Redundant since Jan, struggling to find anything...

[deserialisethis]

Bit of background:

• Middle aged male
• Last role was Product Manager (digital consultancy / app development)
• Former experience as a BA and Project Manager

Situation is that I was made redundant in January as the company I was working for lost one of their larger clients. Been on the hunt since but the market feels absolutely broken at the moment. There seem to be very few roles out there, and those there are seem to be looking for unicorns.

Are other people seeing the same or is there something wrong with me / my experience?

[deserialisethis]

Ok not just me then.

Saw a thread on Reddit that suggested PMs / BAs / Product Management was an anachronism and those roles no longer exist, which I didn't think was the case. I think some people have a very narrow definition of what "tech" is and that all tech roles are for neck beards in NOC caves or something.

[deserialisethis]

Thank you for all the replies. I'll try to rattle through and reply to a few here...

Chimaera98 said:

Lost my job of over 20 years in December. Being middle aged too I can fully sympathise.

/snip

Yes, agree with everything you've said. The market feels wild. Couple of recent experiences:

Interviewed for a role, feedback was excellent, progressed to 2nd round with the CTO, again excellent feedback, told by the CTO that they could definitely see me fitting into their organisation. Agent then came back to me and said they had decided to reassess the role as the JD they had put out was too broad and probably needed 2 or 3 people to fill it.

The above scenario played out at another organisation I interviewed with too. First and 2nd round interviews (including with the owner of the company), both with great feedback, would love to have someone like you onboard blah blah blah, only to then be told the role needed reassessing.

For another role, the agent replied to my application saying they were doing their best to rely and get back to people but had received 250+ applications in 24hrs.

Saw another ad that had been live for about 5 mins. In the 10 mins it took me to drop the ad poster an email and send over a CV, there had been 20 applications.

However, I would say the hit rate on actually receiving any response is maybe 1:100 at the moment. It is definitely not a candidate's market.

geeks said:

I was about to ask if you started that thread on Reddit, your OP is almost identical.

Also dont spend any time in /UKJobs, it's depressing and null and void any many people with real world experience, most questions are answered "Join a union"

Couldn't possibly comment but I agree, there are some proper basement dweller replies on that thread.

mikef said:

OP - I was going to recommend the company that I recently retired from, but your profile doesn’t accept messages. They have 5 UK Prod Mgmt roles currently on their site, 4 London and 1 Southampton

ps: the state of the market thread on Contractor UK forums is pretty depressing as well

Thank you, I've changed my profile settings so should be able to receive private messages now. Would be immensely grateful for any leads / pointers.

JaredVannett said:

Yep same with me, been looking since Jan (App/Database field) - I have never had it this bad.

My CV has always landed me 3/5 interviews... not this time. Almost had an ideal manager role lined up in December and then it fell through "budget cuts".

Same here. What used to be a ~60% hit rate is now more like 5%, if that.

Good roles are few and far between and there's massive oversupply of candidates from what I can see. Add to that the layoffs seem to be continuing across a range of industries it's impossible to tell when things will start to bounce back, though from what I'm hearing things are starting to pick up (albeit at a snail's pace).

SeanyD said:

Jan-March can be a tricky time...

Agreed, but you usually see things starting to move by this time (i.e. after Easter). Problem is, things usually go dead again in the next couple of months as people take time off for kids' school holidays over the summer.

I suspect there's a bit of "holding off" going on by business too. There's an election coming both in the UK and in the US. There might be a reticence to commit to any large business expenditure until we see the results of those and the potential policy changes that could come with that.

---

Again, thank you all for the replies. There's some consolation in knowing "it's not just me".

I'm going do something of a "reset" over the next couple of days, reworking my LinkedIn profile and my CV and then keep plugging away.

[deserialisethis]

wyson said:

The new pattern in tech is to flatten the structure, strip out BA’s, PM’s and other management types and push these tasks back on the techies.

One of my friends is going through this sort of reorg now. My firm did this last year.

This is similar to some of the replies I've seen elsewhere. However, are you able to clarify the nature of the those organisations and the tech teams?

What sector is the wider business in? What kind of work are these "headless" tech teams doing? This is important context for people like me that are in the roles that are being "stripped out".

[deserialisethis]

mikef said:

PM sent

For Prod Mgmt roles they will be interested in exposure to Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) methods, to OKRs and to Agile (scrum/kanban)

And replied. I've got no formal SVPG training (something I will look into) but I'm all for the "build it light, build it fast, measure, improve" approach.

One of my biggest gripes is being asked to specify and build large monolithic systems,products, and feature without any real-world data (actual in-use data) to base the nature of those things on.

[deserialisethis]

wyson said:

Next time if side eye guy says he is unsure about a timeline, I’ll politely suggest he start a gantt chart

Bonus points if there are external suppliers / vendors involved and you ask him what their timelines and highlighted risks and issues are, along with proposed mitigations.

Then give him my CV

Genuine question, in these scenarios where the SA (or some other techie) is taking this stuff on, are they also taking on all of the project reporting for budgets, resource requirement, utilisation, ETC / EAC etc? Are they also accountable / responsible for these areas?

Edited by deserialisethis on Wednesday 1st May 12:01

[deserialisethis]

PurpleTurtle said:

It's all Jira and Confluence in my world now, we've drunk the Atlassian Kool Aid and anyone who can wax lyrical in that environment does well. We have a bloke called a 'Release Train Engineer', nobody knows what he does but he just spouts pure Bullst Bingo, doesn't actually do any real 'work', but the CTO seems to think the sun shines out of his fundament.

I'm already in that world. Have been for 6+ years and know the tools inside out, and they've been commonplace in my area (software development) for a fair bit longer.

rustyuk said:

Nearly 1.7k Project Manager vacancies advertised on JobServe.

Take the SCRUM Product Owner and SCRUM master certifications.

Yeah but try applying to any of them and see what you get back. I have CSM certs, as well as waterfall / stage-gate related certs.

[deserialisethis]

Ah ok, it sounds like some of the management stuff is being moved out of tech departments and into a consolidated PMO function. Not uncommon depending on the nature of the organisation to be honest, I’ve seen it before and worked in that sort of environment in the past (consultancy).

It can work but what it can result in is management that is even more wildly out of touch with the actual “work” of the project and how to best facilitate getting that work done.

That’s all project management is at the end of the day. I always saw my role as the umbrella that protects the team from all the politics and bullst.

[deserialisethis]

I was referring to the post above by wyson. In my world Product Managers are embedded in the teams building the thing, along with designers, QA etc.

Or am I misunderstanding what's being said?

Edited by deserialisethis on Wednesday 1st May 21:53

[deserialisethis]

Things may be starting to pick up. Seem to be getting a bit more interest from applications (but nothing concrete). But have what feels like a fairly solid lead on a contract gig.

Just in time too, money's starting to get a bit tight!