Golden handcuffs to legacy IT
Unhappiness takes many forms, as Tolstoy noted about families. In a City IT job it can take the form of a 65,000 bonus.
For an IT professional who has a rare skill set that an investment bank needs, that's the extra payment above his market rate required to keep him, says Simon Walker, an executive recruiter at Partners Group.
The skill set in question may well be Cobol programming skills needed for an important legacy application running on a mainframe. Cobol programming is a role that can limit a person's future employability because he or she isn't learning new programming skills such as Java or .NET; it's also likely to be of limited duration.
"When the bank phases out that application, it will make the people working on it redundant," says Walker, "They have to jump." He says you can anticipate this happening because training will dry up several months in advance. The options are twofold: look immediately to recruitment consultants as a way out, or take the money and wait.
Handcuffs can be hard to escape
Unfortunately, that additional 65,000 can be hard to walk away from. Walker says he has never seen a person willing to take reduced pay in financial services unless they are moving to a firm in Scotland or somewhere outside London that offers significantly lower costs and less time spent commuting.
One IT executive told Walker, "I am bored, absolutely bored, but I am not moving because I know I cannot move. I am waiting for redundancy."
Coaching can help build the courage required to bite the bullet. In the nineties personal trainers were all the rage, now it is career coaches, says Walker: "I see a massive increase in the number of people who use life coaches, or career coaches, to focus on where their skills lie and figure out where they can get the most out of their careers."
Simon Horton, a career coach who works through Rivercalm, a financial technology marketing firm with a career coaching practice, says people who decide to jettison high paying careers in the City for something else should ensure they have sufficient cash to live on for three years, and that doesn't include equity in a house.
Leaving a City job will have a big impact on a spouse and children. "The sharp drop in salary will really impact lifestyles," says Horton. One of Rivercalm's clients calculated that it would cost 700,000 to support his four teenage boys through university.
"On the other hand," says Horton, "your wife and kids will probably see more of you, you will probably be less stressed, and may well be able to provide better quality parenting."
