Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Getting ready for the first day at school":
How has your first week gone? Has it been easy to slip back into the routine, is it exciting to be there? How does it feel to work again instead of working at home to find a position? How is the adjustment of shared chores at home instead of you doing all the cooking and cleaning? Have friends been supportive?
Posted by Anonymous to Other Dribblings at February 18, 2011 7:46 AM
These are great and I thought I would answer them here.
How has your first week gone?
Great. It has been a big rush of learning. My job has three parts. One part is to help design a metric system of benchmarking and operational metrics for strategic management. So I’ve been reading tons of Gartner reports, learning how to use some external data mining sources, and generally learning what the current state of the organization is. Another part is to help with implementation strategy for ITIL, a set of best practices for IT. Here I’ve been trying to understand their current maturity level and bounce this against current version off ITIL implementation thinking. And the third part of my job is in helping with a mix of current ITIL implementation and improvement activities. Here I’m also learning what they already having in place and what they are looking to accomplish.
I take the bus to and from work, I have also been using this time to get some extra reading time in.
I’m treating this as a 6 month interview, so I’m trying to make the most of it. Learning as much as I can about the job atmosphere at the UW and trying to show them what I am best at. Hopefully at the end of the 6 months we can have a discussion about whether there is additional work and whether I’m a good fit.
It has been great not having to rewrite my resume once this whole week. Not doing a single job search. I haven’t even checked to see if Simply Hired has satisfied their disgruntled users after last weeks huge snafu.
Has it been easy to slip back into the routine, is it exciting to be there?
So far it has been very exciting to be there. So far there isn’t much in the way of routine. I have been learning about the bus schedule, and how early have to leave to make each bus, which one are full, and how soon I have to leave work in order to get across campus.
While it has been hard to get up about an hour earlier, I’ve loved he walks both at the beginning and end of the day. Especially this morning, the sun coming up and bathing the trees in a bedazzling display of glowing morning light fragmented through the tangle of leafless wintering tree branches. It was a Ansel Adams moment in full living color. I’m going to enjoy seeing Spring spring into its full glory on my daily walks.
I have met a ton of people. They are all very friendly and welcoming. I’m trying to quickly learn their names and a bit of their back ground.
So far, I’ve been spared the regular mundane monotony of endless business meetings. It’s been nice. I’m finding that I need to get my concentration level up a bit so that I can focus for longer periods of time. My mind if jumping to another subject in the middle do something, sometimes just minutes after starting something new.
This was a view I saw this week, without the fountain and a bit colder than this picture looks, though I think the mountain was quite spectacular.
How does it feel to work again instead of working at home to find a position?
I think I learned quite a bit by having to look for work, and feel much more confident in my ability once I need to get back into it. But what I have trained to do for the last 20 odd years is not looking for work. I’m not as good at it or gain near the enjoyment as I do working in the field of change management. So it has been great getting back to doing what I love to do and what I feel confident at doing.
How is the adjustment of shared chores at home instead of you doing all the cooking and cleaning?
This is still in work. I don’t think either of us quite knows how this is going to work out, but we are pitching in to make it work. Even my daughter is trying her hand out at cooking, she made pizza last week from scratch and it was good. Last Thursday was my first day, my wife headed up to Whistler with her book club on Thursday afternoon, so Monday was kind of the first day of learning what we need to do.
Have friends been supportive?
Yes they have been very supportive. I think when I pasted on Facebook that I was starting a new job I received 30 or 40 supportive comments and many private messages. Several messages on LinkedIn and several from here.
I have been pretty heads down since starting, so I haven’t been able to connect and pay attention quite as much as I would like, but I’m sure I will be able to get back in the wing of things after I settle in.
Thanks again to whomever asked the question, it was good to reflect on the last week.
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