Happy New Years! Are your goals still intact? Have you given up? Are you like most workplaces and set goals for the year by the end of Q1? How frustrating is that?
I committed to myself that I’d have a breakfast out in January and here we are. January 31st. Maybe one of my goals should have been to not procrastinate. If I’m entirely honest, I didn’t set concrete goals for the decade this year. *gasps* I know. For whatever reason, I passed on my own koolaid and am letting 2020 go by the flow.
Something I’d like to discuss at this month’s breakfast is evolution. No, not in the Darwin sense. I’m wondering about skillset evolution or personality evolution over time. As some of us get more senior in our roles or evolve to the next level (Congratulations on your P.Eng, CB), I’d imagine that we harbor less feelings of ‘imposter syndrome’ and are starting to feel a larger sense of belonging.
For myself, I am slowly trying to shy away from the reputation of “Young EIT” and I’m trying to build a persona with the characteristics like ‘knowledgeable’, ‘experienced’, ‘accomplished’ etc. When I was an intern, and also an EIT in the field, I felt no shame in making mistakes as I was embracing the ‘fail fast’ mentality. I found great comfort in saying “oh I’m sorry, I didn’t know” if I was unsuccessful in a task. I found that expressing humility, along with eagerness to learn/improve was a successful strategy to show my coworkers and leaders that I have the potential to be a ‘high achiever’.I don’t feel comfortable using such excuses or statements now. I should know better. Another tactic I would deploy is to ‘help everybody’. I would purposely solicit work/tasks from everyone on my teams on top of my usual day-job in order to learn more. No matter how menial or out of my ‘job description’, I would take these small tasks to ‘build a reputation’. I knew full well that this isn’t a sustainable way of working, but for a short time it definitely works. Now, I no longer employ this strategy. Since I’m in a more fixed role I am more concerned with doing my job well, first, and then stepping outside my job description. Since I don’t feel like my role is ambiguous anymore, (nor am I trying to get hired) I don’t feel the need to go 110%, 110% of the time.
However, as I get closer and closer to that P.Eng title, I am trying to move away from the image of ‘new-grad’ and the convenient excuses that come with it. What happens when I’m no longer one of the new kids on the block? Obviously, a lot of these changes just happen over time and more experience, but what if I want to fast-track this process?
I apologize for not having a more interesting pre-read for this breakfast, but I will leave you with a few leading questions:
- What skills and strategies were successful for you as a new-grad but you have now since abandoned or shy away from? (eagerness / naivety can only go so far)
- What are you doing to build yourself into your next step?
- Did your personality start to change when new people started to join your team?
- At what point do you start to feel comfortable enough to start contributing as if you’re an equitable member of the team and not still ‘in training’
- As you change roles, the whole cycle of being new starts over again. Which tactics will you take with you? What will you abandon?
Early Birds > Late Worms 