Resilience and The Job Hunt

Resilience is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently so I wanted to write a short piece to collect my thoughts.

I knew making a major career change was going to be hard and that the job hunt after studying at Makers wasn’t going to be easy, but in all honesty I don’t think I’d fully considered how difficult it might be. I know that my location (Chamonix, France) is one of the things that’s adding to the difficulty and that my job hunt has been more of a roller coaster than most. After 2 months of job hunting I was offered a really great position at a supportive company that I was excited to work for, only for it to fall through down to the logistics of hiring me. This was particularly frustrating as the team itself was already distributed over more than one country and fully remote working was expected in the role. There’s also been the situations that almost all job hunters are familiar with, interviewing for a role that you’re passionate about and where you’re sure you could make a valuable contribution, only to find out they’ve chosen someone else. It’s these situations, as well as the everyday trawling of job sites that have got me thinking about different types of resilience.

I’ve always considered myself a resilient person, especially in the world of work. In my previous position, resilience was a skill that was very necessary, I worked for a large tour operator and part of my role involved overseeing the arrival and departure of thousands of guests at the airport each week. This already complex logistical operation was often made infinitely more demanding by the unpredictable weather in The Alps. Think crisis situations where there are flight diverts, the team spread across 4 airports instead of 1, guests spending 10+ hours on coaches and even hundred of guests spending the night on airport and local sports hall floors with the Red Cross providing camp beds and hot drinks. I quickly became a team member that was considered resilient enough to be able to step into any role, wherever it was going wrong and just get on with it, until the job was done. I thrived in these adverse situations.

However, the job hunt has taught me that resilience over a sustained period of time is very different to resilience in a think on your feet, heat of the moment, deal with unhappy guest shouting at you type of resilience. I’ve learnt that I do need a couple of days after facing a big disappointment to get fully back on the job hunt, and that that’s fine, and even though it can make you feel pretty down, generally for me that feeling will pass after just a couple of days. I’ve also learnt to identify what can trigger changes in my mood while job hunting. One of those things is looking at job sites and finding a lack of suitable opportunities for me. Instead of continuing to trawl, which I realised lowered my mood and encouraged negative thoughts, I now make conscious decisions to avoid this. I’ll decide to either work on a project instead for a few days before I look again or even just take a few days out from the job hunt and coding all together.

It’s these learnings about myself that are definitely adding to my ability to bounce back and keep ploughing on with the job hunt. I’ve also become resilient in a more rounded way than I was, I guess I’ve got a difficult job hunt to thank for that!