Having been made redundant in May ’25 from a job I absolutely loved, and subsequently having to move house (as my landlord wanted to move a family member in soon after that) I’m back on the hunt for a new job.

But first, how did I find myself here? The pressure of finding somewhere else to live and not knowing where that would be makes finding work hard. Add to that we moved to an entirely different county after finding the perfect place, with all of the complexities that brings, has set me back on my journey back into meaningful work.

I’ve reached out to a few employment agencies to see if they could find me some temporary work, hoping that it would be like it was for me in the old days (admittedly, 25 year’s ago) where you could rock up to an agency, ask them to find temp work and you’d be sent on an assignment that would last a few weeks. But things don’t seem to be quite like that any more.

Quite rightly, they want all of your information so they can match you with a role, but often those roles (in my field of work anyway) require additional checks, certain qualifications and often there isn’t a specific role they are recruiting to anyway – they just want you on their books.

Now, I particularly want to work at Newcastle University. They have an excellent reputation, are a Russell Group university and as I’ve worked for the best part of 16 years at a uni I know that this is the work I want to be involved in. But the jobs I’m being courted for are often fixed term for a few months and I’m not the type of person that wants to let people down, so I’d feel obliged to stay for the duration because of the effort it took to get into post in the first place, but that means I might miss a golden opportunity at a more permanent employer.

The rational answer is to not be so committed and loyal to a temporary position, but each post is extra experience but because of the effort it has taken I don’t want to let the client or the agency down, but that feels disingenuous.

It’s not as though I even have a job offer or opportunity at Newcastle to worry about just now, so really I should just go all in on a temporary post and worry about if I had to leave it earlier than planned if that came up.

#NicerProblemsToHave