Week Fourteen - The journey ends!!!!!

So here we are, the post I've been looking forward to writing for 14 weeks now! Thank you to all those who have been regular readers. I hope it has been insightful to follow the journey of someone in my situation as thousands out there continue to navigate the job market so cruelly enforced on us by this pandemic.

Last week, the fourteenth of my official job hunt since being made redundant by Sky, I was offered and accepted a fantastic new role which I'm really looking forward to getting started in.

I will be joining Ipsos Mori as a Director in the Creative Excellence team. When I saw this role advertised in mid Feb it rang many bells for me so I had to apply for it. It allows me to call upon my entire career to date to add significant value to clients and also gives me the future career pathways that I've been looking for in this job search. It of course means a change in tack from client-side to agency but it feels like the right time for me to make this transition in order to further develop in some key areas of leadership. Finally, it sits in a passion area for me, ad research. I started my career at TRBI in "The ad unit" focussing largely on ad and brand research, I led many brand & comms related projects across my time at Samsung and most recently I've been heading the campaign insight team at Sky where my remit was to help Sky do the best campaigns possible. This balance of experiences clearly makes me very well qualified for this role with Ipsos and I can't wait to get started to impart the knowledge I have to their clients whilst utilising the extensive creative toolkit that Ipsos has at its fingertips.

I have to say thank you to Ipsos too for having the bravery to appoint a "client-sider" in to a senior position. As those who have followed my updates regularly will know, I've put myself forward for a few other, carefully selected, agency roles and all have seemingly got nervous about the lack of recent agency experience. Kudos to the senior team at Ipsos for seeing through this and focusing on the skills, experience and value that someone like me can bring to the role. I wish others hiring at the moment were as open minded as there are some incredibly talented and experienced people on the market right now that would add significant value to any agency.

So my third job hunt since the start of 2017 comes to an end after 3 months and 9 days. It has been an emotional journey this time. Starting with a lot of bitterness to be honest. The manner and process of my, and others, exit from Sky was frankly awful and has scarred me more than the previous two exits. It has made me seriously consider what I want to do and where I want to do it! A flurry of positivity then followed as early opportunities all seemed to be progressing to final stages. Alas, then the slow sinking depression as the rejections start to pile up and the application count rises and rises. Let me tell you, no matter who you are, how experienced you may be, losing out at final two hurts, failing to get a role because the JD wasn't pre-approved and is then withdrawn, hurts, being flat out ignored by 24 out of 66 applications hurts! The resilience I've built up over the last 4 years is something however that I am proud of and can take forward from this to help others....and no doubt myself again at some point over the next 25 years of career!

A big difference for me this time around has been the help and support of my Linked In network. I wrote in 2017 about how important Linked In is for the job search and I reiterate that with a cherry on top this time around. I've focused my energy on connections and utilised as many people as I could to gain some kind of advantage, however small, with as many applications as possible. It is no coincidence that the roles I've done best on have all had strong links to my network as seen in previous searches. I've also made a load of new 'friends' who have helped me along the way whether directly or indirectly. Many have just shown support through engagement with these posts, some have reached out personally to offer coaching or advice and some have gone as far as to highlight jobs that are not on the open market yet. All these things have been so greatly appreciated. They say in tough times you work out who your true friends are, this is very true but it is also a time when new friends can be made too.

Finally, thank you again for those who have read these updates. I knew that if nothing else writing down my experience would give me a way to focus my thoughts and offer some personal therapy. I didn't dream that I'd get over 1000 followers (seems big to me) and regular readers giving me thanks for sharing the experience and providing an understanding of what they are also going through. On reflection I count myself reasonably lucky to have got to this point in just over 3 months. I've read plenty of stories of those who lost jobs this time last year and still don't have new employment. I've worked hard, a full time job almost, and put a lot of effort in to interview prep, presentations etc and I'm glad it has paid off. I've enjoyed writing about my experiences, and feel compelled to keep some sort of authoring up so watch this space, I'm sure a wash up post will follow at some point soon to cover the lessons learned this time and maybe some kind of other professional update will also follow!

To those who are still job hunting, keep going and please don't hesitate to reach out to me if you think I could help in any way.

Cheers all

Phil