I am job searching to leave my current company as I feel the culture is churn and burn and I cannot keep up with my work load in the sales operations analyst role. I am able to process claims, orders, and monthly reports. However, I keep getting assigned work last minute with short turnaround times. My last assignment was 20 min last week to pull data, and each last minute report has a deadline that usually spans from 1-6 hours. I originally came aboard as a first year analyst, but unfortunately it has become expected I should have been up and running 6 months in a complex foodservice company. I asked for more training on understanding what last minute tasks could come up, but the response was that it would be hard to train since anything could come up. More last minute tasks are expected my way soon, and I’m already working 30min to 1 hr late of the 8-5. Should I keep pursuing a new job and is this a realistic/unrealistic expection from the company?
You know your work better than us but if these tasks are “how do I write this query” or similar stuff (“how do I write a script to hit this json endpoint and that database and join and pivot them into a google sheet”) then I expect you will get a lot faster as you gain experience at this company. Like obviously the management situation is not ideal and it sucks to not have more training or clearer expectations. But you will learn the hard way what kinds of things come up and learn your way around the data sources.
If the expectations and truly unreasonable and you find yourself continuing to work a lot of extra hours, it’s important to manage expectations and sometimes that means failing to deliver stuff on time. Try to give reasonable estimates even when it’s not what they want to hear.
That said, if you’re unhappy in your day-to-day I would say do keep job searching. If a company sucks you don’t owe them anything and I have no problem leaving before a year. I left a similar job for different reasons after 9 months early in my career and have no regrets.
I’m grateful. I’ll attempt to resist this more; in the interim, I’ll take care of this even though I believe I still want to go. Everything is well on a daily basis, however I do feel under pressure to complete any new assignments. After completing 5 reports in 2 days, I was asked why I hadn’t finished a distinct one yet and hadn’t received an alert for it. Nevertheless, I’ll consider your advice and be glad that I’m not experiencing this alone!
mentioned. If someone tells you their timeline that doesn’t mean it’s your timeline. It’s time to learn how to properly respond to what they said: “Yeah, I completely understand. I’ll start working on that for you right away, but it will take me x hours to make sure it’s done correctly.” I’m working on Y report/pull for Z stakeholder right now; if you need it sooner, please get in touch with them so they can prioritize it.
and then look for work elsewhere, using these abilities in your new organization.
Time to start managing expectations. “Sure, I can get you that report. It’ll take me 6 hours.” or “yep, happy to get that for you. I’m working on a couple other things too, how should I slot this in to my priorities?”
Thank you!! I’ll try to communicate this more with them