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Ok so you’ve read my blog and found it useful so far. You got some ideas to try, discover, investigate and feel like you can make some improvements in your role. However you still feel quite stuck, no where to go and feel a slave to the system (no pun intended). You perform the same duties over and over in the last 5 years and feel like you are making no progress in your career.

• E.g.
  • IT / support work
  • Data entry
    • Some copy and document work
  • Run the same old cron jobs or scripts, manually each morning or evening (or whenever) and wait for the output to be correct
    • And when the output is not correct, go complain to the person that knows how to correct the output
      • Even that person probably has had enough and probably can’t be bothered with their current job. Again reality.

You have come early, left late, did extra work and no one is recognising your work. Get used to it, that’s reality. This is what I felt after 6-7 years with my first employer.

Before you start hitting the employment websites on what is available, consider the following examples.

• What is around you at work (literally. Spin around on your desk and see what might pop out at you)
  • Do you notice the server room across the room with all the lights flashing from the racks of servers
  • When you log into your work portal, you notice a strange button that you’ve never clicked on
  • You look at these fancy screens with charts, graphs and dashboards, showing different metrics, numbers, lines going up and down etc
  • You overhear a conversation with some terms or words that you’ve never heard before

The examples provided above might just be a ticket to improving your current role. You’ll be thinking, well how do these examples get me a new job or role. Well to first be given / earn that new job or role you need to know where you want to go. By looking around your current work place, other’s are doing the potential roles you want to be doing. It’s first a matter of observing and learning what is around you.

• Do you notice the server room across the room with all the lights flashing from the racks of servers
  • Have you asked the IT administrator or in charge of the server room and asked how to get a job looking after or moving into supporting these servers
• When you log into your work portal, you notice a strange button that you’ve never clicked on
  • Have you actually clicked that button and found out what it did? Did you know that button opened a development portal into the work portal so you can see logs, issues, data that made that screen show the interface you use.
• You look at these fancy screens with charts, graphs and dashboards, showing different metrics, numbers, lines going up and down etc
  • Have you asked someone in the L2 dept and asked what the screens meant? Did you know that those screens measure the performance of the systems you use.
  • Did you know some had to write code, build the environment so the screens showed IT users all the health checks of the different systems
• You overhear a conversation with some terms or words that you’ve never heard before
  • You overhear the word, ‘scrum’, ‘sprint’, ‘iteration’, ‘delivery’ etc
  • You also hear that ‘the project needs to be delivered on time’
  • Have you looked into researching what these words meant?

I’m not saying spy on the people and systems around you, but observe and think if that might be a role/job you might be interested in. The best opportunities are usually account you than away from you.

If worst comes to worst and you really don’t want to observe and learn, hit the employment websites and good luck.

Summary:

• Look around you and see if something caught your attention
  • Document it down and reflect later if this might lead you down an opportunity
    • I.e. secondment, shadowing the user, asking a question etc
• Have you asked your manager or a specific individual on what they are doing (not what they do, but what they are doing. I.e. the specific role right now)
  • Is the question specific or too generic
  • When asking specific, ask ‘what is that for’ or ‘what would happen if that did/didn’t happen’
    • By asking the specific question you might get that extra fulfilment and curiosity, which may lead to an opportunity