Deciphering What I Enjoy Doing for Work
Volunteering and participating in a development program can help with figuring out or fine-tuning what to do in a career. The more clues there are, the clearer the picture!
Below are links to what I’ll bring up today:
- My Story
- Volunteering
- Participating in a Development Program
- Continuous Improvement
- Lesson for Dumber Self
- Next Step for You
The following question was always a difficult one for me to answer:
What are your long-term career goals?
A glimpse of how I started to piece it together is summarized below:
My Story
For almost 10 years of documenting my career aspirations on an annual basis, my focus was never on a job title that I wanted, but rather the types of responsibilities I wanted to tackle. By reading job descriptions, I couldn’t find a position that I wanted to attempt. For me, I needed to try out the work before I would know whether I wanted to continue it or not. Eventually, I found out that 70% of learning comes from job experience.
What did I do after I had the nugget that the majority of learning comes from job experience? I volunteered and participated in a development program! Below are some details from the opportunities that I pursued:
Volunteering
Because I was at a lean company where many great ideas were waiting to be executed, there were plenty of volunteer opportunities to pick from. The trick was choosing one that I could learn the most from and dedicate enough time to on top of my regular job duties. The one that I was attracted to helped me confirm what type of work motivated me, whether I preferred working alone or on a team, and if I favored big picture or details.
Responsibilities
The volunteer option that I selected was to start a development series for the department that I was in. The goal of it was to create and implement quarterly learning sessions that were open to approximately 65 employees. This involved planning the sessions, conveying the plans concisely in a presentation, securing guest speakers, booking venues, facilitating the events, and other project management tasks.
Individual or Team
During the beginning of the one-year commitment, I co-produced the first development session and acted as the project manager. For the remaining three sessions, I transitioned to becoming the project manager overseeing a six-member core project team and reporting to a two-member steering committee from different groups within the department.
Big Picture or Details
Launching each quarterly event required tracking the details of all the parties involved, including the tasks, deadlines, and costs, while having at least one contingency plan. In addition, updating the steering committee needed to be done at a summary level to enable decision-making, but additional details had to be available if requested.
Result
My experience in this volunteer project supported that I still enjoyed helping others develop, creating new solutions for them, and tracking all the related details. On the contrary, facilitating a live event in a large group setting was not something I liked as it was too chaotic for me to capture everyone’s feedback quickly.
As for organizing all the details, I was inclined to do it on my own first and get feedback from a small group afterwards, which made it easier to manage. However, if time was limited, I would resort to sharing the work, e.g., when I was creating the presentation deck for the year-end session, I involved one of the presenters to expand on the slide deck, which in the end, resulted in a higher quality product.
Lastly, I relished the specifics of the project, but with practice, I did enjoy the challenge of documenting just the important points for the intended audience.
Participating in a Development Program
As for partaking in a more formal development program, it required more commitment. In my case, I switched roles with another person in the department for six months in an area that I’ve wanted to learn about for many years. The exchange program reminded me more of the type of work that excited me, how I tended to work with others, and if I appreciated to be hands-on or hands-off.
Responsibilities
The main goal for me in this development program was to deliver a Smartsheet tracking and reporting tool for end-to-end processes impacting this and other teams for the following items:
- Issues
- Root cause analyses
- Corrective and preventive action plans
- Metrics on the issue resolution process
Working with Others
When I was assigned the project, I reached out to one of our partners to learn more about the process that she went through to implement her Smartsheet tool and another person in the department for clarification on the organization’s project approval process. Soon after, I worked with other departments to complete assessments in order to have the project approved, built the internal team to help with requirements gathering, and engaged a vendor to build the tool.
Hands-on or Hands-off
Because it took more time than anticipated to learn about the team’s existing business processes, propose a new process, and understand how the Smartsheet tool could help with achieving the project goal, onboarding the vendor started later than expected. In order to bring the project back on schedule, I trained enough on the Smartsheet functionalities to be able to create an initial prototype of the tool, with the goal of speeding up the requirements, design, and development phases with the vendor.
Result
Going through this development program was very rewarding. Not only did I find out that designing a prototype using the Smartsheet platform was one of my favorite parts of the project, experimenting with project presentation slide design in Microsoft PowerPoint was fun as well.
When it came to working with people, I also validated that I enjoyed working with them individually because I was able to focus better on performing the assignment at hand and providing any input that they needed.
Lastly, as with this and other projects that I’ve managed previously, I usually jumped in to help others where I could, if the schedule was slipping. In this situation, drafting the prototype for the tool saved money for the project since some of the planned work for the vendor was already completed.
Now that the volunteer and development projects have ended, I have more ideas and a more visible picture of what I like to do for work. However, since there are so many more possibilities of what else I might want to do and my likes can change through experience, here are some other actions for me to take:
Continuous Improvement
- Research more ways to use the Smartsheet features and apply them to the current tool or share them with other users
- Participate in additional development opportunities in areas that I’m curious about
Up to this point in my journey to figure out what I aspire to do in my profession, I have one lesson to share with my younger self.
Lesson for Dumber Self
- Get lots of experiences as soon as possible, decide on where to take each experience that you’ve gained, and trust/act on your decision. Repeat.
What will you do now?
Next Step for You
- Volunteer for an interesting assignment?
- Participate in a skill development program?
- Read more details about the original and updated learning models? (CommLab India’s article Time to Take Another Look at the 70:20:10 Model! provides some good information.)
- Read another post on this site? (Go to the menu at the top of the page.)