On Sunday 22 March 2009 02:42:01 Tamar Raine wrote:
> Deri, what's voluntaey redundancy? what does your company do?
>
>
> Thanks,
> Tamar
Hi Mags,
I've worked in the Finance Sector for 23 years (before that I was in the
Civil Service). For most of that time I've worked for small/medium sized
companies (up to 500 staff), and I worked my way up to Associate Director
level. Unusually, for that grade, I had no staff who reported to me, I
preferred solving technical issues rather than management!!
5 years ago we got taken over by a large bank (Barclays), who proceeded to do
the usual strategy of "letting go" all back room staff and middle/top
management. So, practically all my colleagues in IT were eventually made
redundant. However, because of Disability Employment law in the UK, they could
only make me redundant in very particular circumstances.
Big businesses work very differently from small/medium companies. Rather than
having a few very good people who can tackle any challenge (usually on a shoe
string budget), big banks employ whole armies of "experts" who are masters of
their own very narrow domain, and money was no object. The bank didn't really
know what to do with me since a lot of work is done by phone conference (which
is no good for me!!), so I ended up doing virtually nothing (but receiving a
salary as though I was still a director ;-) ).
Two and a half years ago I'd had enough of doing nothing (unless a catastrophe
happened - when the "experts" would come looking for help). So I went to half
time working (17.5 hours a week) and even on half pay I was earning a lot more
than the national average. I spent the other half week developing a system
to do volume colour printing, aiming at the big Utilities and Finance
companies who have to produce bills/statements for millions of customers. My
system turned out to be up to 10 times quicker than many current systems, so I
set up a company, but instead of selling the software, I sold a click licence
for the use of the software (so every page they print I receive a small fee).
Some of my customers are printing 10 million pages a year.
So, when the Bank offered me a generous redundancy package I voluntarily
agreed to it, as opposed to them forcing me to be redundant.
Cheers
Deri
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