I love my job, but I'm dying for a vacation. My job is very mentally taxing (engineer). We always have tons of work to do which is better than the alternative, but it can be pretty stressful.
That said we only get 10 days of vacation (which I suppose is standard) and 6 company holidays. No floating holidays or personal holidays. Just the 10 and the 6. We also don't get black Friday nor even Christmas Eve off. Needless to say you don't get a lot of time off, and most people end up trying to save as much of it as possible for the holidays since we get the absolute bare minimum off (Christmas Day and New Year's Day only). In our 6th year we get 3 weeks off. Can't roll any vacation either, use it or lose it, and lots of people have lost it thinking they'd be able to take it at the end of the year but having too many deadlines, so even that's a gamble.
At my last job I had over four weeks of vacation in addition to about double the holidays. Seemed like I had a week off or a few days off every other month or so, which was great.
I've taken just four days off this year, and am trying to save the rest of it for Christmas time. That's still four months off from now though, and I'm getting really burned out. I haven't had a full week off since spring of 2012.
I don't know what the point of this post is; it's just tough to get to do any traveling abroad unless I want to burn most/all of my vacation in one shot (haven't been abroad on a vacation since '09 when I was at my last job), which I don't want to do. My mom died in her early 50s, and ever since then I've found that time is what's important, and I'm glad I realize that in my 20s; I think a lot of people don't realize that until much later in life.
The easy answer would be to find another job with more time off, but there are a lot of other great things about the job, and I don't know that I'd get much more competitive a package elsewhere. I would be perfectly happy with taking unpaid time off, like maybe two weeks of that to go along with my two weeks paid that I get, but I'm sure that's not allowed and is probably not something payroll wants to deal with making adjustments for.
It's going to be a long 35-40 years. There's gotta be a better alternative.
That said we only get 10 days of vacation (which I suppose is standard) and 6 company holidays. No floating holidays or personal holidays. Just the 10 and the 6. We also don't get black Friday nor even Christmas Eve off. Needless to say you don't get a lot of time off, and most people end up trying to save as much of it as possible for the holidays since we get the absolute bare minimum off (Christmas Day and New Year's Day only). In our 6th year we get 3 weeks off. Can't roll any vacation either, use it or lose it, and lots of people have lost it thinking they'd be able to take it at the end of the year but having too many deadlines, so even that's a gamble.
At my last job I had over four weeks of vacation in addition to about double the holidays. Seemed like I had a week off or a few days off every other month or so, which was great.
I've taken just four days off this year, and am trying to save the rest of it for Christmas time. That's still four months off from now though, and I'm getting really burned out. I haven't had a full week off since spring of 2012.
I don't know what the point of this post is; it's just tough to get to do any traveling abroad unless I want to burn most/all of my vacation in one shot (haven't been abroad on a vacation since '09 when I was at my last job), which I don't want to do. My mom died in her early 50s, and ever since then I've found that time is what's important, and I'm glad I realize that in my 20s; I think a lot of people don't realize that until much later in life.
The easy answer would be to find another job with more time off, but there are a lot of other great things about the job, and I don't know that I'd get much more competitive a package elsewhere. I would be perfectly happy with taking unpaid time off, like maybe two weeks of that to go along with my two weeks paid that I get, but I'm sure that's not allowed and is probably not something payroll wants to deal with making adjustments for.
It's going to be a long 35-40 years. There's gotta be a better alternative.
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