How to get more zing out of your job

A job is a social contract - the one between the individual and the organization as an entity.

The organization wants our skills as much as we want the opportunity and the money

One of my first mentors told me that for employees , employability is more important that employment.

That means that we need to pick up skills as we do our job - skills that will help us continue in our employment. This is the age of knowledge workers and we have enough avenues to pick up new skills.

This is what I do:

This is not sacrosanct and I keep changing the time. I don’t have a sienfield calendar either to make sure I follow it.

I have a overall goal that help me balance things - like goal of 2 posts / week in my blog, 52 books an year. These goals are aggressive and I tend to do better when I am under pressure.

Overall how much do you value your time: http://programs.clearerthinking.org/what_is_your_time_really_worth_to_you.html#.VbT7FuhViko

How much do you value your contribution: Remember, the company needs you only as long as you add value.

Value can be qualified as the following:

Skills that you have
Knowledge that you have
Your personality
Your connections in the industry

If you can increase your value in your current employment and the current employer can also benefit from it, Then you have got the right match.

Keep in mind that you should always look at the equation 2 ways - What value can you get and what can you provide to your employer. If you do not balance it right, you would not be employed.

Comments

Designing for Accessibility

The software world has starting being more inclusive. After serving only the geeks and the techies, a lot of the software that is produced in this world has started looking at how it can be mor euseful. One of the key constituencies of software usage is people with disability. The ADA (Americans with disability Act) has forced a lot of the software developers to look at this issue. The software world has also responded sensitively and with care making as much of the software usable by people with disability. One of the key components that we are looking at in this are people with visual impairment. Over a period of time, a lot of the software has made sure that the user experience is adjusted in such a way that is is intuitive. Google has been a front runner in this and a lot of others are also not left behind. Text The size and the font typology is very important. Choose those aspects with ADA in mind. Media like Images A lot of the media , including video and images ,...

Principles for developing systems that are anti-fragile

I have been trying to make sense of what anti-fragility means and how do I use that in my day job. As a Business Principal, I tend to work with the abstract but orchestrate a program of work that needs details. This makes my job a little difficult in the terms of designing for more self-preserving systems that preserve the spirit of the abstracted strategy or vision. I came across an article from Daniel Russo on anti-fragility and his attempt at creating a manifesto similar to the manifesto for agile software development. For more reading on Daniel Russo, here is his profile: http://djrusso.github.io More reading from his paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050916302290 This post is an attempt for me to understand what goes into developing a program that uses every opportunity to strengthen itself and achieve its objective - the vision. I liked the approach of principles for developing systems that are anti-fragile. It i...

Public Policy and Software Development practices- Convergence

My last 2 posts on public policy discussed on the need to revisit our public policy making process and how it can be mapped to software development . There are a few areas that I would love to focus on for convergence of policy making process and software development process. To provide some context on what is really happening in policy making today, please check this video out.

Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

Search This Blog