Has anyone experienced having your job designation change five times in five years and all along you are still working for the same employer?
I was with my previous employer for 15 odd years and the last 5 years were the most interesting but demanding years as well.
I was not a job hopper.
I was not a fresh entrant to the workplace.
I had chalked up 24 years of working experience prior to this roller-coaster ride of being the loyal corporate staff, doing what my employer reasonably asked me to do.
To be fair, I requested to start this adventure when back in 2017 I asked my employer for some form of job change as I was then the Head of Internal Audit for close to a decade and wanted to do something else as some of the audits I had done close to 5 to 6 times over the decade.
It so happened that there was an opportunity to get involved at the ground level of a rocketship start-up within the public sector that was being established. At that time, the details of the job scope, duration of the posting and even the actual address of this new posting was unclear. What was clear was you needed to put on seatbelts as this rocketship was blasting off into orbit fairly quickly.
And so, I took a leap of faith and get involved in the set-up of a new educational institution that involved some serious mergers and acquisition work because I was tasked to set-up the Finance & Admin team from scratch taking in seconded staff, staff transferred from the merger as well as to hire new staff to bring the headcount from 3 to 11 in six months.
Now that I have the luxury to reflect on the posting that lasted from late 2017 to early 2020, I realized that it was a blessing in disguise. I picked up so many diverse skills and experiences in M&A activity, change management processes, start-up culture in both its successes and the occasional failure. And for a public officer then, being involved in a start-up whilst still operating within the public sector environment, was a rare opportunity that only presents itself once in decades.
Folks who have experienced start-ups will also understand the organization evolves and after the pioneers have set-up the fundamentals, invariably the owner of the start-up would bring in new managers who come to “manage” what the core pioneer team set up. This led to a loss in autonomy because now the bureaucracy starts to set in and any joy, spark and meaning from the initial rocketship ride peters off quickly and I decided to move back to my home organization having set up a team that was functional, effective and able to run without me.
When I came back to my home organization, that was when I was asked to go through a series of “transformations” personally. Initially, I was a place holder because after I posted out of my role, another staff took over it and when I was posting back, this staff had to move out of the role for personal reasons. Hence, I was thrown back into my old role as a stop-gap measure.
There was a twist to taking back my old role. The then boss asked me to eliminate that function due to organizational restructuring. Thus, I had the interesting experience of being the last in-house Head of IA before I quite literally eliminated my own job and the team by out-sourcing the entire function. That experience was more emotional than I expected. It was not because I had set-up the IA function, I was the third IA Head but when I was clearing and shredding all the old documents, I could see how the organization was losing part of its heritage and history. But it seemed to me that no-one cared.
After successfully evicting myself from my old premises, I then moved to two other functions quickly in the span of three years because the organization needed me to first helm the legal and compliance function and then subsequently cybersecurity.
I took on these roles gamely because I thought as a team player, that was what I should do to help the organization. I did not ask what the organization could do for me, but quite literally do what I could for the organization even though it was and is a very challenging task to get your staff to pivot across quite literally virtually 5 different job roles in 5 years.
Whilst there are some complementary skills sets between IA and finance, IA and legal and compliance and a bit between IA and cybersecurity, it is rare to find a staff who can pivot very quickly without hand-holding to deliver the work across multiple domains effectively in such a short-period of time.
As I reflect, those five years aged me a lot and those of my friends and colleagues who know me may have noticed I have less hair and more white hairs and have “lost weight”. But the weight loss I believe stem more from binge eating during the initial two years of this five year adventure! LOL.
But I have gained tremendously because I have in five short years been exposed to many useful areas in corporate operations across Internal Audit, Finance and Admin, Legal and Compliance as well as IT and Cybersecurity. Not forgetting that during that five year stretch, I was also involved in a system change management rollout for an ERP system as well as to undertake one investigation into potential staff misconduct.
All these experiences are embedded deeply into my psyche and I cannot forget those highs and lows even if I wanted to.
They now serve me in good stead as I am a board member on three non-profits where all my accumulated experience across 29 years and especially the last five years made me much more wise and seasoned in exercising my role as a Treasurer and board member.
These experiences also serve as the foundation for my next chapter in life as I have started up own training and consultancy outfit, RxE Integrity Advisory covering fraud risk management, internal audit, cybersecurity and charity governance.
What has been some of the pivotal experiences in your career or personal life that has made a difference in your life?
I would love to hear from your experiences as well.
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