I've been away on holiday for a week. I felt great.
Now I don't feel so great.
What has changed?
I'm back at work that's what.
So two images for you to start with.
1. A fly hitting it's self repeatedly against a window pane to get out.
2. A small village in Wales.
What connects these two images. I'm waiting. No? OK I'll tell you.
The first is how I see myself trying to get out of this role I'm in. My strategy so far, to hurl myself at the window of HR in HE repeatedly in the hope of smashing through has singularly failed to get me any positive results. I'm still here, still bored, still ignored.
If you are a newcomer to a village in Wales it will take you a very, very long time before the other local residents stop referring to you as the newcomers.
You can do several things as a fly to escape, and I'm not including being swatted by the weekend paper at this point. However I do seem to vaguely remember that no one has ever trained a fly to do anything, though what a trained fly might usefully do escapes me at the moment. Still the fly might buzz around at random until it finds an alternative to the solid air it seems to have encountered and fly off to a new source of rotting food to land on and eat, it can rest for a while think up a new strategy (buzz, buzz buzz, buzz?) then start on the head banging thing again or it can die and be found feet up in the air on the carpet. I like to think that my career is the solid wall rather than the carpet of death and that I'm slightly cleverer than a fly and can come up with an escape plan. A veritable tunnel of escape. I'm working on that although all I can, figuratively, find to dig with is a wooden spoon and try and break through the reinforced concrete.
HE is not an easy place to work. I went and asked for feedback for my CV today, for a job I failed to even get an interview for. I am calm, deep breaths, stay calm. The feed back was 'you are being too subtle in your approach'. Subtle? So what was meant was to knife and fork the CV. If they ask for evidence of a competency then type the competency and evidence it - a sort of glorified list and don't be so bleedin' stupid and even think of trying to categorise the evidence under grouped headings. Too subtle. 'Makes the reviewer of the CV a little irritated' I'm told. Poor dears. Well I accept that piece of advice - if that's how they want it then so be it. However there was no answer to the 'but I got an interview from that style CV just a few weeks ago.' I'm still not convinced that there is a 'CV' - depends on the person on the day. Got to play the game. I think the game is like a very early version of football as they seem to be playing with my head today.
I think the important thing is to listen. However it seems glaringly obvious that HE is not a meritocracy as an institution, more of a waiting game and lots of background politicking. 'We don't like brash and pushy' I was told. Or putting people who are 'not one of us' in positions of management either.
And that sequeways me neatly to, it does there's no point in complaining, to the village in Wales. To stop being a newcomer there you have to live in the village for a mere 60 years. Then and only then will you be accepted as 'one of us.' And you can refer to other newcomers as 'the newcomers.'
So what have we learned today about progressing in HE?
It's not a meritocracy.
You have to be patient, very, very patient.
You have to not stand out, be pushy or brash.
If you are not one of us you are one of them. If you are one of them you can't become one of us.
I'm not one of them - so is that it then?
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