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Вікторія ГорбікThat's Life
8 January 2025, 15:18
2025-01-08
A marketing and communications specialist chose voluntary unemployment for 7 months. What did she realize and did other IT professionals support her?
Yulia Kleban, a marketing, brand and communications specialist at Projector Institute, spoke about her experience of consciously chosen unemployment for 7 months. The girl shared the insights she gathered during this period.
Yulia Kleban, a marketing, brand and communications specialist at Projector Institute, spoke about her experience of consciously chosen unemployment for 7 months. The girl shared the insights she gathered during this period.
«You’re also about to plan for 2025, so perhaps the idea of voluntary unemployment will come in handy,» Yulia Kleban noted. And although the girl is no longer unemployed, she noted that she really needed this experience in order to maintain the calm and professional curiosity she had accumulated over these months in her new place. «But there’s no anxiety, pretension, or rush. Now the main thing is to maintain this state after onboarding,» she emphasizes. So.
Required base:
Mental activity. Lying down and walking around is good, but only for the first few weeks. I then had teaching, freelancing, and lots of books.
Financial cushion. Calculate your monthly needs, plus 20% for risks. Now you know how many months your unemployment can last.
Plan and deadlines. If you don’t plan on being unemployed forever, determine when you want to start a new job — and add a month on top of that for hiring.
Message box for relatives. The questions «Have you found something yet?» or «Aren’t you scared, these are the same times?» won’t let you breathe. My grandmother still asks if I’m really living in a box at the train station after so many months without a salary.
Expected:
A free calendar without myths is incredible.
It’s never boring to joke about unemployment.
There were anxious days: it was scary at the same time not to find a job and to start working again.
The most favorite things came to the fore — books, cooking, writing.
Unexpected:
After the 3rd month, the brain seems to really wake up and produce cool things: book plots, answers to consultations, vacation ideas, awareness of who I am and where I want to go.
Not having a daily schedule is exhausting. I started keeping to-do lists and a calendar, where I would write down activities like «Reading in the park over coffee.»
My sleep is improving, and anxious thoughts about all the unfinished business disappear. Friends who met me after several months of unemployment sincerely admitted: «You are very calm!» And that was the case.
Who else had a similar experience?
Other IT specialists also commented on Yulia’s comments, telling what interesting things happened to them during long breaks in work:
«It’s very life-changing, when I quit my job and decided to take a break for 1-2 months, my mother asked me every week if I had money for food,» — AQA Engineer Yulia Sviderska .
«I wonder what kind of world these people live in, what kind of «nothing to do» that they have to invent reading in the park. I didn’t work for a year, I ran long distances every day, sometimes I didn’t understand how I managed everything when I was working… «Really, don’t you have any household or family matters? You’re not sick, you’re not helping, you’re not learning anything new? Who are all these people with readings?» — QA Engineer Natalya .
«I’ve been unemployed for a whole year. There were different feelings during this period. At first, I had to stop «like a squirrel in a wheel». I discovered a talent for needlework, I make rattan products. I wouldn’t have known that I could do that. In Ukraine, my relatives don’t know that I’m unemployed in Poland. They would have already gotten tired of those questions. Thank you to my husband for the support. Although I haven’t been sitting idly by either. I feel that I’m ready for a new job,» — Specialist from PSSI Natalia Marchuk .
«I was on vacation for 2 weeks, now I’m back at work and I feel empty. It’s as if the meaning of everything has disappeared somewhere. I’m trying to get back to myself, the active, passionate person I’ve always been. At the moment, I’m not really succeeding… I don’t know why,» — Content Marketer/ Strategist Katya Nechit .
«I had a maximum of 4 months of «unemployment», in which I only really rested for the first month. And from the second month, I started to have energy for some freelance projects, made marketing strategies, taught and studied myself. It was incredible! And what is important, at some point you clearly realize that you are ready for full-time work again and this thought does not cause you any anxiety at all,» — Marketing Lead Olena Yena .
«I haven’t worked since August. Well, I can say that August was occupied by a long vacation. And after a few months, things were hard. I felt some internal resistance — «how am I without a job?», «what if the search will be delayed?» and so on. But it’s already January, and I, having enlisted the support of my husband, am enjoying unemployment,» — HR Business Partner Anna Prykhodko .
«I feel literally the same. I lost 33 kg without any effort in 3-4 months,» — Software Architect Volodymyr Melnyk .
«A Justified Measure for the Future.» How a Project Manager at the Peak of Her Career Left Her Job and Reimagined Her Life Through «Conscious Unemployment»
