My Top Takeaways After Working At A Retirement Board For Over A Year
And most of them are NOT about money
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There’s no such thing as a wasted experience. Even years at a “dreadful” job can teach us a lot. That’s how I feel about my time working at my state’s retirement board.
Though I wouldn’t call it a dreadful job, it was certainly not what I envisioned for myself after coming back to the U.S. from Egypt in 2017.
If you’ve read some of my other pieces, you’ll know that I had tons of debt at the time, and had no idea what to do with my life careerwise. But I was ready to hit the ground running, and finding any job that would help me attack my debt was a priority.
I remember submitting my resume for several jobs. Most of them were administrative positions — at universities or government institutions. After a few failed interviews, I was feeling a lot of fear, guilt, and pressure.
My anxiety was mounting, and I reached out to a temp job agency I had worked with from 2014 to 2015, before leaving for Egypt. Surprisingly, they got me a job interview with the State Retirement Board in downtown Boston within a couple of days. Soon after, the temp agency confirmed I had the job.
Though I wasn’t thrilled, I was relieved. I would finally have a source of income.
My start date was November 27, 2017, the day after Thanksgiving.
Long story short, and after only three months, that temporary job turned into a full-time position with benefits and a four dollar per hour raise. I stayed there, processing retirement applications and calculating pension benefits for state employees, until May 24, 2019.
Though I am happy I no longer work there, I look fondly at this time, especially because of some of the people I met, and the skills I developed.
That being said, these are some of the lessons I came away with from my time working at my state’s retirement board for a year and half:
In government hard work doesn’t translate to better pay
If you’ve ever dealt with the government, you know that things tend to be slow, especially when compared to the private sector (the DMV is a painful example of this).
But what I also learned at my job as a benefits calculator at the retirement board was that in government, working hard didn’t translate to better pay.
One of the things that motivated leave the job was my pay. Maybe I was naive, but I thought that by working hard, I would receive recognization and hence better compensation.
Of course, the fact that I processed twice or three times as many retirement applications as the other employees had little impact on my pay. Even when it alleviated the pressure on management from retirees who had to wait two or three months because of the backlog of applications, my hard work went uncompensated.
The whole time I was there, I did not receive a single raise beyond the cost of living raise — about a 50 cents per hour increase. And though I was promised a pay raise by my manager, a supposed “pay freeze” kept it from happening.
We are all replaceable
This was clear from the moment I decided to leave. In the back of my mind, I had hoped that my manager or her manager would beg me to stay when I submitted my notice. I mean, I was such an amazing employee (at least that’s what my work demonstrated). I was hard-working and smart, and very good with employees who came to speak with us in the office or who called us over the phone.
And though a couple of people in upper management did ask me why I wanted to leave, and whether I wanted a more flexible work schedule or a different position, never was the idea of giving me a raise proposed.
Training a new employee would have taken more time and money than it would have cost them to give me a raise, especially because I was efficient. Clearly, that was not a matter of concern for them— and just like I came in about a year and a half earlier, in their eyes, someone else could just as easily fill my position.
Some of us are well prepared for retirement; others not so much
Being an employee at a retirement board, I got a glimpse into people’s financial situations. I learned, for instance, that a state retiree’s pension could reduce their social security benefits from a previous private-sector job, which was often a surprise to them. There were also rules about what kind of work you could do as a retiree who was receiving a state pension.
Many of the pensions I calculated were quite impressive, giving the retiree enough money to live a rather comfortable lifestyle. Most of those with good pensions also had other sources of income, like private pensions, 401K’s, and even their own business.
For a large portion of state employees, however, their state pension was devastatingly inadequate despite their years of work. And the sad part was that many of them had no other sources of income post-retirement. They hadn’t prepared well for this stage of their life. This was tough to see, especially because a lot of them were too old or too tired to work at another job after retiring from their state jobs.
This experience opened my eyes to my own lack of awareness about retirement and prompted me to start taking steps to prepare for life after retirement, even if retirement was in 30 years. Time flies.
People will often underestimate you — especially if you look different from them
No matter how much they interacted with you or pretended to see me as their equal, there was always a hint of disdain towards me beneath some of my colleague's words and actions. This wasn’t the case for all people I came across and the degree to which this was obvious varied. But still, being a 27-year old Hispanic woman working with mostly caucasian people over 40, it was hard for me not to feel it.
I remember one lady at my job who got annoyed at me for sending her a voicemail from someone about something related to her department. Instead of speaking to me as a colleague in a mature and respectful way, she ran up to my manager and told her to scold me for transferring calls to her.
Looking back, I can remember other similar situations with minority employees. For example, there was one Indian guy who got demoted from a management position and whose work was constantly questioned. Another Asian woman, who worked for the same department, was also constantly criticized. I remember one morning I was about 30 minutes late to work. As I entered the office, she was marching towards the door crying and screaming loudly “leave me alone.”
I never faced overt racism, sexism, or discrimination because of my age while I worked at the board. However, I could definitely see how my age and race influenced how some people looked at and treated me. Henceforth, I’ve started caring less and less about people’s opinions of me.
Life is too short to do something you don’t like
Even before the pandemic, I had already understood that life is too short to slave at a job that you dread. I saw so many sad situations at the retirement board that made me understand this.
One retiree whose application I was processing, for example, was diagnosed with cancer only a month after requesting her pension. She died a few months later before the pension was even processed — which meant that it was processed as a survivor benefits application.
She had worked at her job for several decades, hoping to finally enjoy her retirement, when death came knocking at her door. Her husband would be the recipient of the fruits of her labor.
And this wasn’t a unique case. People who had worked hard all their life to obtain a coveted pension died before they retired or right when they were about to retire. Having worked in government both as an employee and as a temp for several years, I can tell you that a lot of these people working in government don’t do so for the love of their work. I’ve had my share of bitter colleagues and managers who were counting the days until they could be vested and get a pension so they could leave.
This has forever influenced the way I look at work — and going back to a 9 to 5 work style is something I have discarded since then, because I know I will never be happy with someone telling me when and how to do my work.
There they are; The most profound lessons that I learned from my time working at my state's retirement board, which have had a big impact on my life.
Life is not perfect, and we will face many unfair situations and periods of bad luck. But I think the clearer we are about the reality of life, and the fact that we are not on this earth forever, the more steps we can take to ensure that we are building satisfying lives, especially careerwise.
We spend most of our time at work, so we need to make sure that we’re doing something that will make us happy.
What lessons have you learned from your own work experiences? Share them in the comments!
