Last year, I took a job at a F100 company within their legal department. I am a data/BI analyst by trade, and I was told that I would essentially be helping them to leverage all their data systems that they previously didn't have a SME to refer to. The pay wasn't great, but I was coming off a slew of consulting jobs that were coming to an end and this seemed like a foot back into the door.
For the first 3-4 months, things were actually pretty great. I was primarily supporting a team that managed the company's entire temp/contract labor force. For about 80% of my time, I was helping them pull reporting, providing utilization/spend analysis, and supporting various business who used this program. Ancillary to that (about 20% of my time), I was supporting the legal department at large, pulling reports for audits and producing various BI insights for leadership. Overall, I was spending about 90% of my time doing exactly what I wanted to do: being a data/BI analyst.
Fast forward to around September of last year. The team that I primarily supported was moved to another organization completely. Somehow the legal department managed to hold on to my headcount. I was moved under a manager whose role primarily served the operational and administrative function of the legal department. I had a lot of initial concerns at this point, because most of my work (~80% of it) was moving to another department. But this manager assured me there was plenty of opportunity to leverage their data systems and use my skills.
As it turns out, my worst fears have mostly been confirmed. My data analytics/BI workload has never fully recovered. In that capacity, I'm still used for those specific duties about 30-40% of the time in support of the legal team. For the rest of my time, my relatively new manager has assigned me mostly operational and administrative tasks in support of her team. So, about 60-70% of my time is now divided up between a variety of administrative duties. I have had many conversations with her during my 1:1s advising her of my interest to continue growing my skills and experience as a data analyst. I have even come up with opportunities to support the team better in this capacity. However, as far as she is concerned, she seems utterly clueless as to what that work should entail. She has provided me no clear initiatives to work on as it pertains to my original primary function. She is always giving me excuses that “we're not quite ready for this or that yet, but we will be soon once we get more stakeholders on board!”. But she definitely likes to pull me in to help on tasks that the rest of her operations team needs help on. These duties are mostly administrative and low skilled in nature. Putting together binders for meetings, setting up conference rooms for meetings, being involved in non-analytics projects, etc.
Things sort of came to a head yesterday when I was discussing with her a project that I was pulled into that fell outside the purview of reporting and analytics. Ultimately, the project consists of building org charts for our company in a new tool they invested in. As I explained to her my concerns about being expected to lead this large scope project alone, she expressed to me that it was her opinion that this was definitely a reporting function because technically the org charts will be printed out on a “report”. To me, this just illustrates her complete lack of understanding of what a data/BI analyst does. She also insisted that I was “the only competent enough member of the team” who could wrap my mind around this new tool. That bit stings quite a bit, because we've been talking for the last several months about getting me promoted to a more senior level, and it's just been one excuse after another as to why that's not possible. She also loves to leverage gaslighting as a tactic to make me feel guilty about asking for such things like a promotion or seeking more opportunities in my area of expertise.
I've been going at this about 8 months under her management, and it's gotten to the point where it's having a serious impact on my sleep and mental health. The one silver lining about this situation is that I've been working with a mentor on another team who has been really helping me make connections with others in different departments who do more of what I'm looking to do.
Idk, what say you? Is it worth pushing through with this BS under her management and trying to find another role within the company (currently there is a hiring freeze, so few job opps; but one day soon)? I started ramping up my applications yesterday, but my luck has been pretty lackluster over the past couple months.