Unemployment or the travails of a trailing husband

I think most, if not all of you know that I am currently "between jobs".

Obviously, we originally came to Beijing for Caroline's job. And since we weren't married at the time, I also needed a job to get a visa. Now of course that's no longer the case.

When we left Newcastle I was very happy at the job I gave up, however after three years I was ready for another challenge. So it wasn't easy to give up a good job with good benefits, but equally it was an easy choice to make when presented with the alternative of coming here with Caroline.

I was nervous. I spent a lot of time telling everyone that I would take any job I could find to stay here - and I certainly would have done. However, I care about my career too and didn't want to put that on hold for too long. Perhaps even more substantially I was a little nervous about Caroline being the breadwinner.

It might sound a little bit pathetic to say this, especially as I would like to present myself as a modern man. I don't expect to tell the wife what to do, I always expected our decisions to be a compromise and that is how we work. However, one of the things I've learned being away from home is that Newcastle is still quite a traditional place. Well, actually I never doubted that, what I've actually discovered is that this has had more of an impact on me than I realised. This is something I have written about a little recently, you leave and realise that you have been shaped by your own origins more than you thought.

In a couple, it's inevitable that one person earns more and has the more prestigious job than the other. Normally it's the man, but that is and should be changing. I'm quite proud of my academic and professional career to date, so it wasn't easy to be the minor partner.

Fortunately I managed to find a job which presented a real challenge. Through a process of in-depth research, lots of applications and of course some good luck, I discovered International College Beijing (ICB) and applied for a job as a business studies lecturer. There were some clear ties to the work I had done at Newcastle Council and while there was no comparison to Caroline's job, the benefits were very competitive in Beijing and most importantly there was a real intellectual challenge.

After the first three months at ICB I felt comfortable with my role and confident enough to look up and try and identify some other opportunities. Not necessarily as a replacement job, but given the hours of a university lecturer, it was possible to take on a second and even a third job. Thanks to an academic I knew whilst working on Chinese student issues in the UK I started teaching English at another university and to volunteer at a micro-finance NGO.

The English teaching presented a different challenge, but it was not my particular area of interest, so after a couple of semesters I decided not to carry that on. It's also worth mentioning that whenever I told someone my job, I was very quick to explain that I was a business teacher and absolutely not an English teacher. This is an issue which is very specific to China. I have a number of friends who work as English teachers and I intend no insult to them. However, for a lot of 'Westerners' being an English teacher is shorthand for those people (read men) who are in China for a few different reasons (girls, learning Chinese and a better quality of life than at home, in no particular order). There is so much demand for English teachers here that some of the supply is not of the highest quality and can sometimes lack even the most basic teaching credentials. I contrast this completely from those people with genuine qualifications and experience in education. But it was simply easier for me to explain that I was a business lecturer and then most people seemed to assume that it was a 'real' job.

I was particularly self-concious when speaking to Caroline's colleagues. These are people who's jobs I coveted and am confident that I could do, so I never wanted them to see me as an 'English' teacher. After introductions it never took very long before I told them I had also passed the test to work for the EU, but for jobs back in Brussels. Stupid really, but these are the small ways that we try to retain a little pride.

Working at a small-scale NGO which had only been established for a short time was a fantastic experience. It gave me a real insight into how hard it is to start up a business and how challenging the Chinese business environment can be. I learned about the value of networks and also how much impact you can make with a small organisation. I was also able to apply a lot of the procedural experience I gained working at public sector organisations and gained a new perspective on why bureaucratic organisation develop the way that they do and have. It was hard work, sometimes morale-sapping and a demanding place to work, however there were a number of occasions when I came very close to taking this job on full time and leaving ICB. Ultimately another opportunity arose that I chose to pursue.

After the first year at the university, things changed. Again a combination of hard work and good luck meant I was in a position to take a lead in the development of a new programme there. Over the course of the academic year and especially in the second semester leading a great team I learned a huge amount; about management, about working with a Chinese organisation, about organisational change, about cross-cultural communication and about the in-depth planning that is necessary whenever something new is being introduced. As a team we had some great successes, but also some failures and the greatest challenge was to learn from these as you go and make the necessary changes to improve the programme, rather than simply to stick inflexibly with the original plans.

For a variety of reasons, some professional, some personal; the latest contract offer from ICB wasn't acceptable for me. So at the beginning of July my last contract ended and so began my first period of unemployment in China, my first anywhere if you ignore two weeks between undergraduate and postgraduate degrees.

We then spent a month, from mid-July to mid-August back in Berlin and Newcastle, so that was no different than a usual holiday. I think some of my negative feelings around that time were due to nervousness about job opportunities there might be, even though I acted supremely confident and blamed all frustrations on the little irritations of life in Beijing.

I've now been back in Beijing for a month and as of today, I'm still out of work. However it has actually been a really positive month. Since we first got here I've always tried to take on more of the burden of jobs around the house and any of the small, but time-consuming tasks that are necessary outside of work were my responsibility. It's a small effort to rebalance the scales with Caroline's long hours and big pay packets. So obviously this month I have tried to do that even more. It's also been a personal rule that, even if I was working in the afternoon, I would get up with Caroline and have breakfast with her - I couldn't handle lounging around in bed while she goes off to work. And I have most certainly kept that going, even more important while I've been unemployed.

So what have I been doing? Well, applying for lots of jobs obviously. And that's probably the main thing that has kept me relaxed throughout the process. My experience of coming to Beijing and taking on some completely new roles has given me a lot of confidence that I can take on a new job and quickly identify how I can add value to the organisation whether it is big or small and in whatever sector. I can do this wherever we move next and I can do it in my next job here in Beijing. So there have been some interesting opportunities and in fact I'm very hopeful that my status will change in the coming weeks - but I don't want to say any more about that since it would be unprofessional and potentially jinx it.

I've used the free time to get back into a good routine at the gym, four or five visits a week. It was sorely necessary after the good life that we have here, but it has been a real pleasure to have the time to commit to it and I'm feeling much better for it. Going to sleep physically rather than mentally tired is not to be underestimated. I'm actually off there in an hour or so when I complete this post and another application.

The rest of the time I have spent updating my on-line profile, I think this is certainly a part-time job and much harder to maintain when you are working full-time, unless of course some element of your job requires it. I've also been reading lots of interesting articles. The challenge will be to keep up these good things when I do start my new job.

As with most things, I think the lesson I have learned is to be more confident. It doesn't really matter what people think of your job. We can probably all think of examples of idiots with great jobs or indeed, great people with crappy ones. I've got more pride in what I have actually done in the two years since we moved here than if I had taken on a great sounding job and spent the time surfing the Internet and waiting for the weekend.

As soon as I've got a new job, you can be sure I'll post.