Have you had a fulfilling mentorship, whether as mentor or mentee? How does one gain a mentor? Are there professional associations that one pays a fee to join?

Advice on career development wanted. Especially advice for introverted, neurodivergent women in business.

I want to hear a variety of stories, of how you became good at "career", beyond becoming competent at "work", and how you learned to be good not only at what you do but how you go about doing what you do.

Thank you for your time.

I recently joined a tech company purportedly with a mission I believed in. Before joining I had some hesitance about how their product achieved that mission, but I liked most the people I interviewed with and the offer was good. Turns out despite being profitable it’s a dumpster fire of a company led by a terrible person who is actively hostile towards my coworkers and our customers. So, I’ve been looking for a new role to get out ASAP.

Some challenging factors: the market is tough right now and I don’t get as many interviews as I feel I should, SWE interviews remain extremely stupid, and occasionally my brain just shuts off during interviews despite practicing it a million times. So getting an offer isn’t a breeze.

The question I’m wrestling with is should I join another company whose product I’m very skeptical of? It has market traction and many of you may have heard of it, but it’s not very compelling and it’s in the blighted world of social media (which I largely don’t use). My fear is that a bad product may necessarily mean a bad company. The confusion for me is that every single person I’ve interviewed has been incredibly down to earth and genuinely fun to talk to. They all claim to respect work-life balance (it’s remote too) and it doesn’t seem like lip service; they pay very well too. The opportunity to learn skills I can’t learn in many jobs seems compelling.

The role itself is the title I want, but the focus I’m not wild about. It’s a bit more user growth focused than I’d typically want. The problem is my current job is wrecking my mental health and I’m desperate to get out.

I’m interviewing with two other companies with better missions I’d much prefer to work for but both are dragging their feet and lower pay; one pays pretty terrible. I’m rapidly approaching a point where I will likely have a single offer in hand with no guarantee that others will manifest.

Any thoughts or guidance on how to navigate this? I want to approach this as “a job is just a job” and clock in and clock out, but I’ve seen at my current role that is not possible as I carry the stress and despair into my free time. I desperately don’t want to join another toxic company, but I don’t want to use that as an excuse to stunt my career growth either.

I know if I posted that on Reddit, all the top answers would be something like "Money"or "It lets me survive" but I'm looking for something deeper than that.

I'm a teacher and school just started where I lived and I realize how much freedom the job gives me. I can considerably modify how my day will go as long as the students learn the curriculum. I love that freedom.

I also love the human nature of it. I get to know and see 100 kids develop every year, plus, I teach juniors and I've had a lot of my last year students stop by me to say hello and talk about their summer or their current teachers. It's fun having all these random positive conversations every day.

I get to learn a lot about people and about me. I love that growth.

What about you?

Sorry if this isn't the best place to ask. IT and cybersecurity-focused communities over on Reddit aren't exactly the most welcoming places for such questions, and reading the r/ITCareerQuestions wiki has made me seriously question if I'm being sold false promises of working in a sector that actually has a low demand for workers. Then again, that wiki page seems more geared towards the US job market.

Two weeks ago, I responded to an Instagram ad advertising cybersecurity courses, because the job market is horrible here in the UK right now, and after some setbacks with my ACCA studies, I am seriously considering just giving up on trying to get into chartered accountancy because that path is closing many more doors for me. A course advisor rang me asking about the reasons I showed interest in the ad, then we had a long discussion about any questions I had, what the sector is apparently like, etc.

Some of the claims seem too good to be true, i.e. that it's an industry where you can afford to be picky, jobs outnumber people by almost 3 to 1, most jobs are remote, the provider boasts a 90%+ employment rate, I don't need programming experience, the most complex thing I'd be doing is running command prompt/powershell commands and scripts.

The firm itself seems legitimate. They offer CompTIA, Microsoft, Cisco, AWS and EC-Council certifications, have good review scores on Trustpilot, are a registered training provider and limited company in the UK, and are supposedly an assured service provider with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC.) The courses they mentioned to me in their syllabus supposedly come to £4k and would take about six months.

1. Am I right to be wary about what this training provider are offering?
2. Do you require extensive programming knowledge or a computer science background to work in cybersecurity in any capacity? A friend with an IT background has told me that Python is useful in his field.
3. Is the reality of IT and cybersecurity jobs in the UK (or in the West) far different from what has been painted to me?

Well, I have a lot of stuff going on.

In May, I graduated with my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. That was good, and I was glad to do so. After that I took a short well deserved break. It feels so good not to have to go to class and listen to a lecture from a lecturer who doesn't want to be there.

Now that I have my degree, I need to find a job that uses that degree. (or any thing remotely related) That may sound simple enough, but it is tough.

I don't know what I want to do with my degree. That's hard for me to say, but it's true. Like I have always been looked at as someone who was "smart" and "had it together" or "had a straight path". Very much not. Anyway, I don't know what all that degree qualifies me for. I know it opens me up to the development field. I did a lot of programming through college and between, but it's not something I really enjoy. I am not particularly bad at it. It just not something I really want to be doing 100% of the time all the time. Then there is the IT field. I am not so sure where I really would like to go in IT though. Support is not really an ideal place for me. I am terrified of the idea of having to talk on a phone. I can do in person support better. Then there is infrastructure. I am kinda interested in infrastructure, but it is huge. I don't even know what to look for in that area. I am just a kid with a CS degree, I don't have this figured out.

I live in the middle of nowhere. or at least it feels like it (rural central Arkansas) You have to really look at the next city over for anything. Even then most things I see are out of the capital. There is nothing bad about any of this. I got my degree in the next city over, drove there every day. The capital is only 40 - 50 minutes away.

It feels like everyone wants to see experience. Either directly or indirectly. This is hard for me. I don't have any professional experience at all. I have some personal projects I have worked on. I do have those listed in my resume. I don't feel that helps that much. I spent my time getting that degree, not working.

Family is troublesome. In many many ways. They are always like "you need to get a job", "have you found anything yet", "are you filling out a job application". Like please leave me alone about this. I am doing what I am doing. You don't have to know every single thing about me. I am me, not you. Troublesome and frustrating. Another thing is they are stuck in the past. Two of them are going deaf. One of them is nuts, and does not know how to respect privacy at all. Its a lot. It leaves me with an annoying bootstrapping problem I have to solve. I still live with my parents, with my grandparents next house over. I have to get a place that is away from family. To do that I need to get a job. To really look hard, and even want to do so and not just do some and get frustrated, I need to get away from family. There are solutions. Just go elsewhere and look for stuff. Not easy when they always want to know where you are all the damn time. Always wanting you to keep them updated and know where you are. I have a few tricks, location services is very inaccurate when wifi is turned off. I also can just say "I am going somewhere", and when they ask more I just say "I am 23 blooming years old". Not the kind of trouble I want to go through all time. Family is frustrating. Even more so, when you are an introvert and just want to be alone for a while. When you get into actually doing something, they come to you to ask about something. "do you know where this [item] is?", "I need you to do this [task]". It's like they can sense when you are actually focus or are just vibing or actually happy. They go on and complain that you snap at them. When they were the ones that were interrupting a rare moment of focus, or appear out of nowhere. Annoying to say the least. Never the one to actually win. By default, "I am older and know more then you", "I gave birth to you". Saying I am in trouble when I do nothing wrong. Like when I got in trouble for going to my grandparents house early in the morning during the summer. Lost all trust that summer. Or when I shared some cinnamon rolls that I bought with my grandparents. Got into trouble for not bringing my parents any. It was just a kind gesture and I am made to feel like I don't care about anybody over it. Troublesome and difficult.

If you just read all that, thanks. I promise I am decently put together in real life. That is rawer then I would usually like to put out.

So far I still don't have a good title for this post so I guess I'll just add some more.
I have not found anything yet. I have not applied to many places yet. I did apply to a regional ISP and got an interview, but was rejected for lack of work history to show I can deal with phone support, and for potential lack of clarity. I applied to a local audio cable manufacturer, but was caught by ats or lack of checking. Actually applied to their website for that one. I have asked some of the local Facebook groups "who was hiring locally in CS / IT fields". I got a few responses from it. A pyramid scheme. Someone who would look at their employer. They didn't have anything open, but at least they have my information now. Someone who is likely looking more so for a general laborer then an IT person. I still kinda want to hear them out, but they still haven't said anything else to me. I have brushed up my LinkedIn. I have also signed up for more accounts then I would have liked. I have talked with a local employment agency, but I don't think they will find anything like what I am looking for.

Well, its a process, and I am just at the beginning. If you do have any advice for my job search I would be glad to read it.

TLDR: Dotz graduated and is looking for a job, then rants about family.

As some of you on here may know, I was made redundant from my Assistant Commercial Reporting Analyst job three months ago and have been struggling to find permanent work since. Many of my interactions with recruiters and hiring managers have been negative and have felt like they were wasting my time, but one particular (ongoing) experience has taken the cake.

In mid-April, I applied for an Assistant Client Accountant position through LinkedIn. The role was with a large property management and building consultancy firm (offices based in the UK & France), who have some pretty big-name clients. Fully office-based, advertised pay between £25k - £29k (already similar payscales to what credit control and purchase ledger roles near me are offering), and the position ideally asked for fully AAT qualified or ACCA part-qualified candidates (I have full AAT membership, am 3 exams into my ACCA, and have over 6 years experience in previous accounting and financial reporting roles.)

Nine weeks later, I am still going through this application process which has been nothing short of a shitshow:

• It has taken multiple weeks to schedule and conduct interviews for each stage, due to unanswered emails and heavily delayed responses from both the Finance and HR teams. I had emailed on nine separate occasions to schedule the the second and third stage interviews I was invited to, and only twice did I get replies. At first I was told it was due to staff sickness, but then the trend of replying in business weeks just kept going on, even after the third-stage (which I'll get to.)

• The first stage interview was a 15 - 30 minute phone interview going through my CV and salary expectations. Stages 2 and 3 involved a series of hour-long competency based interviews, one conducted via Teams and the other in-person with the Head of Finance. This is already a ridiculous number of hoops to jump through for an office-based role with this salary level.

• During the third-stage interview (3rd June) I was asked a lot of supervisory/leadership questions which I honestly didn't expect. It made me question whether I was being interviewed for the correct role, so I checked the job description of what I applied for. Only 4 of the 590 words contained within the job advert even alluded to me leading junior colleagues - so maybe it was easily missed?

• On the 5th June (two days after my third-stage interview), I received an email from HR thanking me for accepting the Client Accountant position and asking me to confirm RTW (right-to-work) details. The thing is... I never received an offer letter, and after immediately chasing this up I found out the email was sent to me by mistake. This HR rep apologized and said they'd chase feedback. I emailed twice to chase this feedback and promised it would be coming.

• Today when I emailed again to chase feedback, the HR advisor responded to raise concerns about the salary expectations I communicated in the first stage, insisted the role actually paid £26k at most and asked me to confirm a salary within their range. This is false (I know, I actually double-checked the job ad and even did a screen recording on my mobile of me going into the LinkedIn app and opening the job posting) and I get the impression that they're now trying to lowball me. I emailed again asking for clarification where I linked the job ads and I get the feeling they confused the salary bands with a Purchase Ledger role I applied for several months prior but was not considered for.

I will find out Monday (after nearly three weeks) if I was successful in my application, but even if they offer me the job at a reduced salary rather than outright reject me, I am already seeing a shitload of red flags.

At this point I've had enough. Normally I'd cut my ties and move on but with how desperate I've been for work and how much I feel like this company has taken me for a ride, I feel the need to take things further. Not sure whether I should (or even could) formally raise a complaint, drop some negative feedback on their Glassdoor page, or go public (with receipts) and openly name & shame the company on LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram. The latter options feel like I'd be going nucelar and as cathartic as it would be, I'm worried it would be seen as unprofessional and hurt my future job prospects.

What would be the best way to proceed?