Promotion

Perhaps the best strikes out of the blue, perhaps.

December 2016

After a few drinks on a Christmas party my boss suggested we needed to have a longer chat. I had awaited this conversation for weeks and had hoped he would appreciate my hard work and signal an imminent promotion and pay rise. Over the next days I kept insisting he did not go back on his promise and so we eventually landed in a conference room. My boss simply wanted to ask me how I felt, overburdened with work. His reason to have a chat with seemed so absurdly silly that I straightforwardly asked about my prospects of promotion. He honestly reassured they were none…

February 2017

Annual appraisal. During an hour-long meeting to talk over my performance over the previous year I learnt whatever I had done superbly, I had just lived up to my superiors’ expectations, but whatever mistake I had made (the more you do, they more likely you are to make an error, statistically) I had been destined to be rebuked over. Then I took out a sheet of internal memo on promotion criteria to prove I had met all requirements set out in the document. My boss rebuffed this, claiming those guidelines were just a bare minimum and meeting all targets did not automatically qualify me for a position upgrade, but was just a condition precedent to it. At the end I was told the reason why I could not be promoted was that I displayed “emotional immaturity”. I immediately demanded examples of behaviours proving my lack of maturity. Needless to say the assertion of my emotional immaturity had no backing. That appraisal was held on Friday. The weekend thereafter in a spurt of anger I sent out CVs to competitors of the New Factory.

March 2017

I attended two interviews with other financial institutions. Even if in terms of competencies I was eligible, with hindsight I found out my pay rise expectations had priced me out of any considerations. In terms of salary growth, banking sector bucks the trends visible on the labour market. Had I even gotten a higher position, I would have had to accept a similar or lower base salary, not to mention I would have given up on a generous bonus.

April 2017

Found a job opening for a senior position in a similar area at the New Factory. I knocked on some doors to senior managers’ offices and shed some tears over my hapless situation. They were meant to play the cards right.

May 2017

I attended a serious of informal meetings with my would-be superiors (would-be boss and his boss) and once they decided they would take me on, I officially applied for the position. For the sake of transparency, a full-blown recruitment procedure needed to be run before they would select me.

July 2017

Meeting with candidates for my position dragged on for weeks and eventually nobody, including me, was offered that position just because the vacancy was either cancelled or put on hold. My hopes were dashed, actually I was not officially turned away. In the HR system my application was not even rejected, I only received a message the process had been completed. Actually since in the meantime my priorities had changed, the loss was not that painful.

September 2017

Shortly before my holidays gossips about substantial reshuffles in the organisational structure were put about. With little hopes to win, I began to wonder how to take advantage of the changes.

11 October 2017

My would-be boss dropped me an e-mail with an urgent request to meet up and asked whether I was interested in that job any longer. I came over, showed some reserved interest and declared I would need to think it over seriously, especially since some time had passed.

12 October 2017

I met a boss of my would-be boss to haggle over my base salary. The basic they offered was some 15% higher than my current one, yet I feared with much lower bonus multiplier, my all-in after-tax remuneration would go down by some 10% – quite astonishing side effect of a promotion, though you must remember bonus multipliers may change any time and the only bonuses you could be certain of are those ones already transferred into your bank account.

13 October 2017

Pay bargaining turned out to be successful. I got more that they wanted to offer me two days earlier, yet still less than what I held out for while applying. I accepted the base salary, bearing in mind how much some of my ex-workmates who had changed jobs recently earn. We nailed down the deal, yet before I sign the annex to my job contract, my promotion and pay rise remain in the realm of gentlemen’s agreements and the New Factory still stands a chance to double-cross me (it can boast of track record of mistreating its employees).

The unexpected goings-on from recent days prove one timeless regularity – the less you care, the better things shape up. Same happened to me a few months ago when after several spectacular mistakes in the love life, I decided to give up on looking for girlfriend. Less than a month later I dated somebody and future still looks bright.

Reasons to change a job

Upbeat tidings from the labour market, confirmed by figures published by the Stats office and palpable shortage of workforce in some industries naturally prompt thoughts on what motivates people to change their workplace. Recruitment agencies share results of their research on this; their outcomes and real-life observations put together form a list of factors employees take into account when they are considering a relocation.

1. Your boss. Some statistics prove shattered relationships with a direct manager most often (up to 80% of instances) prompt employees to look for a new job. Your boss may be a tyrant who never puts up with disagreement, a workaholic who coerces their team to work as long and as hard as they do, a tormentor who picks a victim in a team and bullies them. All characters above induce one to quit, but even if your boss is only lazy, incompetent and afraid you may want to take their place, the set-up is bad enough to waste your potential and forbid you to thrive. If you are ordered about by a despot or by an idiot, there is no point in waiting your superior gets sacked. Take matters in your hands before you hit the roof in a bout of frustration!

2. Colleagues. Just like a boss, the closest workmates with whom you spend several hours a day might become a pain the arse. If you simply do not fit in with the team (e.g. you are an extravert surrounded by introverts) the situation is bearable, but if your team lacks team spirit, people run rings around one another or hostility is felt in the air, time to make off!

3. The pay. You can hear voices work is all about the money, yet a decent pay will not compensate you for emotional ordeal that might destroy your psyche if you have to endure it for years. Before you jump to conclusions you are underpaid, do sound out the market to make sure competitors of your employer can offer you more. A huge pressure on salary increases is observed in low-paid professions, however the tide does not lift all boats. Professionals in industries where earnings are above-average and headcount is on decline, such as financial sector, should not reckon on easy pay rise. Moreover, HR departments bend over backwards while grappling with payrolls and their moves vary across the industry. Some companies lay off best-paid experts to find cheaper, yet less competent ones and this might seem economically rational. Many more employers, however, fail to retain (by giving a pay rise) good, yet slightly underpaid employees who quit, but then the same employers hire less experienced new staff and pay them more than their predecessors.

4. Appreciation, or rather lack of it. Hardly any worker will be satisfied with wages paid on time only. Apart from tangible, pecuniary or not, benefits, humans long for other forms of reward. Tapping somebody on their shoulder and saying “good job”, thanking, giving prizes will not replace bonuses but decent bonuses without non-material reward come out shoddy!

5. Prospects. If you feel or are genuinely told in a few years you will be doing the same thing for the same money, then even if your job is not repetitive and you actually like it, your motivation may plummet. Awareness of being stuck in a dead-end street is unappealing, unless you are in a pre-retirement age and wish to make it safely to the moment of pensioning off on your cushy stool.

6. Identity crisis. If you do not believe in a business model of your company, you cannot believe its well-being will translate into yours. The more serious type of the problem is when your employer engages in illegal (or morally dubious) practices you do not wish to take part in.

7. Opportunity. It usually emerges unbidden, for a short moment, so you are given little time to take it or leave it. I would hazard a guess the most successful transfers between jobs come about when an opportunity strikes out of the blue and one is not afraid taking a risk to seize it.

For the very end, a sad observation I need to share. After nearly seven years of being submerged into corporate world, I was under delusion quick advances on the career ladder in international corporations were just thanks to sheer hard graft, while jobs gotten via connections (not in a positive meaning of the word) were the domain of government-owned companies and some of private small businesses. Quite recently I have been disabused…

The power of networking

A wise man said once you work to live, not the other way round, but you need to work to enjoy your life. In your adult life you spend around one-fifth of your life at work (assuming your work 225 days per year, eight hours per day) and nearly one-third of the time you are awake (assuming you sleep seven hours each night). No wonder then workplace is where you meet people and get involved in relationships with them (today not a single word on romantic ones).

One rarely can choose their workmates, so one can sometimes hate them, but also hit it off with some of them. Nevertheless you spend several hours a (working) day with colleagues not to become friends, but to pursue together a common goal which is making your company earn, which you hope will translate into your individual goal, i.e. to get paid!

It’s not a secret relationships built over your professional life, though frequently cannot be called friendships, are precious. In the corporate world, the more people you know, the more you can gain. Everybody knows what growing your network means, so nearly everyone, driven by their self-preservation instinct, plays that game, as having a network can benefit everybody. The only question is when you reap the benefits (if you do it at all), but since sowing the seeds of networking costs little, nearly everyone does it.

Those familiar with the nicknames I consistently use on the blog and keeping track of developments in the Polish financial secret, don’t need to be told the Employer, where I worked from 2010 to 2014 has actually fallen apart after a merger with another player in the industry. As it naturally happens when two companies are combined into one, several corporate functions are doubled and to streamline the organisation and pursue cost synergies overstaffing has to be coped with. The way making staff redundant is handled does not vary across corporations. The set-up I described in much detail over four years ago (hey it’s been over eight years since I posted on PES for the first time) remains up-to-date and the only positive thing about being left out in the cold are parachutes laid-off workers get that let them make ends meet for a few months.

Regardless of the financial aspect of being given the sack, on top comes the emotional one. Many people, though they have hobbies, families and lead private lives, find it hard to stay at home for a prolonged period and miss the part of their life which apart from earning them a livelihood, gave them a lot of satisfaction and self-fulfilment.

Those who I feel most sorry for are the ones who had spent more than a decade at the Employer, who last looked for a job before Poland joined EU, who will be outside their comfort zone when they finally are taken on by another company.

When I attended a funeral mass in early January, I met some long-unseen workmates and since then the frequency of interactions with former colleagues has intensified. I could hold a grudge against them for renewing our relationships when they are on the verge of falling off the cliff, but I won’t. Majority of people want to grab every opportunity to reduce uncertainty and increase their odds of soft landing when they are dropped of the corporate plane.

The number of invitations on LinkedIn, number of phone calls, lunches in town and meetings indicates the lookout for a foothold is under way. From a not entirely professional perspective, relationships with former workmates have grown multi-faceted. I have become a professional counsellor, a psycho-therapist, a shoulder to cry on, a labour market analyst and a potential assistant to recruiters at the New Factory. I need to show empathy in those roles, but I often struggle not to overdo with empathy at the expense of sincerity. Giving advice to someone or raise their spirits must not mean telling them they are eligible for every job or they would fit every organisations. My job requires above-average assertiveness, fluency in English, involves frequent public speeches, business trips, staying overtime and (OK, I’m now blowing my own trumpet) not everyone meets all the criteria.

Plus to be sincere, my workplace has turned recently into a mire (worse than in my first months there, though easier to survive today) into which I would not draw any of my workmates, though they know there are vacancies to be filled. On the other front, five months after first cracks appeared, I went to labour market and sent out three applications last weekend (no response so far). It has been my first sounding out of the labour market since early 2014 and the main change I see is that sending a CV and a letter of application to an e-mail address has given way to filling in application forms and attaching a CV (letter of application is gone?). Interestingly, all three potential employers were asking about salary expectations in the application forms; wondering whether this a tool to disqualify over-priced candidates right away?

With such nasty course of affairs, I may only hope the good I am sending to people will return to me if I am left out in the cold, which is unfortunately not inconceivable.

Worlds apart

The girl

When I joined the New Factory she was already there. I passed her by each day several times while walking past the reception desk on our floor. She looked twenty and I thought she was a weekend-mode student working as an assistant to earn money for her university tuition fee.

Normally the occupation of a receptionist is treated as temporary. Usually students take up such mundane jobs to earn a livelihood, sometimes to fill their CVs and then they move on to more ambitious positions. This is not the case here.

She is quite sociable. Easily hits it off with everyone, yet her come-and-go attitude does not help her build true friendships. With time it turns out she is 45 days younger than me, yet since I was born in December and she in January the next year, she finished her studies a year later (in 2012). As a child she was an actress, in her career she had some impressive roles in films and TV series. If you tap her name into google, you will find her more-or-less up-to-date photos and learn in 2012 she graduated from the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Warsaw University (full-time studies). Tens of fans are wonder what she’s doing.

The job with a New Factory is the first one she has held on to for more than one year and the first one in which she has a regular job contract, involving all rights, privileges and pension contributions, rather than a junk contract. Actually she only cares about the type of contract for only one reason: with a regular labour-code-governed contract she is entitled to 20 days of paid holidays a year. Until now when she felt like going somewhere, she’d quit her job and upon return looked out for a new one. None of her jobs was anyhow related to what she had studied, comparing to what her studies should have prepared her for, all her previous jobs (and the current one) seemed actually well below her competencies.

She likes the job with the New Factory. It involves meeting lots of people and chatting to them, keeping them company during lunches, making a morning coffee to a management board member. She appreciates the fact her job involves no strain and no stress. Office workers around her have hectic days, face pressures, get irate easily. She doesn’t understand their quandaries and is glad her job is so carefree, despite the fact she earns just a fraction of what her stressed-out workmates get paid. Her salary is just enough to meet her basic needs: cosmetics, clothes, weekend clubbing, holidays; a very decent pocket money. Her parents with who she lives seem to put up with her lifestyle and her grandpa whose car she uses (and once a month she leaves the vehicle, grandpa fills it up and then she picks it up with full tank of petrol) also seems to be quite tolerant.

While we lunched last week, she told me to look at her and asked what I thought she should be doing in life. After turning down several ideas she had come up with, I suggested she should search for a job in which she could make use of the knowledge accumulated during five years of law studies. She nodded her head, pulled a face, nearly burst into tears and said it would need to involve some strain.

She backs PO. She believes PiS is backward and would bring nothing good for Poland. She tells Mrs Szydło should return to the sack (Szydło wróć do worka, a pun stemming from a Polish idiom, when reversed meaning bad things should come out of light).

The neighbours

They have lived in NI since ever, their parents as well. They were on this land years before building houses on this suburb became all-the-rage in the 1990s. They sold little of the land they had had, since the family was big and a sizeable plot was needed to put up houses for all the children.

The neighbour is the local, his wife comes from eastern Poland. They met the time he was breeding foxes in late 1970s. They got married and prospered well until 1989 when exports of fox furs to the former Soviet Union came to a halt and consequently their business went bust. In the new reality they engaged in some trade with the former Soviet Republics, yet as they were shuttling between NI and the borders, four children they had at the time began to be brought up on the street. Then they switched to local trade and opened a stall on the former biggest bazaar of the CEE, where today the National Stadium is. Golden times have gone by and for more than a decade the neighbour and his wife have been jobless. They do not need to. Their properties are large enough to sublet rooms for construction workers (20 PLN per person a day, yet in black economy) and officially let a larger hall for a company (here already a registered business, generating a recurring stream of income of a few thousand per month).

Their older son (32) is a successful graduate of a technical university. While he was approaching graduation, his professors had a high opinion of him and recommended him for a few positions which could give him prospects of brilliant career. Eventually he has not taken up any of those jobs. I have no idea, whether potential employers have rejected his candidacy or whether he turned down all those jobs, because they would have interfered with his academic career, namely the doctoral studies he began eight years ago and in the meantime suspended for a year; his PhD is still pending.

Their younger son (29) according his parents’ ambition was meant to firstly finish studies and then to find a job with a town hall. Unfortunately, so far there was no job offered to him there, while the family’s ambitions are put on hold, the son takes up temporary jobs on construction sites (he indeed is a dab hand).

Two daughters (27 and 25) have finished studies and work as shop assistants in one of clothing retail chains’ shops, most probably also on junk contracts. The youngest daughter (14) keeps learning and watches her parents and older siblings staying at home or dabbing in dead-end job. What are the chances she pursues a career ambitious people want to make?

Despite the fact the family consists of seven people they easily make ends meet. They have a variety of sources of income: rent from their corporate tenant, some cash from construction crews renting rooms, the neighbour’s sickness benefits, the older son’s assistant salary, the younger son’s wages from construction sites, the daughters’ salaries from the retailer. Except for the office rent proceeds, these are most probably peanuts, yet add up to a sum which allows the family to meet their basic meets. Fair enough.

The neighbour and his family hankers after PRL, yet votes for PiS, despite not being totally fond of all points of the party’s agenda. Yet PiS passes muster, it will restore law and order in Poland, take away the wealth from the elites to give it to ordinary people and put behind bars all thieves and cons who currently run the country.

In the descriptions above I did my utmost to include only facts and avoid expressing any opinions on how other people choose to live. Yet there must be a reason why I have decided to post the two stories. Every time I read in a newspaper or in the Internet about my peers as a “lost generation” (stracone pokolenie) I wonder whether it is the system or the people (the ever-lasting question) that should be blamed for the failures of many of the youngsters…

Next weekend I’m off, next post in two weeks.

Nie robię za darmo

Back as a fourth-year student I brought to your attention the topic of unpaid internships and expressed my displeasure with HR policies allowing to hire young people without paying them at all. As a student, I never condescended to take an unpaid internship, despite understanding employers’ rationale (or excuses) behind such despicable practices. Time has gone by, my career has moved on, I am no longer eligible for an internship, but keep in mind days when I was on a lookout for gaining first job experience and hence sympathise with current students, often coerced to work for a mere “thank you”.

I was more than pleased to find out somebody has finally decided to draw a line at offering students and graduates unpaid internships. Nie robię tego za darmo (I don’t do it for free) is a project launched by one of Poznan-based NGOs, Wspieramy Wielkich Jutra (Supporting the Future Leaders, to convey the meaning) foundation that has gained extensive media coverage in week following the campaign commencement on 20 September. Originators of the venture have broached an important social problem that affects each year thousands of young people in Poland.

For some of you this may sound like a leftist twaddle, but unpaid internships are a nefarious form of labour exploitation (campaigners call it slavery), taking advantage of natural weakness of inexperienced youngsters (no one has been born with a CV full of previous positions) in corporations’ pursuit of higher profits. I do not advocate going to another extreme and meeting excessive pay requirements some graduates have, as it is obvious a freshman will not add huge value to a company, but it is a matter of straightforward decency to pay an intern at least token “peanuts” allowing them to subsist in a city they work (during my last internship, 3 years ago, I earned 2,200 PLN before tax monthly and such salary seems reasonable). If you argue an intern does not add value to your business, what is the point in hiring them at all? If you argue an intern requires attention and teaching such person utilizes the company’s resources, I remind you in free-market economy in order to reap profits you need to invest and every kind of business expansion carrier a risk – the same applies to money spent on human capital. Not every such investment will pay you back.

If the points above do not seem convincing, let’s refer to the economic concept of negative selection. In simple words it implies better candidates for interns will choose paid internships, while those too poor to be offered paid internships will come to you and you will get leftovers.

OK, so they will come anyway, better or worse, yet suitable to do some simple tasks. You might point out the market functions in such way, so if there is a demand even for unpaid internships, why not coming up with supply? The reasoning is akin to noticing a loophole in law – if you can circumvent a regulation and go unpunished, why not benefiting from it? It all boils down to ethics, the moral spine you have or only claim to have. Any company that takes on interns for free and claims its commitment to CSR lies through its teeth! Get it? If not, use the last resort analogy. If someone pays you a visit, do you offer them something to drink or eat, or not, because they do not ask you? Just as offering a beverage or snack to a guest is a matter of good manners, paying an intern is a matter of decency.

Tens of companies, including the biggest Polish firms and multinational corporations have swiftly supported the initiative. The circle of commendable employers covers, according to press reports, inter alia: Orange, Danone, ArcelorMittal, Deloitte, General Electric, Leroy Merlin, PKN Orlen, Bank Pekao, PwC, PGNiG, PZU, Toyota and Whirlpool. The code of ethics has been written in one-page long “Polish Internship Quality Framework”, a document which sets out requirements an internship with a civilised employer has to meet. The key assumptions are:

1) each internship lasting at least 1 month MUST be paid and governed by a written contract,

2) each internship should have an agenda / plan setting forth duties of an intern and skills they are to acquire or develop

3) each intern should have a supervisor who will be responsible for overseeing and lending a helping help to an intern,

4) each intern should receive feedback at the end of their stint and written confirmation of completing the internship.

I must say my last internship fulfilled all the criteria above, thanks to this both my employer and I benefited from it.

Points above address other pathologies affecting how internships are organised. We must not confine the problem to the mere aspect of remuneration, since what an intern does at work is of paramount importance as well. The initiative is also intended to crack down on internships consisting in brewing coffee, copying documents, or sorting pieces of paper in files. But these pathologies in turn stem from another ludicrous arrangement, which fortunately was not in force at my university when I was a student, i.e. that internship is obligatory for every student and every student needs to get a credit for it in order to get a degree. I hold the view students are adults, aware of how the labour market functions, who realise what factors are appreciated by employers and who know the value of experience when looking for the first serious job. If somebody wants to gain experience, they will take matters into their hands anyway. If somebody is reluctant to have an internship, their choice – what is the point in two parties to internship agreement having to put up with each other?

Noteworthy is also the story of intern working in the City who participated in summer programme run by Bank of America Merill Lynch. The 21-year-old student was paid 2,700 pounds a month for his job, but did not endure 70 hours of continuous working without a break… So while in Poland the case is whether interns are paid at all, in the UK problems youngsters overreaching themselves in the chase of jobs in the never-sleeping financial industry, have become an issue.

How it feels to be made redundant

As they were taking you on, good times were rolling. Returns were high, risks were underestimated, salaries and bonuses were enviable. Then the housing bubble in the United States burst and fallouts flied even to Poland. The industry faced a slowdown and felt the pressure to economise. To make things worse, just before the outbreak of the crisis your company was about to fully merge with another one. Unfortunately, due to Competition watchdog’s objection, the takeover was only partly brought off, the buyer picked the best divisions and rest was put up for sale. It soon found a new owner; the sucker was ready to pay over the odds for the piece of shit which used to be one of the leading and most reputable players on the market.

The new owner introduced its principles and began to turn the business around, despite really adverse market conditions. Faced with the choice either to shape up and keep your mouth shut, or to ship out and begin to look for a new job, on the market flooded with supply of similarly profiled professionals. You soldiered on and they appreciated your effort. Soon you got promoted and received a pay rise, while over 10% of the staff were laid off during the first wave of employment restructuring. Then ensued the second wave of lay-offs. Several people around were fired, but this was not your problem. You held down the job and performed well, so you did not need to be afraid.

As the economic recovery begin to fade and sovereign crisis in Europe loomed more perilous, your company, despite everything, announced expansion plans. The whole market learnt who was going to be the growth leader, competitors looked with some disdain on your company and slowly began to downsize to retain profitability during economic slowdown.

Reality check came a few months later. There have been some mistakes regarding the strategy made, but executives found the scapegoats in those who had been fired some time earlier. Review of recent performance figures proved the growth strategy fizzled out (unless you define growth as shrinking). Time to bite the bullet has come…

Hearsay over the third wave of cutbacks had been heard long before, but the press release saying this would happen and unveiling details of the plan was issued during the trading session. Shares of you company soared at the news of cost-cutting plan, but retreated to pre-news level by the end of the day. After all investors and speculators know this boat is bound to sink.

Following the lay-off announcement and recent 10 PLN pay rises, motivation among the staff fell dramatically. Nobody felt what they were doing was making sense, the company was going nowhere. Instead, everyone began to fret over the imminent job loss and make fun of the under-performing business.

In a message to employees the executives promised people will be notified in advance of their redundancy, treated with dignity and will receive the proper support and a generous severance package.

As time went by, only the very last promise has not been gone back on. How your fateful day looked depended on your position.

If you were a rank and file, head of your department took you to a room where you also met your HR manager. They told to sit back and handed you an envelope containing all documents linked to job contract termination. They informed they were too many of you in the team and you were selected to continue your career outside this organisation. You could either agree on a conditions proposed by the company or leave with no severance package. So you agreed obediently and got informed by when you can still work and hand your duties over to another employee and sign up for a course “how to write a CV successfully” (you had not been on the market for over 10 years so you did not know or have forgotten how to do it).

If you were a manager, you the invitation for a meeting when they were giving you notice looked similar. Severance package also did, but managers were given a very short deadline by which they had to pack their stuff and go away. Usually it takes two days to close their duties and say goodbye to your colleagues, then you can take your due days off and are requested not to come to work at all. You are still paid and are not allowed to take up a new job with a competitor, but your employer clearly tells you they do not want to see your face any longer. Slap on the face slightly worse than 10 PLN pay rise.

You colleagues seem to sympathise with you, but deep down they are happy it is you, not them. After all they are no irreplaceable people, those who stay on will have it much worse since now. The company has to grow anyway, only labour force harnessed to propel the growth will be less numerous. This is not the tragedy, they will have to work even longer and harder, in other words, more efficiently. Touch luck…

While you are gone you realise you are out on the limb – nobody needs you, market is full of professionals like you, fired by other companies in the industry. Your severance package will help you scrape along and keep paying off your mortgage for a few months or even a year, if you decrease your standard of living. What then – who cares… Maybe on the occasion of the next wave of lay-offs, set to come next year, somebody will mention you and wonder how you are doing.

To make it clear, I have not been fired and I have been told I will not lose the job under restructuring programme this year. But next year opportunities may unfold, with a more generous severance package…

Any similarities between real companies and event are totally accidental. The story is an absolutely fictitious figment of my imagination…

A barometer of the business cycle?

Who knows? Not me, I have conflicting feelings after visiting the biggest internship fair staged in Warsaw. The event is held two times a year, the autumn edition is organized in my school, the spring one, usually in turn of March and April – in the Palace of Culture and Science… This year’s edition had rather austere setting, I couldn’t see any banner on the facade of the building, the number of exhibitors shrunk by almost a half in comparison with the previous year, the stands didn’t look specially lavishly, rather they arranged it sparingly. Some of the companies listed in the brochure didn’t even appear, number of banks present didn’t exceed ten. I’ve had a few conversations with the representatives, procure a few pens and finally left the Palace to relish on the first blow of spring – now, in the late afternoon I guess I’m suffering from the thermal shock – the weather shift was too rapid for me.

Any conclusions? This is next time I was proved wrong – the crisis hit the industry. I thought companies, including the ones in financial sector, in an attempt to trim the cost would seek after students and graduates to offer the positions of trainees, rather low-paid ones, to benefit from the freshness and ingeniousness of the cheap, but gifted labour force. Luckily, I feel secure about my own professional future, particularly after a chat with a charming female colleague from the personnel department of my previous employer. Future is bright, even in spite of the crisis. The one who can prove their value may sleep restfully.