You got the job and you are greeted with cheers and congratulatory messages but upon resuming, you discover that new job perfectly encapsulates the ‘new job nightmare’ syndrome that a growing number of career professionals find themselves dealing with. Let us put this in perspective with an incident that was recently shared.
Abdul was a high-flying mid-level professional who was really enthusiastic about his job. The excerpts from his mail read: “I currently just got hired by a company but contrary to its promises, I discovered that this company does not honour its contractual agreements with employees. I am expected to slave away my productive life and even go as far as putting in extra hours without getting paid. I found out that everything from the selection stage to the employment, career growth (promotion) promises and agreed remuneration was a lie. I ended up in a rigid and aggressive environment where everything toxic has become the norm Please, I need your advice and help.”
Are you like Abdul? Are you facing a similar situation/challenge? Are you still shocked at how you ended up getting trapped in your new job nightmare? Below are a few things you can do.
Assess yourself to find out why your job falls under the purview of a nightmare. Seek to understand the root cause. Are these challenges from you or your environment? You should be able to state the problem clearly. For example, is this a case where the HR manager made too many promises that he/she is struggling to keep up with? Is this a scenario where your role advertised and the job description handed to you don’t match?
Assessing the situation would help you seek to learn how you can focus on a possible short and long-term solutions to your new job nightmare and find out what the pain points are.
In Abdul’s case, he was asked to seek redress with management. If you ever find yourself in this kind of situation, speak to the HR manager and write an official letter about what you were promised, what your contract reads and what is happening. Many professionals might suggest that at this point, the best line of action is to jump ship but the truth is that even in a new job nightmare situation, it’s important that you seek a solution.
While the personal solution you are likely to come up with might be different based on whatever nightmare situation you are facing, seek a professional brand of solution that can help improve you and/or the situation you find yourself. With a team or manager, a solution might be documenting tasks and communicating better via officials channels.
You have faced your fears by looking inwards, constructively analysing the situation to seek a reasonable solution to improve things. It’s time to check for progress and your next decision would be derived from this. You can also communicate the challenges to a few team members. The purpose of this is not just to tell them just for the sake of it. Rather, the goal is to learn if they faced a similar situation at any point in time and how they progressed from it (if they actually did).
After checking for the progress of your new job nightmare, ask yourself some honest questions to know if things have improved or worsened. Would you want to stay for a longer time? At this point, most professionals are torn between two broad schools of thought. Some professionals maintain they would still wish to leave to save their self-motivation on the while others are mostly afraid of leaving as they believe they might be missing out on a great opportunity.
What would you do next? After taking Abdul through this process, he decided it was in the best interest of his career to leave. Considering he was in his fourth month in the organisation when he emailed us about the challenges he was facing, Abdul set a 6-month period to allow him to upgrade his skills with a particular emphasis on training and certification. His new goal was to improve his personal brand, network more and start applying for new jobs.
He set his next line of action and followed through. Abdul eventually got hired by another company and left his employers after 11 months. Some situations might not need you to stay this long but a lesson from Abdul’s new job nightmare was that he used the opportunity to motivate himself to upskill and become more efficient.
Anyone can be faced with a new job nightmare but you have to make sure you that get stuck by doing nothing, just because you are afraid of how things might pan out. This would be a terrible choice for your career. Prepare yourself for fresh challenges by arming yourself with relevant skills.
