So tonight I met with a career counselor. Some of it was a bunch of hooey and some of it mad sense. I told him about my present job and what I liked/didn't like about it. Then he told me what I should do is take a personal inventory of the things I like about my job. He told me that he sensed I had problems with leadership and coaching and should take some classes or learn more about personality types, etc. The gist was that I should see what I can do to make me more satisfied with my job. I should also look to myself to come up with creative ways of dealing with people. Okay - I can see that because the help desk industry isn't all that creative.

Then I told him how there hasn't been any raises in five years, how I've gone as far at my company as I can (minus my present manager's job which I don't want), I've approached my last three managers with my unhappiness and I get a new manager every 18 months. They all recognize validity in what I say but nothing gets done to change things. While I've been seriously unhappy since May 2004 I've only applied for four jobs and interviewed for five (one of the managers I interviewed with referred to another manager for a position that became available) but these bizarre things generally happen or they need someone with more teaching/coaching experience or went with someone internal who already knew the product/system.

He gave me some solid information about how to update my resume. I will spend some time on it but it's not a high priority at the moment. I know it will take me a few weeks to get it done. He is going to send me some one-day seminar information regarding advanced coaching skills and such for me to approach my manager. While I know firsthand they haven't paid for anyone to attend any classes or workshops in five years not run by clients maybe I can get him to send some of the managers to one or have the career counselor come in and run a workshop. Right now of the "junior managers" (since I'm the only one that is a manager and the other two are leaders) one team of people is so unhappy that half of them are looking for new jobs and the other half are just happy to have a job. The other one has a team that gossips about each other, doesn't do their assigned work, and want to set their own work schedules from day to day. They could really use the training or workshop as well.