Dark Side of the Carton

I’m not sure what the stats are for the current American workforce in terms of workplace happiness, but I am sure they are not very high. Corporate America seems to be running rampant with unhappy and disgruntled employees.

I am happy to say I am not one of these people. I love my job. I love where I work. I love getting up in the morning and coming to work.

I’m also very passionate about what I do and I am sure that goes a long way when it comes to overall job satisfaction. I also work with an incredible team of guys that make the day seem less like work.

What about you? Do you like your job? Why/Why not?

I’ve been working in my field for a very long time now, roughly 10 years to be exact. In those 10 years I’ve managed to keep learning new things year after year. Sometimes these new skills were learned with specific purposes or through on the job encounters. On the other hand, I’ve also had jobs that really didn’t challenge me and that I could easily get by without doing much or without growing professionally.

While these types of jobs can be “easy” or “fun” for people that know how to fill their free time, they can be really detrimental to your professional growth. To combat this negative growth I’ve really had to be deliberate about growing my skill set and expanding my knowledge. I’ve not always done a great job of making the most out of my situations at all times and there are times where I’ve looked at myself and thought “I really could be doing a lot more with my time.”

When you find yourself in that type of situation, how do you keep yourself from growing stagnant and becoming irrelevant? You never stop moving forward. I don’t mean this in a truly literal sense. I mean it in the sense that in most jobs the industry will continue to evolove and expand. When you find yourself stationary, you will find yourself becoming irrelevant as the industry passes you by. If you commit to forward movement though, you will either maintain the status quo and merely keep pace with the industry or if you work really hard you can be a trailblazer and lead the industry.

It takes a lot of dedication and work just to keep up, so it stands to reason that being a trailblazer is immensely difficult and it is. That’s why there are so few of them.

So just how do you keep up with a growing industry? For starters, you need to analyze what your current skill set is. If you don’t know where you are, how will you know where you need to go?

Once you’ve established where you are you need to get a feel for where the industry is headed. You can do this a number of ways, and I do all of them with some regularity.

Check out current job listings

It might seem like an odd thing to do and your employer might look at you funny if they notice, but what better way to see what future jobs will require than to look at current job openings. Don’t limit your scope to local jobs either. Check the regional areas that are the epicenter for your industry and see what skills are in demand.

Join an onilne community

It’s easy to see where an industry is headed if you are part of the community of that industry. Not all industries have online communities so you may have to venture out and do some networking.

Subscribe to some periodicals

Get a subscription to a few of the industry magazines or start reading their respective websites on a daily/weekly basis. This will introduce you to new concepts/technology in your field and give you cues on where things are headed

Once you gather all of this information, just how do you apply it? That really depends on your job/industry. For me, it’s reading and doing. Getting my feet wet with new technology in some sort of demo or building a new application using a new language or framework. The hard part is figuring out what skills are hot and getting in on the action early. It’ll be up to you to take charge and make yourself one of the elite.

Nick Halstead runs a programming blog and is one of my favorite reads. His insight is very good and he has a lot of experience. His post today was about becoming a better programmer and was a very good read. I totally agree with what he was saying, but I had something to add. I think we would all write better code if we had this in the back of our minds:

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. –Martin Golding

Success. It’s one of those things that we all strive to achieve. My recent decision to change jobs has had me thinking about my career and the idea of success and I recently asked myself that very question.

How Do You Measure Success?

Is success driving the cool car that everyone looks at? Is success wearing the hottest clothes? How about having the high paying job? Just what kind of metrics do you use to measure your success?

The reason it’s important to give this topic some serious consideration is because if you don’t know how to measure success, how do you know when you’ve gotten there? Striving for success without quantifying what that actually means is like walking around in the dark. Are you actually even headed the right direction? How would you know if you haven’t even set a final destination for yourself.

These are all largely philosophical questions, but they are questions that I believe it is important to answer lest I find myself further away from my eventual goal than I am now simply because I didn’t take the time to plot a course.

I could further complicate the matter by bringing the topic of happiness into the mix, but I’ll reserve that for another day.

My final thought on this topic for today is that this hustle and bustle of the normal american workday hasn’t allowed us to slow down and answer the types of introspective questions that I think we should all give serious thought to. This is not to say that it is anyone’s fault but our own, but we let days be dictated by the list of things we have to do instead of taking control of our day.