Salary Story: I Changed Career 3 Times Because Of Burnout
In our series Salary Stories, women with long-term career experience open up about the most intimate details of their jobs: compensation. It’s an honest look at how real people navigate the complicated world of negotiating, raises, promotions and job loss, with the hope it will give young women more insight into how to advocate for themselves — and maybe take a few risks along the way.
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Age: 40 Location: Devon Current industry and job title: Project manager in higher education Current salary: £38,500 Number of years employed since school or university: 20
Starting salary: £16,000 in 2003 Biggest salary jump: £28,000 to £36,000 Biggest salary drop: £28,000 to £0
Biggest negotiation regret: I missed out on a salary increment award by starting a job seven days after the cut-off point. I wish I had negotiated to still be awarded that as it has left me one increment behind where I could have been by now, worth about £1,000 to £1,500 a year.
Best salary advice: Don’t assume that a higher salary will mean you have to work harder! Also, don’t assume that taking a salary drop will turn out to be a bad thing.
I didn’t go straight into mental health nursing from education. I have a generalised anxiety disorder which started in my teenage years and disrupted my GCSEs and A levels. I dropped out of my A levels after the first year, leaving with 3 AS levels, then unsuccessfully worked in a few retail and insurance jobs before going solo travelling in America and Canada. While out there I realised I could use my experiences to help others, particularly teenagers in a CAMHS (children and adolescent mental health services) setting, so I applied to university to complete a mental health nursing course. Thankfully the university was quite progressive at the time (2000) and although I had dropped out of my A levels, I gained a place as they took my mental health experiences into account. My first job after graduating was as a staff nurse on £16,000.
This was a really valuable experience for me career-wise as I have always taken chances on applying for jobs, even if I don’t fully fit the job description. I am a big believer in transferable skills. I think that has contributed to being able to pick myself up when knocked back in my career, and to enjoy quite a varied career. I still have bouts of anxiety, which I need to manage, but it has never held me back for long now that I have learned what works for me.
I moved across the country from the southeast to Devon to take up a role in a child and adolescent unit, which had been my ambition since university. This was full-time at £21,000 a year. I was pregnant three months after I started!Following a year of maternity leave, I returned to work part-time at £11,000 a year. The unit I worked at had been closed down while I was on leave, meaning that I had to return to work for the same NHS Trust and be redeployed to another role. In my case, this meant a jump from CAMHS to working two nights on an acute dementia ward. Quite a change and a steep learning curve.Again, the unit I was working on was closed down, this time for an 18 month refurbishment, and the nursing team was redeployed to another ward about 20 miles away. This made too much impact on me through increased travel times with a young child so I started looking for another role and was lucky enough to secure a part-time community role at £28,000. This also came with school hours so I was able to work more as my child started school.After experiencing burnout and mental health issues myself, I made the difficult decision to leave mental health nursing and become a stay-at-home parent for a short time while I recovered. I still miss mental health nursing but I could not continue working with such vulnerable people in good conscience once I knew I was burned out. I also decided it hadn’t been good for my daughter to experience that in me.Between 2008 and 2013, I completed an English Literature degree with the Open University. Spending the school day at home alone had been good for me initially but as my health improved, I needed to find a job to keep me fulfilled and occupied. The money helped, too! I decided to look for work in the library and information world, in the hope that I could work my way up to becoming a librarian. In 2014 I found a part-time library assistant role for £14,000.Due to my nursing experience, I had a lot of transferable skills that meant I had the opportunity to be promoted within a few months of starting work at the library. This bump to £22,000 also came with full-time hours but they were flexible, which meant I could work around my child. While working to become a chartered librarian, I was lucky to secure this opportunity to be a library customer experience manager at £28,000, where I managed a large team and drove the direction of the library service. Through this time I gained experience in working with IT and implementing digital solutions.I decided to make the jump to working in higher education (can you tell yet that I like moving around jobs and roles?) as a full-time university information desk manager at £36,000. It was hard work to get used to another new sector but I knew that I was resilient enough to work my way through it and manage an even larger team. What I didn’t know was that I would also need to be resilient enough to manage that team and assist students during COVID.I have just started this project manager role at the same university after applying for it through a job advert, and again, I’m relying on my ability to adapt to different roles and initially feel that I don’t know what I am doing. I think this is a skill in itself though, and something that I will be passing on to my daughter, who is about to go into her GCSE year and then get ready for the world of work herself.
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