My Novels

Monday, July 22, 2013

Transition



There are two things I never thought would happen in my lifetime.  One is living in Las Vegas and the other is working for a corporation, yet both happened, not necessarily in that order.  In 2008, I was still working at the school and loving my job, and even though there were some things that were somewhat of an irritant (isn’t that so of any job?), for the most part, I absolutely loved getting up every day, walking into my home office, and having a pile of tests to grade, projects to work on, and a stack of emails to answer. For me, that was a perfect day!  I often worked well over 40 hours a week, but when you love your job, the extra hours don’t matter that much, at least that was the case for me.

In October of that year, I got a call from one of the directors—the school had been sold to a major MT service.  I knew at some point the school would be sold, but it was always in the back of my mind that probably another school would buy it and combine it with their curriculum and maybe take on our name or some type of merger name.  I was happy for the owners of the school, as this is what they had been working towards.  Selfishly, I was not happy for me because I don’t like corporations.  Well, I guess that is not true across the board. There are some good people out there doing the right thing by their employees, but unfortunately that is rare.  Just as there is a standard of care for patients, why can’t corporations have a standard of care for their employees? 

I honestly did not know what was to come, and since I loved my job and was told that would not change, I made the decision to stay on.  After all, I really knew very little about this company that bought the school other than it was very large, but you have to give the employer a chance, right?  If it did not work out for me, well, the best time to look for a job is when you already have a job, so that was my plan.  See how things would play out, especially since it looked like my job would not change in any way, even keeping my independent contractor status. 
In January of 2009, I got the promotion to instructor coordinator.  I was very excited about this position.  I did have a similar opportunity a few years back for this same position, but at that time, it called for a relocation to Akron, Ohio, which in one way would have been wonderful since that is my hometown, but my husband and I were now happily living in Idaho and did not want to move back East.  Once you live in the West, you tend to not want to leave.  This time, relocation was not necessary, so I was thrilled to say yes and take on this new challenge.

As faculty coordinator, I did not want to take on the aspect of being anyone’s boss. My position was not really one of “me boss, you worker bee,” anyway, but I wanted to make sure everyone knew that.  I wanted to be the support member of the team, so that is what I worked towards. 

I took some time to determine how I could be that reinforcement for the staff and took some ideas to the new director of the school (the previous director and former owner had retired in August of 2009).  I became the coverage for instructor vacations so that way students would not have any interruptions in their study schedules and also so that the instructor would not come back to a mountain of work and thereby pretty much negating all that relaxation from vacation.  I developed extra assignments for struggling or failing students, maintained test keys and practice dictation keys.  I helped with any extra researching that needed to be done if the instructor was short on time and sometimes helped with a difficult student.  All of this was developed over a period of time. In fact, I spent the first year just getting used to my new position and what new responsibilities would be added along with also keeping up with a full student roster.

That particular year, 2009, was very eventful for me.  New responsibilities, becoming part of a large MT service, losing both of our directors, one of whom is my best friend, so no longer working along with her was a difficult transition, new personnel coming on board, and many changes taking place within the school, some good, some not so good.  Quite a bit happened over the next 2 years, so I think I’ll save that for my next post.  Until then, enjoy your day and your week.  See you next time.  Take care. 

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