u/flash_match

I posted this sitúa in greater detail in the career advice sub but realized this group could actually be more helpful. Thank you for reading this and providing insight.

After 8 months unemployment last year I took a job below my previous title and pay to remain in my chosen field. There were definitely gaps between some of my prior work knowledge and the job description at this company but the hiring manager seemed happy to have me on the team given all my relevant experience and wasn’t concerned about me needing to learn the rest on the job. It’s been about 9 months and I’ve had very few opportunities to use my strengths and have been given amorphous and dubious assignments without a lot of context or mentorship.

I now believe this situation of being “overqualified” has backfired. My manager at the very start expected a strange level of independence and content knowledge about the company and their processes and offered nearly zero onboarding to the extent that she didn’t know my start date and wasn’t in the office on that day.

I had to set up much of my workspace and access to shared files and necessary software without her acting as a liaison besides a brief Teams introduction to one of the IT people. I was then lectured for not being able to resolve an IT issue quickly enough which impacted my ability to do work when I barely understood the org chart and the issue would be fixed one day only to return the next. I found that discussion about not being able to use the computer issue as an “excuse” going forward really insulting given how little she understood what had actually happened and how many steps I took to try and resolve it.

She has continued to neglect mentoring me about company priorities and has now become very critical about a technical skill I’m still developing for which she has not actually observed my work. I’m not nearly as bad at it as she believes but given the ill defined project scope it’s hard for me to look efficient when the projects keep expanding.

Additionally, my reasonable lack of domain knowledge about a very niche medical procedure has been overlooked and when I’ve been stuck on a project it’s been described as me lacking “critical thinking skills.” In this specific case the choices she made to push a project forward are very non standard and would not have occurred to me given the nature of how these procedures are supposed to be done in the scientific community. If a regulatory body overlooked that work, I have no idea how she would justify it. Then again, her findings were interesting.

What I can’t tell is if all these criticisms and lectures are an attempt to get me to quit or if she’s just bad at being a manager and thinks this behavior will motivate me. I don’t feel confident in confiding my troubles to other team members as I truly believe it will backfire on me and I’m not sure the situation is HR level despite a few behaviors on her part that definitely felt like she was demeaning me in front of others and intentionally misrepresenting my work in her one on one meetings with me in order to lecture me about how to “improve.”

I need this job and had genuinely hoped it would sooner than later result in getting back to my previous title and pay so I can stay in this industry. Obviously moving on will eventually be the solution but until then, how paranoid should I be about whether or not she’s trying to sabotage me and what can I do to protect myself besides documenting every conversation and using a crystal ball to figure out the unknown unknowns she is expecting me to magically figure out with zero guidance.

I’d love the perspective of managers in this sub on what might be going on here and how to proceed.

1,000 pioneers started the Oregon Trail journey.

Unfortunately I don’t know how many actually died of dysentery.