A few months ago, I had my annual review and got a promotion. I've now come to find that it came with a few surprises!
Background
Some details - you can skip if this is boring! - I've been working at my employer and with my boss for 15 years. Each year we'd have an annual review, but in 2014, I also started a part-time PhD and she was my supervisor. Our annual reviews for my job became reviews for my PhD instead.
I therefore went ~9 years without an annual review. When I asked about raises during our annual budget discussions (part of my job is to create an annual budget for the project I manage for my boss), she'd say, Oh, doesn't [employer] give automatic raises?
And they do, but they are ~1% or something. Not even cost of living! And they have never factored in my job performance or expansion of my duties. This is a huge thing, because I've successfully managed our project to be one of the most impressive in its category in NZ, according to our funders and stakeholders. The project provides immense value for the $$ it costs. My duties have grown from just organising meetings and writing quarterly progress reports to:
- chairing those meetings and presenting at them,
- creating research project ideas from scratch,
- designing annual budgets,
- supervising a 4 person research assistant team,
- having almost full control over a multi hundred thousand dollar budget each year,
- negotiating contracts,
- interviewing and hiring assistants,
- handling all researcher requests for information or help,
- migrating our entire data archive to Google Drive and then again to DropBox,
- creating a communications plan,
- creating a media strategy,
- creating an open access guide,
- creating layman's term summaries of our research,
- starting and managing our Facebook project account,
- coleading our outreach group (and organising events),
- stakeholder engagement,
- and much much more.
And I did all of this working at 0.8 full time equivalent, then 0.5 FTE when I started my PhD, then 0.3 FTE when a colleague really needed the time/funding and I needed the help. She left, but my FTE never increased back to 0.5.
At this point, during meetings with our funders, I know MUCH MUCH more than even the co-leaders of the research project.
My Current Role
Essentially I've been doing a solid 20x more work at 0.3 FTE than I did
when I was 0.8 FTE pre-PhD. My income has shrunk massively even while my
workload has increased. I've just dealt with it because I 1.) love my
job - it never feels like work! 2.) my boss lets me take as much time
off in the US to spend with family as I need/want, and has NEVER said no
to me for ANY request, and 3.) my research assistant team was supposed
to take care of more work for me, but they are also students and mostly
do not have the time in the time-frame the work needs to get done,
graduate and leave, or just don't do as much as I assign/expect them to.
Partly thanks to my hard work, dedication, and attention to detail, the project has now advanced well beyond what anyone else is doing in the world for the particular subject matter we deal with. I am the go-to for all questions and information relating to the project and one of ~5 people that are asked about the project's subject matter for everyone in this research space across the entire country. This is quickly turning into "the world," because I gave a presentation in the US last year and people from Asia to Europe to South America to Australia have started to come to me to ask questions and get my advice.
The Promotion
I think the above shows that I've proven my worth. I think my boss caught on because she mentioned reviewing my salary several times over the past 8 months.
Great, I thought - I'll plan to go to 0.5 FTE and get a pay bump. I even costed it out with the finance folks. But that didn't go as planned. She is very concerned about me finishing my PhD, so the meeting became all about my PhD. She didn't listen to me when I showed how much more work I was doing for less pay - she told me that HER boss had told her that 'you just have to get it done, just fit it in' and that was her toxic advice to me. She also said that 'we do so much extra stuff that we don't need to do' in the project. My reaction was to feel sorry that her boss treated her that way and said that to her, and that the 'extra stuff' we do is actually why we're continually funded and touted as a successful project!
Her response to my request for an increase in my FTE was to throw a promotion at me where I stayed at 0.3 FTE (so I could get my PhD done, by her reasoning) and give me a $20K raise (if I were full time; it is much less at 0.3). She also said I shouldn't do any of my work at my job until I turned in my thesis in December and that doing research in my PhD counted. I don't think she understands what my absence actually means for the project... I literally do everything and people rely on me for instructions about what to do next and how to do it, and then I review everything before it goes out.
I guess that means nothing is going to get done for 6 months, and I'll have a huge backlog in January 2024!
My Reaction & the Missing Details
Gosh, how toxic was that meeting, in hindsight?
The promotion suggestion was said so casually...it wasn't, I think you've earned it, I think you've grown and are ready, I think you're now capable, it was - 'I hear that you are asking for more money and can't afford to go full time on your PhD but I don't want you working more so here's a quick solution to make that happen.'
A very weird feeling. It wasn't satisfying AT ALL. When I promoted one of my research assistants recently, it was super fun telling him how awesome he was and how he is a credit to our project and how he'd earned the position through hard work. I got nothin'.
Missing Details
In any case, I received my contract and it lists all these extra duties, like giving lectures and just stuff I'm not interested in in the slightest. I need every spare second I have to get my job done in the 0.3 FTE that I'm allotted, how am I supposed to ADD more duties to the list?! There is absolutely no time.
Whatever. I need a job in the next week, so I'll take it, but when I'm allowed to work again (post-PhD), I'm going to let her know I am not interested in doing any of the additional stuff she listed. We never talked about any of it.
She also didn't tell me that the position I was moving to completely changes my status with my employer! I'm moving from professional staff to academic staff. They have completely different rules.
For one, academic staff have a 40 hour work week. In my current role, a full work week is 37.5 hours. This changes the # of hours in my 0.3 FTE role.
Academic staff do not have sick leave. They don't log it at all. I guess they just take days off sick when they need to?
The amount of annual leave you earn per pay period slightly with academic roles.
I knew about none of it, so when the contract came through, I had to ask the hiring admin tons of questions, delaying the process.
I wonder what else changes? Who the heck knows. I guess I'll find out.
