Six months and counting

I have now passed six months since my last job. It is the longest I have ever been without work, usually it has taken me five months between jobs.

I would be lying if I said this is not something that gets me down or weighs on me. Like everyone else in this situation, I have good days and more difficult ones. It is a test of many qualities, such as patience, cheerfulness and hope. I have learned over the years the importance of having a network and felt that I had done some work to develop one. And I do have one, but nothing has come in through that path that has worked out for me.

I know I need to keep on working at it, but the effort to do so feels like more than I can do at times, it is just easier to stay within my cocoon of not risking being ignored or being told 'no' one more time. As I have learned every time I have had to look for work, you become invisible when you are not in the mainstream of the world of work. I really have nothing to offer to anyone who is working, so there is little incentive for them to take notice of me. Certainly, friends and former colleagues have been helpful, along with many other people to whom I have been referred. Nevertheless, it is challenging to exist on people's radar.

This is not the first time I have had to learn life's hard lessons when looking for work, but I had hoped it would not be this long. So there are new and tough lessons for me this time around. I hope I remember them and put them to good use.

Here comes the auditor

Wednesday, October 7 will be a day of reckoning for eHealth Ontario as the Provincial Auditor will issue a report, about which the leaks have already told us quite a bit. It won't be pretty.

As a former employee, I am following the news quite closely. It has been a rough four months for the agency with senior departures, microscopic scrutiny and now what should be the nadir in reputation for the organization.

Is there anything that can be done for the embattled agency's reputation and communications? I imagine people are hoping this will blow away as soon as possible. It will blow away eventually, but the question is what can be done about its communications at this point?

Likely not too much in the immediate term. The provincial government is too involved to leave the agency to communicate on its own at this point as the problems have affected them in many unhappy ways.

The bottom line is that trust has been broken and needs to be re-established. This is going to take a long time. But the place to start now is to build alliances with other eHealth organizations and leaders. This will have to be an under the radar effort for some time, but it is the place to build the new reputational foundation for the future.

Of course, if management decisions keep being made that will embarrass the organization in future, then there is not much that any communications program can achieve. Let's hope that fundamental change is the first order of business.