I’ll start this off on a positive note, and say that I was able to quit my job last year without horrible financial consequences since my husband has a good secure job that he excels at and makes enough money to support the family.
That being said, I have worked in various IT Development positions since I graduated college in 2006. However, up until the past couple of years, I was always working under a team lead or a business analyst who told me what needed to be done and I would just work on translating that into code. Junior programmers don’t really have a great deal of responsibility.
My last job is the one that I held the longest, and in the third year I was there there was a major company split and I found myself suddenly working on a much smaller team in a much smaller company. And then they told us all that now we would all have to be “leaders” and take on more responsibility.
That is when I got the opportunity to be the technical lead on a project, and it was about then that things started to unravel. I could hardly keep up with my own tasks much less those of others on the team. I couldn’t keep all the detail of the project straight in my head. All my tasks were slipping terribly and I was taken off the project before it was done (and after it had gone well over the planned deadline.) While some of this was not my fault, honestly I didn’t quite know how to lead a project and I was not picking up on these prized leadership skills the way all my peers were… I still stuck with the job and went through a “Performance Improvement Plan” which (despite what my anxiety told me) was an attempt to actually help me. I got a lot of good coaching from my manager, and after several months they said I had mastered the needed skills and could go off of the PIP. However, the adjustment was clearly not permanent since all the same problems came back as soon as they were not monitoring me so closely. And even though I was performing better externally when under the PIP, my anxiety levels were through the roof–I even discovered that high levels of anxiety can cause temporary chest pains.
It didn’t end with that project. The new small company had project after project lined up, and it was not just me slipping on things but my whole team. I ended up on another PIP largely because one of our internal customers essentially said I’d been rude and talked over them on the phone. Actually all of my meetings were on the phone, and that especially makes it hard to read the non-verbal cues. I would have follow-up meetings with my manager where she would point out all the ways that I completely missed the meaning of what the customer was actually saying. And I’ve never figured out how stay calm and placate a customer who is not happy with results. In fact, all my life just being around someone who is angry or frustrated (even if not directed at me, even if it’s a character on TV!) has made me incredibly tense and irritable. And when I’m anxious I can’t think clearly, then when being pressured to answer I just say the first thing that I think of.
(As an aside, it was this last bit of negative feedback from my manager that finally pushed me to get properly evaluated for ADHD.)
So, I’ve been out of a job since October, and my bit of money I’d saved up is almost gone. I feel really guilty about transferring my bills to my husband though he has been very supportive about the whole thing. But I really want to find a good job again since I like having my own money. But neither my technical skills nor my communication skills are that great (evidenced by previously mentioned experience and feedback) so there is always something in every potential job where I simply do not feel qualified. I would suck it up and just “fake it until I make it” but that is what I tried to do in my last job and it just doesn’t work!
I’m just fine with socializing when I have no performance pressures on me, but dealing with customers and tense situations is a problem. I’ve heard that if you have stellar communication skills you can get in the door of a lot of careers regardless of any specialized technical skills. Does anyone have some tips on how I can improve those communication skills and gain back some self-confidence *before* starting a new job?
