Entertaining Growth

One of the things that I really like being able to do is grow and become independent in the workplace!

I've had all kinds of jobs over the years. Some of them pretty random in terms of where they are compared to my core skills and interests. I think that's a great thing though because one of the things that's incredibly important in the world we live in is a wide range of experience. It can be something that makes or breaks a candidate for a role, or helps someone go above and beyond the call of duty.

I would like to say that I go above and beyond quite a bit at work, but you'd have to talk to the people I work with directly on a day to day basis, though that will never happen :D. Still though, I am never one to shy away from a problem or a challenge. I tackle that shit head on to figure it out, get it sorted, and move past it. I have been in plenty of uncomfortable situations before and yes it for sure sucks, but it's one of the important life lessons that we can learn.

With the new structure at my job, one of the things that has changed for me is that I've gotten a whole lot of new tasks and responsibilities. This is both incredible because it greatly expanded my base of skills and knowledge, while also being fairly difficult and stressful. With the notion above though, it is a challenge and I am not backing away from it that's for sure!

With these new things that I'm doing, being much more on the technical side than ever before, I am learning things at an incredibly rapid pace which is great. I am getting ramped up, as they say, to do a lot more than I knew I was able to do and it's a pretty cool feeling.

One of the things that is exciting for me is that I can work with a colleague directly and absorb as much as possible from him. He's helped me out quite a bit over the last several weeks which is great. I've also helped him out a lot as well over the years that I've worked with him, so we've developed a really good working relationship. We have a good amount of trust between us and that's important!

I've taken his strategies and adapted them to my own style, but the important thing is that the basics are there and if I were to fall off a ladder or something, he could, for the most part, pick up where I left off and run with it pretty well. I think that's great because he has a great system, and I am taking that system and improving it for my own needs and purposes.

With that training, an exciting thing for me to be able to do is a number of tasks independently! It feels good to only need him to give me the very beginning piece, since in the flux of all the changes, I wasn't able to get access to a specific piece of our software toolkit because it is with the original company and they are not adding people to it. We are making due, and I just set up 20 minutes for him to log in, give me the files, and then off he goes! This has greatly improved the throughput of what we are doing, and it has considerably reduced his stress levels which is great.

I think this is also important because it reduces single points of failure. If he had gotten sick or hurt, or vice versa if I had, then we would kind of be screwed for a bit until things got back to normal. That's pretty rough to deal with on a number of levels!

As the days and weeks go on, more and more is improved which is awesome and things are getting worked into the memory banks. One of the most important things for me is that I'm having FUN lol. It's weird to say.. but this type of stuff is really a lot of fun for me which is cool!

What about you, have you gotten things at work where you learn something, then graduate to becoming independent? How does that make you feel? Let me know in the comments!