Learning and Skilling

Learning at the workplace is something we should always strive to be doing, in my opinion.

Several few weeks ago, I was talking with my manager in our weekly one-on-one's and going over a few things. They have a software that I know conceptually, but have never deployed before and it's picking up some good steam, so he wanted to know if I was interested. Initially I wasn't really interested because I was already working on a lot of stuff, so I didn't want to give something some effort that I wasn't going to be able to dedicate a lot of time to. It also seemed a little silly, so I opted out.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, where the team was really desperate because they were getting a lot of orders coming in for it. I acquiesced and said let's give it a go, because I also want to make sure I'm not being a squeaky wheel. With a lot of things, it's about compromise and priorities. With this, it was a bit of me compromising on my assumptions of what would be beneficial, to make it a priority to learn something new and help the organization out.

I did all the requisite materials, shadowing and such. Thankfully I knew what the stuff was from previous life experience, and that helped me, combined with other knowledge and things I've got. After all that, I kicked off my first project for it! It was pretty cool because it's been a while since I started something new to me.

The funny thing about it was that I was supposed to have a few colleagues join me, but there were some scheduling snafus and I ended up flying completely solo, on my first meeting of this nature. It was really interesting and a bit fun because I was able to bullshit my way through the presentation, ask some partially intelligent questions, and produce a pretty good fake front.

I think so many things in the world today are like this. Not exactly in the way above, but where people really have no idea what they are doing, but they do it anyway. I think that's a really important thing for a lot of things, except for surgery or something. That you kind of want a good one.. but for a lot of other things like projects or selling things, you don't have to be very knowledgeable at the specific thing you are working on, but have a more generalized knowledge and you should be good.

I managed my way through it thanks to some prep work with colleagues of mine, and it went pretty well which was nice. I have a bunch more work to do over the next few days related to it, but I think it's good because I can sprinkle these quick and easy projects in very regularly throughout my monthly schedules and get quite a few of them done. We are at a pretty good point in terms of the quantity of these coming in and getting worked on, so it feels good to have some revenue coming in for my name. It certainly helps when it comes time at the end of the year with raises and bonuses and stuff!

What about you, have you initially resisted a new challenge or situation, but then decided to give it a try after all? How did it go? Let me know in the comments!