My Days Are Numbered

FROM TO

Three months, to be precise.

No, I'm not dying or anything like that. Three months will be all I have left at Jardines, should I decide to take up Shell's job offer.

Up until now, the only people who know about this, apart from myself are the people at Shell and my friend JES who works for Potens in London. If you check out the link to Potens, the connection with what he does and the energy industry will become clear.

I've had a couple of meetings with Shell and after the second, I had a gut feeling that they were interested. What gave it away was that they had slipped into a pattern of speech where they assumed I was one of them and had to correct themselves when they realised their assumption was premature.

I didn't hear from them for about 2 weeks after the last meeting and I was wondering whether I had read the signs wrongly. In the interim, they did call to let me know that no decision had been taken and with hindsight, they probably wouldn't have called if they weren't interested.

Yesterday I received a call from Shell saying that they were going to make me an offer and would get back to me with the formalities, etc later this week or early next week. It might be premature to say that my days at JLT are numbered seeing as I don't have anything in writing from Shell yet.

The question is whether I want to take the job with Shell. It will depend on what the terms of the offer are and whether I can use this as a leverage to improve my position at JLT. I will be asking Shell for time to consider their offer and depending on how much time I have, will use it to see what I can get out of JLT. I should now within the next 2 weeks how much I'm valued by JLT, or not , as the case may be. If the latter, there's no reason why I should stay.

Rather than counting unhatched chickens, I think I'll wait until I get a formal offer from Shell and there will be more blog entries on this in the coming weeks.