Looking inside, climbing up

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been at the mercy of the UK product job market. She’s not been particularly fruitful and my spirits are starting to sink so in an effort to not succumb to the anxiety I have decided to reflect. We’ll find out as I start writing I guess.

Who I am as a person is, I need stimulation. I’ve never been one that can “just treat it like a job”. I spend far too much time doing it to consider it “just” a job. It has to mean/provide more. I’ve always been something that’s curious about all things – Why do squirrels collect nuts? Why does that app flow that way? Why are do dogs get zoomies? Its taken me over a decade to embrace this. If you’ve ever watched Brooklyn nine-nine then picture Amy. That’s me. Teachers pet, gets excited to learn and like tests (sort-of). If you haven’t, She’s a nerd who is over-enthusiastic and wants to get ahead but in a team-player and empathetic kind of way.

I wanted to get ahead. I’ve always naturally been a quick learner in tech so I can onboard into new places pretty quickly. My younger introduction to consultancy also flexed my adapting skilled quite frequently. Going from project to project is no new or big deal for me and I guess I always saw the places I applied to as the same. Get in, get good, cant get ahead? Try option 1 and 2, oh they didn’t work? Skip to the next. For better or for worse it grew certain skill sets exponentially and left a few other behind.

Softer skills – The ones where you learn to work with different kinds of people. You start to build a bird-eyes view of how different companies work or how projects are setup. Do it enough and you even start to recognise the trouble-markers, friction in the systems or the flaws in projects/process very early on.

Technical/hard skills – The skills you get after working with certain systems for long enough. Those short-cuts and work around in systems to get what you want. A deep understanding of interconnected-ness of systems is something amiss too.

Where I am in life now isn’t that I’m a big fish in any kind of pond. It’s more the realisation that fishes that work together have a better eco-system than those who don’t. Yeh okay I know that analogy didn’t work but stay with me.

I think now, it’s not that I don’t want to get ahead, I VERY much do. I think it’s more that I want to take the team there with me. I want to have that team in the first place. The corporate world is quite lonely. So when you get a chance to build a team in a field that really requires a team, it only feels natural to want to take them on the journey with you.

Culture matters to me now. How is a place treating it’s people. What benefits do they have? What mission are they on? Do they care about helping their people grow? IS there space to accommodate or is it another place where its the battle of the egos? I call this having standards. Standards where you can bring yourself to work and it matters.

In the current market where there are 1000 applicants per job it’s hard to remember your standards, especially when you have pressures of life – Mortgages, bills, people you look after. I wish there was a way to sieve through the places that were right for you vs those that will end up as another “mistake”. When I look back to the girl that was applying to these jobs its no wonder that I landed in the places that I did. I too never care about the team, it was “me,me,me”. MY growth MY plans MY progression even if that meant leaving the team behind or worse yet going over their heads to make it so. Bad potato.

With the luxury of hindsight I take pride in typing that I’ve grown more focused on my values.; Kindness, honesty, hard work etc. The good fluffy things. I wish I could say the same about the places that have jobs open. No, that’s a lie, there absolutely have been some great potentials but because they’re great the competition was even more fierce and there’s no way I was making it through.

I’m Grateful for the growth I feel as a Human. I’ve learnt to care about people and value the things that will matter in grand scheme of things rather than status and salary figures. I hope there’s a place out there that can give me that too.

I manifest the patience to be able to stick to my standards. Even in times where the pressure and anxiety feels a bit TOO much.

Until we I think again,
A hopeful potato x