I work in the Financial Services industry.  It’s not a good industry to be in right now – and even though I work in the Information Technology division – it’s the bank that pays me.  And therein lies the problem.

If you’ve been by my personal blog, you may know that since February, 2007, I’ve been working on selling and shutting down parts of my world.  First, we sold my client’s line of business to one of our biggest competitors – less than a year after I moved my family 65 miles away from where my son had grown up and gone to school.   He had just finished his freshman year in High School and left friends that he’d had since Kindergarten.  My husband and I moved believing that this would be the next step up in my career; moving from Manager to Executive.

For the first six months, that’s exactly what happened.  I learned the difference between tactics and strategy.  I thought long-term.  I grew in confidence and decision making became second nature.

Then I got called into my boss’s office.  “We’ve sold the wholesale division to XYZ,” he told me.  “We have a year to get everything converted to their systems and shut down ours.”

I was given a layoff date of May 31, 2008.  Nearly 2 years to the day from when I bought a new house, hired a moving company, and left town for country life.  We were in shock.   (I need to note that my husband retired in 1996 to become a stay-at-home-dad to our son.  I am the sole wage earner in this family of four.  My step-son moved in with us in April.)

I got a reprieve of sorts.  I was asked, because of my expertise, to assist with another divestiture.  It meant another 5 1/2 months of employment.  It meant additional contacts with another company.  It meant the possibility of a different career path opening up along the way.   It didn’t.

The end of that project has now come.  It was a successful end, but it means that this week is my final week of work with a company I’ve spent 16 years building. Sixteen years working with people who have become like family to me.   Sixteen years of growing and learning; being challenged, learning to lead.  I’ve traveled from New York to Chicago to Jacksonville to San Francisco.  I’ve been to the Taj Mahal on a whirlwind business trip to India (four cities in seven days) and stayed in a canal house in Amsterdam two blocks from the apartment that hid Anne Frank and her family.  I’ve sat in a bar on the North Sea with people from Hong Kong, England, Australia, and Luxembourg – discussing differences between business in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

I loved this company, and now, we go our separate ways.

So, as this new twist has come to my life, I hope you’ll allow me to share it with you.  I will be spending time looking for a new job – one that will let me work from home at least part time.  It’s a new dimension to this column, but one that I hope will be beneficial for all of us.