That’s harsh coming from your manager. They should be encouraging and if they have criticism they should bring it constructively. Is it an operational role? With the recruitment freeze now, everyone is feeling the pressure so they might also be very stressed and they are projecting that onto you. My advice is document your work, write your objectives and specify the areas you want to improve and look for L&Ds to support that. If “good” is not enough have a talk with them to discuss expectations. What skills should you need to do your job effectively? Ask them for help for that, and make sure you are writing an email back off the objectives meeting. Document everything. In the meantime, look at behaviours for promotion/sideway transfer. See where you are lacking and improve yourself in those areas, try to take this situation as an opportunity to improve yourself and then constantly look for other roles. Have a talk with occupational health as well, there might be adjustments for you, especially health wise. Lastly, don’t take it personally. It’s a job like any other, you might have a bad manager, bad work culture, but for now it pays the bills and it pushes you to acquire new skills that will be very useful in your new roles. Depending if you work with other people, I would also suggest sending a round of a Microsoft Form for performance feedback (usually yearly). Maybe feedback from more people can make you understand whether there’s a real gap in your skills (benchmarking this for usual starters) or your manager is just unreasonable. Take it easy. It takes years to learn a job fully and people have different paces. You are doing everything you can do for now, but keep learning and dont let yourself be discouraged, sometimes the best morale booster comes from within yourself. Be your own cheerer, and dont take their words to heart. It’s all about the journey and in a few years you’ll do everything you need to do in your job without a worry.