Hypothetical question turning into ramblings

[stellar_muddle]

Hypothetical question...

You are looking at a rather good sounding (long term) job and trying to suss out conditions etc. There is some info on the web, but your main info is though the person answering questions for the job application itself and from the sounds of things, in charge of organising that.

Given this is lible to be a 5 - maybe 10+ year signup (1 year training (lets do honours level stuff again, whoohoo...), 1 year basic internship then ongoing career), you would really like to know things like maternity/parental leave conditions, but statements like:

Since we invest a lot of time and money in helping you become a productive member of our Company we believe that, once you're trained, you owe us your loyalty.

make you think that such an enquiry is lible to sour your chances or at least taint it slightly. Or it may not but you are really not certain.

Suggestions?

Edit: which also gets you onto the interesting questions:

Would you employ someone who stated they wanted to take time off for pregnancy etc over someone equally qualified whos partner could do that biological stuff for them? Even if they were firmly committed (at that time) to staying in the job and returning to work after (while maintaining a reasonable work/family balance - whatever the definition of that is - you hear about the corporate male one...(another rant for later)).

Biological limitations/imperitives over natural inclination? Not so much never want to have kids - that is your fair call and anyone pressuring you over that should be slapped, but how do you handle if the mental inclination to do the 9-5 thing (or 8 hour shifts on a 24/7 system or whatever gainful paid employment) lies with the one who has to physically do the delivery etc?

And the practical considerations:
How much money do you need?
How essential is two incomes in this day and age?
How happy are you allowed to be in your work?
What are the flow on effects in paid employment taking either parent away from their children and what are the crucial developemental stages when the effects are most/least?
How sane can you stay through all this?

How much do I want to have my cake and eat it too?
Is the answer "Tough shit. Life isn't fair. Deal with it by making choices and sacrifices. You can't have it all."?
In which case, I want at least one chance at redefining the world in my local vicinity and trying to make it work.

Comments

[mmy-me.livejournal.com]

well, now, see when I see something like that I run screaming for the hills. First of all, "you owe us your loyalty" means "no payrises for ten years", "no extra leave or time off" and "take whatever crap we throw at you, for we were noble and trained you."

If they "give" you that amount of training, it's because they can't just find someone qualified off the street, and they know it. So I don't think you'd owe them anything, except a good day's work and the usual work ethics. "Helping you become a productive member of our Company" indeed!

IMHO, of course.

On the other hand, if it's a really good job, then who cares? You can get crappy bosses anywhere. And unless they make you sign on as an indentured servant, you can still always quit.

/maggie

[stellar-muddle.livejournal.com]

It is a very grating statement - unclear as to whether it follows from management speak badly handled/badly thought out or is a grovelling plea not to have them train you up and then you feck off into the middle distance and join the brain drain in making better money elsewhere. You do after all get a post graduate degree out of it, and after a years work, reach an internationally recognised qualification/standard for doing the job anywhere in the world - which probably does pay better elsewhere.
I'd post the job link but there are certain implications of following though on that, that Z and I are still discussing/not ready to make public. Sorry I am not being clearer...
Idea bouncing is good though.

[auntyyolly.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm, I'm with Maggie. Unnerving statement.

In publishing, I have mostly employed women of a certain age (thought in my current job I don't need to worry about any of this, yay!). To be honest, I won;t knowingly employ someone who is pregnant at the time since it takes too much effort to train more than one person a year. However, I expect a turnover of about one to three years in everyone, whether for reasons of pregnancy, new job or just tedium.

I would never tell anyone that I expect their loyalty, that's up to me to create, but I do ask for a verbal commitment to 18 months, subject to change if things don't work out or go ballistic in their lives. I think that my field is on average twice as fast at turnover as most, so three years is a reasonable expectation for most companies.

Two years of training/internship seems basically mad, unless it's some astonishingly new field that has no one working in it at the moment. Are they being realistic in what they are offering?

If the other people who work there all love it and say that it's great, then it is worth talking the issues through with them. You have a good set of phrases coming together already; if you are looking at 10-15 years then you will possibly be having children through that time, and how they deal with maternity and parental issues will be a part of your decision making process.

As a manager, I have always found that the people who intend to stick with a company are the ones who suss out all the long-term info such as this. If they take it badly, you don't want to be working for them. In addition, I often find mothers to be more motivated and accomplished than others, once they get past the sleep deprived stage. But this is not a universal thing, I think it's just that good employees become better employees when under some productive pressure. The crap ones stay crap.

As to the bigger questions of child rearing in the modern era; there's a reason we have no kids. I think that most women make the decisions that work for them and their kids and there are a lot of different permutations on those. Having been raised by au pairs, nannies and a single father who spent a lot of time either being a hippie or a lawyer, I'm not well qualified to speak on normal.

[slothphil.livejournal.com]

Make that three people going "I don't like the sound of that loyalty thing."

[etfb.livejournal.com]

...we believe that, once you're trained, you owe us your loyalty.

Not. A. Fracking. Chance.

If I ever saw that in any information given to me during an interview, I wouldn't even finish the complementary glass of water. I'd get up and run for the lift. That is, frankly, chilling.

I say: these people are not merely untrustworthy; they are bona fide criminals, and you need to avoid them at any cost.

That's what my instincts say, anyhow -- but I've learnt to trust them, because the times I didn't were invariably miserable.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel! News at eleven.

[mr-bassman.livejournal.com]

A question of loyalty is impossible to define. Like asking...
"So, when did you stop beating you husband?"

The conditions by which you work can be negotiated at the start of the contract period. The following day anything can happen. This is business. Business decisions are made for the same reasons other decisions are made. On a whim.

Loyalty is pretty priceless as a concept and is worth a lot to them..... But the question is:- How much is it worth to you??? I think Quadruple the salary for starters. And a car and double the annual leave and LSL after 5 years! A definition of their concept of loyalty would be required. If it's some sort of nebulous PFW idea then it's irrelevant.

As a professional, loyalty to an employer is supposed to be part of the deal. When you get retrenched however, the loyalty will stop at the termination payout. The next employer will not expect you to maintain loyalty with the previous one....

There are probably jobs around with a similar rewards where the matter of loyalty would never be raised.

Loyalty only works one way.

[theuns.livejournal.com]

Since we invest a lot of time and money in helping you become a productive member of our Company we believe that, once you're trained, you owe us your loyalty.

If it ain't in the contract, it's posturing. And I disagree: loyalty goes both ways, or it does rather quickly.

How much money do you need?
Personally, I have slightly more money than I actually require, at the moment. So it does happen without particular contortions.

How essential is two incomes in this day and age?
Beats me. On the other hand, a lot of the second income will be spent offsetting the maintenance activities that neither adult has time for due to work; and quality of life may well suffer. Playing house can be fairly lucrative, in a way.

How happy are you allowed to be in your work?
Personally, I require a fairly high degree of liking my job, and haven't been disappointed yet. [Admittedly, I'm a geek so am at something of an advantage] If nothing else, you'll suck at a job you hate, which damages earning potential.

As for this bunch, ask to see the contract. That'll spell out what they can actually hold you to, and is not an unreasonable request. Everything else is annoying, if not impossible, to enforce (from either side).

[mmy-me.livejournal.com]

How much money do you need?
How essential is two incomes in this day and age?
How happy are you allowed to be in your work?
What are the flow on effects in paid employment taking either parent away from their children and what are the crucial developemental stages when the effects are most/least?
How sane can you stay through all this?

I thought I'd give my answer to some of these, since I am a former high-flying professional (in the sense that I had a senior management role in a multinational, worked 60+ weeks and commuted between two countries - and now I'm a housewife and mother.
Two incomes are not essential - if you're prepared to deal with the lesser income. On the upside, being at home means you can make savings in ways not available to you if you're working. Time is suddenly cheap.

I strongly believe that you need to be happy in your life. Working a crap job that requires nothing of you and leaves you free to do other things is perfectly viable to me; I've been a cleaner at a restaurant for a year for precisely that reason. I worked an incredibly stressful and demanding job because I thorughly enjoyed my time there. Either way, as long as you are getting something positive out of it, whatever that is, is good.

I am glad I have stayed at home with my kids, but I was raised by a single parent working shifts and that was just fine too. I don't believe that matters as much as people sometimes suggest; what matters is that you love your kids and they know it. All else can be negotiated. And yes, you do have to make choices and sacrifices; that's part of choosing to be a parent. And you deal with it. What else can you do?

[queneva.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you're aware of the possibilities. Yes, it's a warning flag, but if other things about the work are powerfully attractive it's worth figuring out more about the culture of the place. It might be quite telling if you could somehow find out their staff turnover ("churn") stats and the age profile of their current workforce, but I can't offer good ideas about how to get them apart from asking nicely. :-)

Have a think about what was and is considered reasonable in cadetship and bonding schemes. They vary a lot, but even when you're training on full pay or having your pilot training paid for there's usually a payback time of somewhere between year-for-year and a maximum I've seen of seven years. Giving you two years' training doesn't entitle them to the rest of your working career, although you might work out a shared expectation about you not walking out the door the day your training ends (and even then, real life events trump most agreements).

Is this work you think you could love? Is this an organisation you think you could help you flourish? (What's their take on provision of quality childcare? Just thought I'd ask...) As you deal with them, do you get the feeling that they care about their people and they're ready to care about you? Is this statement their slightly clumsy way of letting you know that they're interested in a serious, long-term working relationship, or is it a sign that they're controlling types who'll think they own you because they trained you?

Oh, and I think I've just worked out who you're talking about, because they were one of the places I was going to point you at for an example of the training+career thing. Hmmmm... I'd want to get a good feel for what the work's really like and what the place is like to work in before making a commitment of that magnitude. If you get serious, what about seeing if you can do a short internship -- somewhere from a week to a month -- to experience the place from the inside and decide if it's a good fit for you? You're right: for a bunch of reasons this isn't quite an ordinary job choice/selection process.

[auntyyolly.livejournal.com]

And that's why I have Maggie at the top of my list of People I'd Like To Be More Like.

On a related note job-wise, can I just say that four days a week is infinitely better than five? It's astonishing the difference it makes.

[stellar-muddle.livejournal.com]

Does what you think I am talking about involve cloud gazing?
I suspect the background knowledge involved precludes the possibility of an internship, which is a pity. The problem is that while I know people who went away to work there, this was about 10 years ago and it is more a case of vaguely recognising them in the corridor, so asking them for advice is difficult.
I think I will directly ask them about maternity/parental leave/child care - worst case it is established I didn't want to work under those conditions, best, I get good information.

[queneva.livejournal.com]

And isentropic flow.

I wouldn't be so quick to write off the idea of arranging to spend some time getting to know what you'd be getting yourself into before deciding, although since they use 'internship' for the post-training year there's probably another term that would better explain it. But my first attempt at professional training was something I ended up hating, and I guess I'm wanting you to avoid that.

Employment law will cover a fair bit of what I think you're talking about in the parental leave stakes, and there's even a period of paid maternity leave before the year of unpaid parental leave kicks in. Having grandparents close by is likely to make the rough spells of parenting more bearable. There's a university campus very close by which I hear has more-than-one good childcare centre: check out eligibility. Oh, and I was looking seriously at Clifton Terrace Model School which is an inner-city training school modelled along the lines of a rural school. Good ERO reports and it has in the past had good reviews from friends in teaching (although note that schools can turn around in the time it takes your children to need them).

How do you feel about shift work? The money thing is largely about choices: accommodation, distance and travel, respite care for parents... ;-)

Work life return to work

[shr-zr.livejournal.com]

The best(happiest) that I have seen a new mother return to work was on a 3days per week basis using personal and annual leave to cover the other two days.