I very briefly taught at an FE college. I still had another couple of jobs throughout this, so it's just not on my CV, because leaving it out, doesn't create a gap. However, there are some jobs I might apply for that I can't leave anything out for safeguarding reasons.
There were 3 reasons I left.
- The workload was insane. I've spoken to other people who work in FE and they don't have to do anywhere near the same tasks. A lot were small, but there were a lot. They added up. I was spending huge amounts of my spare time (and non-spare time when I should have been doing my other jobs) doing these tasks. The college had me teaching more hours that friends and family do at other colleges. I was hourly paid, so wasn't paid specifically for prep. I seemingly had more planning and prep to do, whilst having less time to do it in, I was going to try and see it out until the end of the term, but reason 2 and 3 meant I left when I did.
- What I can only describe as bullying. The reason I was employed there was a colleague, Anna, took another subject, leaving the one I ended up teaching. She acted as an informal subject mentor. She wasn't my manager. She was just someone to go to if I had any issues with content etc. Anna would constantly make little comments and constantly had a tone of voice with me. Some specific examples:
(I) She would ask my students where I was with the content, after she'd asked me, like she didn't believe me.
(II) She stayed in the classroom for my first lesson and told me off in front of my students because I went to Google a lesson key concept on my phone before the slide came up (I hadn't figured out the IT properly yet, there wasn't a freeze option, and most importantly, I hadn't had an induction where I was told staff weren't allowed phones - I turned up on my first day and was put into a lesson straight away with no prep).
(III) I asked her where a particular document was, and she just said "I showed you where that was last week", and then didn't tell me where it was, so I spent half an hour trying to find it.
(IV) She would tell me not to tell my students about my other job (industry experience, which was why I was hired in the first place).
(V) She repeatedly said she was 'concerned' that I was too far ahead with the content. It wasn't constructive at all and as an attempt to make it feel less tense — I (very obviously) jokingly said "I can stick [relevant film] on to slow us down, if you like?" She then interrogated me, in front of my line manager, about why I had switched the lights off in the classroom after my lesson, accusing me of putting the film on.
(VI) She then accused me, also in front of my line manager, of being "off" with her and a colleague when I had come into the classroom they were having lunch in, where I was about to have a lesson, so I could get set up — I didn't kick them out of anything, they left of their own accord because they had lessons to get to too. My line manager said afterwards to me she through that was inappropriate and that it should have been a conversation with her not in the room.
There was more than this, but it just made me feel on edge constantly. She was behaving like she was my manager, when she wasn't.
- The contract indicated I would be paid at the end of the month worked. However, I was actually paid a month after that e.g. Start work on 1st March, payroll cut off is 25th March, payday is 30th March... but you don't get paid until 30th April. New starters on zero hour contracts have to go 2 months before their first pay. Staff on regular contracts don't. I didn't know this until 2 or so weeks in when my manager was showing me how to do timesheets. The job I had been doing was term time only and we'd only just come out of the summer holidays, so I'd gone through all my savings. I was going to struggle to pay my mortgage. By the time week 4 rolled around, I wasn't eating properly. I was bringing in breakfast bars I already had in my kitchen cupboard for lunch rather than buy a meal. There would have come a point where I literally didn't have money to put fuel in my car to get to work. HR refused to do anything about it because their system apparently wasn't set up to give me a little bit of pay early to tide me over. If I'd have known about this ahead of time, I could have applied for UC, but because of the waiting time to get it, it was too late by the time I found out. The final straw was when I asked if I could go do an extra day with my other job on a training day (as this would be paid at the end of the following week) and I was told no — I was on a zero hours contract, I was under no contractual obligation to do this training, but was told no. They knew I wasn't eating properly and I wanted to do this extra day (which paid less than I would have for the training day) solely so I could pay for basics.
When I apply for certain jobs, I have to go through every bit of work history, and may have to explain why I left. I suspect, given I was only there for 5 weeks, even if they don't ask in application forms, there's a good chance they'll ask at interview. AIBU to just use reason 3? Is that going to seem more valid than the others? If you have ever recruited, would someone saying they left after 5 weeks because the employer essentially lied (although I definitely put this down to incompetence) about how the employee would be paid meant they couldn't afford to stay? I was really sad about leaving. In theory, it was the dream job I'd been looking for. The students were (mostly) great and I loved teaching, and I do still feel guilty about leaving the students without a teacher. But those 3 issues together meant staying was impossible.