Hello SL friends,
I hope some of you can offer some advice.
I'm 5 years from earliest feasible retirement--not a great time to be looking for a new job, as there tends to be a lot of age discrimination in my field.
I have been in my current job 8 years and I like it.
Here is the "issue." My employer has a very big ongoing project (I'll call it the X Project) that he wants done, but for which he doesn't seem to want to hire any staff. People in some other departments are getting inconvenienced because the work in the X Project isn't going forward. Someone in one of those departments is putting pressure on me to do the work of the X Project "until someone is hired" (which might be never).
I am frankly already doing the work of 2 people and I have neither the interest nor the qualifications to do the work for the X Project. It would be a huge technical learning curve and even then I don't know how I would fit it into my current responsibilities, which are highly mission-critical, direct-customer focussed, and visible both within and outside the organization. If I take on the X Project there is no way I can do the customer service work I am currently doing--and I haven't been able to get anyone "above" me to say I should do less of that.
The supervisors in this situation know about the problem, but they are being AVOIDANT. They won't meet to discuss how to resolve this issue, they won't answer emails. I see it is a major area of dysfunction in the organization. I do NOT want to be in the middle of this disfunction and I also do not want to end up scape-goated.
Can someone offer some advice? I wish I could give more details, sorry.