I find reflecting on the year that was beneficial and I have three reflections from 2020 that I want to share in three different posts. These are in no particular order, not chronological or in order of importance.
Ok so the first one.
Employment is not always stable. I have posted many blogs about my decision to leave academia for a year and work in market research. There were a number of reasons for this, and one was that long term contracts in academia are unicorns. Even pre-virus! So getting a full time permanent position within industry felt safer and secure. Then for a number of other reasons I decided to go back into academia. If I was to summarise this decision in one sentence it would be that, I went and stood on the other grass, and discovered that it was definitely not greener. I left my full time permanent position for ten week long casual contracts in academia. This was in early 2020, before lockdowns, and travel restrictions, and working from home. It was a big decision to go from permanent to uncertainty. I found out that less than a month after I left the company, my position was made redundant. If I had not left, I would have been out of a job. This shocked me, as until then I naively thought that a permanent position was pretty much just that, permanent. I thought that the only way to lose a permanent position was to do something terrible enough to get fired. I understand that these are unprecedented times (ahhhh it should be a drinking game to take a shot whenever we hear this !), however it highlighted to me that all work can be unpredictable. That having a permanent position is perhaps not as secure as I once thought. This has reassured me that returning to academia was the right choice for me.
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