I’m stuck in a rut with my job at the moment, so I’m looking to leave but I’ve been kept down by my manager over the years that I feel like I’m now worthless. Job hunting has given me massive anxiety and made me feel very imposter-y.

A bit of background. I am a data manager, but being here in this role I don’t have the usual data manager skills that come with what is needed to progress or even leave. I came in to my job for a bit of a step back (I was in research before) but to learn some new skills as well. Over the last three years I’ve got to the point where I feel if I stay any longer I will be deemed unemployable. Over time, my job has been manipulated and I’m not even really doing the role I came in for. This has happened slowly. I feel like a database because I am manually holding the place up because of the bad decisions my manager has made for the department. I also feel like I’m being made to come on site (my job can be fully done from home) because my manager will not rehire a secretary position since hers left in April. So she has no office cover some days and I come in the office to unlock a door, put a projector out and be on guard to divert calls from the PA’s office phone.

She has not been onsite since last April.

The staff I am supposed to ‘supervise’ are not excel trained and she keeps brushing this aside - they need training but will not put anyone through because she does not see any value in investing in her staff. Some of the training is free. I have just encouraged, on the sly, one of my team members to take it because she will not find out! She has often made comments about one of them not having a degree - she looks down her nose at them quite often and the team know that she gets treated differently over other team members because of this, however it is subtle. I have also had to do my GCP training without her knowledge, I have redone this training since the beginning of my career, it is critical in my career development if I ever want to progress (I needed it for this job!!) but when it came down to renewing it she told me I did not need it in my current role and discouraged me from updating it.

When I say ‘supervise’ the staff, it’s part of my job description but she has so much control she does not let me make decisions for these members of staff.

In the first 6 months, she would not let me send an email by myself - she had to answer it for me. However she would regularly duck out of meetings and let me ‘take the fall’ for it last minute, often not showing up and leaving me unprepared and out of my depth. My first meeting I had I felt like I had lead the session and built a rapport enough with the team to sort some serious issues with our stakeholders who were fully on board. I walked in on her afterwards and overheard her saying to them ‘not to listen to her because she’s new and she does not know what she’s talking about’. Which was not only embarrassing but upsetting and crashed my confidence. That decision for her to block my attempts to fix these issues was a critical moment in the departments business because 3 years down the line we are finally fixing these issues with major financial consequences - it has been left too late and I’ve taken the fall for it.

Another example of how controlling she is, one of our team members asked me to help her do a favour as she needed some data which only me and my manager have access to. I was happy to do it, it was a 20 minute job and she has the right to this data (she just can’t extract it without our help). My manager found out she asked and lashed out at this (senior) colleague, who was left confused and like she did something wrong. My manager then lied to me on the phone and said the reason she said I shouldn’t be doing it is because she was already half way through the task. She had not been asked to do it. It is a typical tactic for her to lie and twist stories to validate her control.

A week later one of the Dr asked me to do the same task, because what my manager had provided to them wasn’t creditable enough to use. It put me in the position where I had to say ‘yes I’ll have it to you in 20 minutes but please don’t mention this to her’. This is a frequent happening in the workplace that i have to do things and send things out in secret. Which shouldn’t happen. But to get my job done I feel like I have no other choice. Other people have felt the same.

This week she had a go at me for not copying her in to an email when she was off over Christmas (to ask external advice about a minor thing), even though I had just been on the phone about it and she knew why I was emailing. She often does this so she can take over the task, and sometimes it’s much more straightforward not to copy her in.
She will often overtake jobs off me, take control and then not finalise them or she will forget about them which means it comes back to me later on. If not, she will just create an issue that isn’t there.

I was struggling financially over Christmas and had an opportunity to take some extra hours over the weekend or evening but it needed my managers signature and I knew she would have a lot to say about it and put me down (it’s happened frequently with other staff) so I never went for it. It’s ridiculous I feel this way.

I have been trying to look for other positions (in data management) but because I have not been provided with the training and skills I feel a strong sense of imposter syndrome like I am not qualified or worthy for a better job and it’s holding me back. I’ve had to emails off recruiters asking me to provide my number for a chat but I’m frozen with fear over it. Even I don’t know what I do as a job anymore, I really struggle explaining my role to people. I need to break through this but I just feel so unworthy and useless. I have recently been accepted for a coding scholarship for the end of jan (evenings) which I’m having to keep from my manager, but I’m freaking out about doing it because I don’t feel like I’m clever or confident enough.

I’m an anxious person anyway so I have to fight and really push for confidence (most of the time I can get past it people think I’m confident naturally) but I feel beat down with this. Any advice or encouragement will be appreciated.