Second-guessing career in payroll
Warning, this is mostly me venting, sorry for all the text. I am still green to this industry. I’m based in Canada. I have been with my current employer for less than a year and from day 1 I have hated it here.
My last payroll-related job was a 50-person animation company where I was accounting assistant and thrust into payroll administration/clerical work. I think that whole company and environment is what made me think I enjoyed Payroll, because I am currently working towards my PCP designation.
My current role is at a 2k employee, half-unionized, multi province, extremely high turnover rate, multi pay cycle company. HUGE difference, and I was hired by my manager knowing the experience (or lack) I had.
All these words to say; today I realized I made a huge mistake during my first month at this company. I entered a new hires salary more than it should have been and they’ve been overpaid for months. I’m not making excuses for myself, I am beating myself up over it.
My training for this role was essentially a month of sitting beside my manager and listen to her talk… about everything. I can tell you her entire extended family, their jobs, death dates, her real age, favourite colour, her entire career from her first job to most current, etc. I know this woman more than I know my own mother. And between all that, I filled up 3 notebooks of good info that I will take with me wherever. After that, the second part of my job title training came from the receptionist (who used to do my job but hated it) and a co-op student they fired for not being good.
Circling back to my mistake, it happened during the training session from the receptionist and co-op student, and my manager (only 2 of us in payroll dept) has chewed me a new asshole, and never in her 20 years of experience has she ever made a mistake like this. Valid. Today has sucked and I’m now on LinkedIn searching for something else even though I hope I don’t get fired for this but I already feel like crying and giving up.
TLDR: I made a payroll error and now I don’t know if I should continue with this career or just this job.