SIX MONTHS after giving birth to her son, Della Judd returned to work. She struggled to find a job that worked around her new family after being made redundant while on maternity leave. Now she was settling into her new role, a 90-minute commute from home.
Then one day her son’s nursery called to say they suspected her boy had meningitis.
“That 90-minute journey to get back to him felt like the longest journey of my life,” Della recalls. “It also gave me time to reflect and realise that this job just was not working. I was out of the house before my son was awake and back after he had gone to bed. I then secured another job that was a big pay cut but gave me ten hours back a week.”
Since then, Della has become an advocate for flexible working and positive leadership and works with people to help them to identify what they want from their job, what they value and what motivates them.
She believes that, following the pandemic, many people are now starting to ask themselves these questions And now she has put her personal experiences of redundancy, childcare and health challenges on paper in her first book Get The Job You Really Want In A Post Pandemic World.
Della has coached and mentored hundreds of people in senior roles over the last 25 years. The book tells her story and offers helpful tips, exercises and case studies for the reader to understand their values and what drives them, to reflect on their work-life balance and how to build confidence so they can present their best self at interview.
“The pandemic hit us all for six,” she says. “Then, slowly, we got used to this enforced period of staying at home without a commute. People started spending more time with their family and focusing on the things that really mattered. Now we are seeing some companies forcing a return to the office and others offering a more flexible, hybrid way of working.
“As we enter an ‘employees market’,with more choice than ever before in terms of how we work, it is important to understand how we can get the job that really works for us.”
Her book is available on Amazon and Della has donated copies to the YMCA and education and careers service Key Business Skills Ltd in Daventry, thanks to a Crowd Funder initiative that sees people who buy a book also donate a book for someone in need to help them change their life.
Copies of the book have also been donated to Willen Hospice, for the charity to sell in its shop.
Copies of Get The Job You Really Want In A Post Pandemic World by Della Judd are available on Amazon. Find out more about Della Judd at www.dellajudd.co.uk
The Crowd Funder to donate books has now closed but companies interested in giving copies of Della’s books away to those in need can to contact Della at admin@dellajudd.co.uk.
“Everyone deserves to be in a job they enjoy and I really want to do all I can to make that happen,” she says.
Della reveals more about her ambitions, dreams and the path that has shaped her life in an exclusive Q&A with Business MK. Read the July edition, featuring Della, here
