Are You Happy in Your Job?

[Dr. Obvious 49]

I am hoping to get a desk job at my alma mater when I go back to the US this spring. Doesn't pay the world, but the work is not bad and the benefits are great.

[Welshcookie 17]

My weekday/part-time job has increasingly become full-time and taking up most of my weekends due to staff shortages/illness etc...so turning up to work yesterday to find me working all weekend yet again I decided to go to my boss and tell him I was quitting.....I meant it too, but I love my coworkers and the oldies and it really made me sad to have to leave.

Anyway, he immediately cleared all my weekend shifts and asked me to reconsider YAY!

[me_4_musa 1]

Love my new job!

[MHandMB 0]

I'm a paralegal. I mostly like my job and adore the people I work with. However, I am looking for something else.

We have a close-knit office, and I'll stay friends with these people even after I leave, including my boss. We get relatively good health insurance, and there are other perks (our boss gives us bonuses for birthdays, etc). However, the wages are low, we get 10 vacation days a year max, and that won't change. I've been here 5 years, and I still have the same amount of vacation days as when I started. My co-worker has been here for 13 years, and she has the same amount of vacation days as well. We're often asked to handle stuff after hours or over the weekend whenever a deadline or a trial is coming up. There's really no where to move up. I also feel like a peon and sometimes like a glorified personal secretary when I'm asked to run errands for my boss, like dropping her car off at the repair shop or booking her a flight for a ski vacation. It's also really frustrating to see my boss go on vacations all over the place for weeks at a time, multiple times a year, and to get guilt-tripped because I'm planning a trip to Algeria for 2 weeks at one time, when I'll get no other vacation or sick days the entire rest of the year.

I have a college degree, a few grad. courses under my belt, speak 2 languages fluently, and feel like I have more to offer than what I'm currently doing. The problem is, I'm stuck in a rut and don't know where to go or what to look for. I took this job straight out of college, so I don't really have a lot of other experience to fall back on, so I feel like I'm turning in circles. I hope that eventually I'll figure out what I want to do and find the right way to get there. Until then, I'm looking around trying to find something that suits me better.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

MHandMB,

The pitfalls of working for a small business. Have you considered using your paralegal experience to land a paralegal job at a large corporation? You could then use the corporations internal advancement and training opportunities (almost all of them have them) to move ahead from within.

[ELW 5]

The problem is, I'm stuck in a rut and don't know where to go or what to look for.

Stuck in a rut - that should have been one of the choices, I would have picked that.