Virtually Locked into a Horrible Federal Career Track

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Vapno
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31 Jan 2018, 12:37 am

I've been a federal employee with the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) for 19 months now. I work out of a node of their "National Call Center", teleworking from home 4 days a week. I was hired without disability consideration due to my (only) 3 months at the private-contracted call center for the phone number on U.S. Passport applications, which hires only the disabled. (This contractor hiring me ended an 8-year, 8-month period of un- & under-employment.) My pay doubled immediately, but my primary reason for the move was the pretense of beginning a sustainable federal career.

I'm a policy wonk/nerd. I love land-use/natural-resource policy, world affairs, and other areas, but absolutely not entitlement policy. It's serving gimme-gimme people every hour of the day. Some do deserve it, but in my interactions with them, all they care about is the money.

And, as I mentioned, this is a call center. This call center is one that is becoming more and more understaffed and beleaguered by the day, as "friend of veterans" Trump has virtually frozen hiring and my coworkers wisely quit as the situation worsens. The calls are incessant. Conversely, at the Passport call center, they took me off the phones early and by special exception, because I loved and knew the subject-matter 99% and I was a terrifically friendly helper to more average coworkers left taking calls. That's not an option with the VBA call center. For one, the material is incredibly boring. Secondly, I'm not former military, so I'll never understand certain aspects of INSANELY difficult quagmires the agency and its often barely literate workforce have constructed. The coworkers who shouldn't have even been graduated from high school are held in the same esteem as me, with my 6 years of summa-cum-laude Eastern university degrees.

As the situation has gotten dramatically worse (due to Trump and the zero-phone-experience managers running things), I have scrambled to find a way out and forward into a federal career, in an agency offering the barest amount of intellectual interest to me. One of my job functions is reprinting official correspondence for our "clients" in what we call Freedom of Information Act/Privacy Act requests. A few months ago, I thought I found a way out! There are FOIA jobs in most agencies! And I found one within the Fish & Wildlife Service, in a desirable state! Out of over 150 applicants, I was one of 10 people to interview for ONE position. I made a few missteps during the interview, but they were overly positive and gave me multiple indications that I was their preferred candidate! I was on a dramatic roller coaster of emotions for 6 weeks. I finally called HR to find they filled the position without informing the rejects. The truth is that it's a stretch for me to expect ever being seen as the best qualified for these singular positions. So few opportunities occur within acceptable localities inside a year.

Assuming I haven't ruined my internal-promotion potential "slacking off" at the call center and its community-outreach activities, the only realistic path out of the call center for me within the next several months is applying for an internal transfer to a position that processes the disability-compensation claims. While I will no longer have to take calls, I'll be dragged day after day face down through entitlement policy I'll never find the least bit stimulating and military-career issues I will absolutely never understand. I can never expect to gain true competence in the field. Unlike at those natural-resource agencies, I'll never have a VBA coworker I'll be able to befriend. (Don't get me wrong. I'm very gregarious and loved at work, but no one is at my level or shares similar interests.)

I fooled myself. I am a tormented fool.



auntblabby
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31 Jan 2018, 12:43 am

I would trade places with you. you have an income and short hours, I don't have an income and lots of hours compressing my gluteus maximus. I need an income.



Sweetleaf
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31 Jan 2018, 3:24 am

Well people getting benefits, generally are going to be mostly concerned with their money when they call the office or go in if it concerns benefit payments. I mean I certainly don't wait 45 minutes to an hour on hold with the Social security administration to chat about butterflies and the weather. I typically am inquiring about what is going on with my SSI deposit or giving them updated info such as if I move, start working, stop working ect. I don't generally only care about money but yeah if I am interacting with the social security administration or the food stamps office...I am there about money/benefits.

That aside what I gather is you're bored within your field of work...is there no way to just quit and look into another field? I mean why do you have to necessarily remain a federal employee if you don't like the work? If you're more interested in land use and natural resources are there any like state opportunities or anything you could look into? I guess I am just not entirely understanding why you feel you have to stick in this particular field if you're constantly disappointed and bored with the work. Not trying to be insensitive, just trying to understand I myself have attempted college and from there have been on disability so I don't have much job experience let alone any experience with a career type job.


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Vapno
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01 Feb 2018, 3:30 am

auntblabby wrote:
I would trade places with you. you have an income and short hours, I don't have an income and lots of hours compressing my gluteus maximus. I need an income.

You DO NOT want this. Even several of my NT coworkers would attest to this warning.

Sweetleaf wrote:
That aside what I gather is you're bored within your field of work...is there no way to just quit and look into another field? I mean why do you have to necessarily remain a federal employee if you don't like the work? If you're more interested in land use and natural resources are there any like state opportunities or anything you could look into? I guess I am just not entirely understanding why you feel you have to stick in this particular field if you're constantly disappointed and bored with the work. Not trying to be insensitive, just trying to understand I myself have attempted college and from there have been on disability so I don't have much job experience let alone any experience with a career type job.


I don't have SSDI benefits I can simply fall back on. The reason why I mentioned people calling in just about the money is the distinction between that selfishness and agencies working to directly protect common resources. For the good beyond one's self.

To address your questions, I cannot simply quit, because:
- I have no marketable experience (other than for other call centers -- ha!).
- Having a master's degree makes me much less hire-able for entry-level positions, because people assume I expect higher pay. I didn't gain full-time employment for nearly 9 years following grad school for this reason. The resulting significant gap would make me even less attractive to employers.
- I have no science degree to meet basic requirements for natural-resource jobs I'd be fantastic at. Taking 2 years off work and accumulating tens of thousands of additional student-loan debt is imprudent on its face and provides no guarantee of subsequent employment (especially with federal-transfer potential out of the picture (see below)).
- A job in land-use planning requires, at minimum, a master's degree in planning and probably certification(s) beyond that. The reason I never got a planning master's is because of the amount of writing the schooling and job required. I have an executive function problem that makes that level of writing impossible. (I tried.)
- Quitting this job would end my chance of ever gaining federal employment, which gives me a lot of protection against being fired for my disability limitations, again. I only hate entitlement policy. I enjoy regulatory policy aka true government.
- Being a federal employee gives me "time-in-grade" transferability between this and other federal jobs. If I quit this job, I lose all hope of moving to the better agencies ever. The problem is that I'm still a bit of an outsider to those better agencies' hirers, and I face stiff competition from "familiar faces" already inside those agencies. (Add to this that the "FOIA" actions I do perform are more limited than what a full-fledged FOIA job entails. For instance, I cannot release documents that require redactions and have never performed redactions.)
- I'm almost 35 now, and I've already delayed retirement several years.



techstepgenr8tion
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02 Feb 2018, 9:11 am

It sounds like your at a job well below your potential and that's starting to grind on you. I actually quit accounting and went to programming because there were the hypothetical rules on one side and the pile of doody people actually made on the other that I was tasked with organizing. Also with accounts payable and accounts receivable work you're stuck trying to force other people to do things, who you have no authority over, and you're at the bottom of their list so there's maybe 5 or 10% achievement or getting things done and the other 90 - 95% just beating yourself in the face with a brick.

I've also noticed people have really wild ways of convoluting things and that's part of why quite often if it's a social butterfly environment and not late generation X and younger you're stuck with the kinds of absurdities that only a constellation of entitled boomers who can't gauge their own intelligence levels adequately can create.

I'd say just think long and hard about what you like, ie. policy and what not, and try to figure out whether there's a place somewhere in the job market where your skillsets will come into play and where your resume might get you in. it'll be frustrating for sure, you'll lose a lot if you take the initiative and I think this is what we in younger generations didn't have ourselves oriented toward - ie. that we're supposed to keep trying even if one or two rejections, even ten or twenty, come up. Where I think we're at is a place where things work in a really lop-sided way, ie. certain things are really clean cut and black & white with technology and certain kinds of newer rule sets but other things are very much on the old 'have a hard face and beat it into a wall until you succeed' type of method. I'm starting to consider that there really isn't a lot of consistency to life in this respect, no more than there is consistency with people perhaps.

Either way I wish you the best of luck. My best guess is try to find meaningful interests after work, dive into them to recharge yourself, and keep looking for other places you'd rather work. You probably won't feel a whole lot more assured with that but when you multiply those interviews by each other across time, even if you got passed over, the statistics are ultimately in your favor.


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