Loyal to my company?

Or should I say embassy... Before I was offered this job, during my second interview when I met the Ambassador for the first time, he said that he was slightly hesitant to hire someone as young as me, because young people don't tend to stay very long and they needed someone to stay for at least one year. I said that this was no problem, and it was true. I had no intentions of leaving anytime soon, after all I'd been waiting for a job for five months and wasn't going to give it up that quickly.

But little did I know then how incredibly bored and under stimulated I would be. I got this job in competition with many others for reasons unknown to me. Some of the people were fluent in both Swedish and Slovene and probably would have been better suited for the job, but I guess they didn't have my good command of the English language. I'm not saying that my English is amazingly, unbelievably good, but I do think that my translating skills are at least half decent. Or at least so I've been told.

Unfortunately, there are only so many articles, annotated agendas and Globalization Council reports to translate, and it normally only takes up a few hours of my time every day. So when I've gone through the papers, translated what I found important, and printed out a couple of papers that get sent to us every day, I'm pretty much done for the day. Ok, sometimes I have to update the agenda, confirm or regret a couple of inviatations, make a few phone calls to different ministries and embassies, and write a summary of what the Swedish ministers have been up to during the week, but this still isn't enough to fill up a whole week.

I know many people probably think that I'm lucky, that being able to just kick back at work and do more or less nothing is a luxury that most people can only dream about. Well let me tell you something. It's not that great. I like to be busy, to be challenged, to be kicked out of my comfort zone and find myself in situations that I don't quite know how to get out of.

More importantly I want to grow, to learn and develop at work. I want to be able to take my career further, but obviously I won't be able to be promoted at work as I work at an embassy and to hold the higher positions you obviously have to be from the country which the embassy represents. And I'm not learning enough or gaining enough knowledge that I'll be able to bring with me to my next job for it to be worth staying here for an entire year.

If something better comes along, then I'm out of here. Tomorrow if possible. Because although I did promise to stay for a year, I feel like I was given the job under false pretenses. Had I known then that this job would provide no challenges whatsoever, I don't know if I would have taken it.

Then again, my original plan was to apply to the Diplomat Program at the MFA, and as they won't be recruiting this year as I thought they would, there's not much point in me wasting my time here.

Instead I'll be looking into finding a job in the publishing industry in London. Or here for that matter, but I do think that jobs like that are a lot harder to find in Sweden. Plus, the English weather is just so much better than the Swedish!