this year), so I just see that as a one-off expenditure.

Another job?

So if the gloomy economic conditions have not affected my personal life to any great degree yet, have they affected my career? Well, yes. Even though unemployment has surpassed the two million mark for the first time in a decade, that hasn’t cured my itchy feet. For a while now, I’ve been keeping one eye on the jobs market and another on the economy. I’ve decided that it is not the right time to risk moving to another job unless it really is an offer I can’t refuse, or an opportunity I can’t afford to turn down.

The recession, has therefore, delayed my plans to progress my career. I’ve never been one of those people who believe that every cloud has a silver lining (or any other phrase as wishy-washy as that) but this pause in my career plans means I am looking for other ways to plan ahead - such as actively pushing my employer for on-the-job training. Now is not the time to be modest about my skills or their value to the company.

So even though I’m not scared by the thought of leaving my job in the middle of a recession, such a prospect is not on my radar. If I did decide to switch jobs now, it would make me a little bit more nervous however - I wouldn’t do so until I know I’d secured a better position somewhere else.

At the moment I’m just content to ride the economic storm.

 My earlier job logs

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