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What is your personal growth potential at your work?

Zeze

Zeze

Lifer
Just finished my first week, it may be premature for me:

1. I'm only the third person in my position. And previous two are also new with only half a year of seniority

2. Our company was public but got bought out and returned to being private. This is a good thing with more funding. Our primary client is a 12th largest pharma giant (Bristol-Myers Squibb) which already takes of 70% of our revenue. We aim to triple in 3 years, looking to tap top 3 clients (Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, GSK, etc)

3. Because of 1, we have lots of responsibilities. I work directly with IT director ironing out many of the internal and external procedures as repeatable processes, on top of my regular duties

Big company = grow a lot with ample of vacancies & turnovers, but you may be another drone.

Small company = may not grow if no one goes anywhere (my two peers are also new), but when you do grow, it's big.

The company is definitely the latter. I really want to grow as I've already turned 30 now. Big potential only if we end up growing bigger. Hope it all works out for me *Crosses fingers
 
I'm stagnated for a bit. Currently as high up the "analyst" chain I can get. Next move is to go into management or project management. I applied for the manager position that was recently vacated in my current team and made it through the first round of interviews. Got bounced after that because they wanted someone "with current or prior management" experience. Whatever. Truth is they didn't want somebody outspoken and progressive in that position. They wanted a doormat/yes man.

I've been doing support for almost 15 years now. I'm very good at what I do, but I need to change things up. So I'll be soaking up as wisdom as I can, networking out with the various business units, and trying to build up a skill set and reputation that would transition well to a PM position. Then I'll apply when the next one in our department opens up.

Maybe if I do that for a few years it'll actually count as "management experience" so I can apply to a real manager position.
 
Theres next to zero churn at my company so all the good positions are saturated with lifers. If I want to go to the next level they'll dick me around for 2 - 3 years to get there. Best bet for ladder climbing is to go somewhere else. I'm not that hung up on position so I'll stick around.
 
I work at a youngish company that constantly has way more ideas than it has people to execute. Our employee count has been growing exponentially, and employees take on new responsibilities as rapidly as possible.

Growth is basically inevitable unless you fuck up. At what speed is a function of the desk and the individual.
 
Growth potential would likely consist of more technical training, but following a management reorganization, training seems to be less of a priority, with the exception of non-technical "creative" things that are terribly watered-down and full of fluff. For example, at the one truly technical seminar I went to, the guy started out with a quick introduction, and apologized for the lack of time he had, versus the amount of material he wanted to cover. Then we got started right into it.
At a creativity seminar, it was short, and it was a lot of fluff and jokes with less than a third of it being actual useful content. Most events on the menu are free ones, sponsored by local companies or business organizations.
The truly useful ones are pay-for things, and they seem to have been postponed indefinitely, despite this having been a very good year in sales.

The big focus seems to be on today's problems. Tomorrow's problems can be addressed tomorrow, and hopefully there'll be enough time tomorrow.

:\

Job title-wise, the only place I could really go would be management, assuming a position would open up. And I don't really want to do management. Where I'm at now, a management position would mean spending 25-35% of my time in meetings, many of which are also full of fluff.
(Engineering meetings are decent though, assuming it's just technical people in them - we talk about stuff, it's interesting and useful, then we adjourn and go try to work on the stuff that was talked about, assuming the constant extra-departmental interruptions cease for more than 15 minutes at a stretch, which is rare. :\)

</tepid rant>


The pluses of course, helping to keep me at the company, are that my immediate coworkers, which consist of another engineer and my supervisor, are both competent and decent to work with. My supervisor has an engineering degree himself, and he knows what the job is like. Sometimes you can get a project coded or built 99% of the way, but then one goddamn irritating little bug appears and refuses to die, and of course it prevents the thing from working properly, which delays the project.

He's also good at interfacing with people in other departments. I'm still not used to it - when someone outside the department asks why a project is taking longer than expected, they don't really want to know why, because anything that's even remotely technical, even after it's been beaten down to a very basic level, will be too technical. I think that they really just want to know when it will be done, even if it's a number you've got to pull out of thin air because you don't know when it will be done.

And my health insurance paycheck deduction is less than $10 per week.
 
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Jeff7 said:
Where I'm at now, a management position would mean spending 25-35&#37; of my time in meetings, many of which are also full of fluff.
</tepid rant>
Click to expand...

And what's wrong with this? You are working for someone else, not your own company. If your management promotion comes with '25-35% of fluff meetings', more pay, & more growth, what's the problem?
 
nickbits said:
Zeze said:
And what's wrong with this? You are working for someone else, not your own company. If your management promotion comes with '25-35% of fluff meetings', more pay, & more growth, what's the problem?
Click to expand...
Boring.
Click to expand...
Boring. Yes. This.

The meetings are often painful. I'd rather be back doing interesting or semi-interesting or dull engineering type work than do the equivalent of have my brain beaten to death by a bunch of people talking about terribly irrelevant things in what is usually a drawn-out manner. More meetings doesn't count as "growth" for me.
That's the other nice thing - supervisor understands his department's general loathing of meetings (and he shares the sentiment). He also understands that his department can get more real work done if they're not in meetings all the time. So he attends the meetings, and disseminates to us any relevant information when he gets back. Both of us under his command greatly appreciate his sacrifice.🙂


I need to have the big computer monitor in the conference room set up with a remote to trigger a playback of Monty Python's God and his "Get on with it!" line.
 
Jeff7 said:
Boring. Yes. This.

The meetings are often painful. I'd rather be back doing interesting or semi-interesting or dull engineering type work than do the equivalent of have my brain beaten to death by a bunch of people talking about terribly irrelevant things in what is usually a drawn-out manner. More meetings doesn't count as "growth" for me.
That's the other nice thing - supervisor understands his department's general loathing of meetings (and he shares the sentiment). He also understands that his department can get more real work done if they're not in meetings all the time. So he attends the meetings, and disseminates to us any relevant information when he gets back. Both of us under his command greatly appreciate his sacrifice.🙂


I need to have the big computer monitor in the conference room set up with a remote to trigger a playback of Monty Python's God and his "Get on with it!" line.
Click to expand...

I hear you, but if you want growth, you will be doing less technical grunt work and more 'upper management' stuff. This is true in all orgs.

1. Grunts doing 'real fight' vs a general strategizing behind a desk
2. Surgeons vs a hospital director
3. A coder vs a IT director

If upper management stuff is boring and not worth the $ and growth to you, then... I guess that's it.
 
I'm in IT for a defense contractor and moving up steadily. My next promotion is a few years out (I just got promoted this year) but that will put me at a crossroads figuring out if I want to be techy or a manager.
 
Well - I was hired in as a network admin and after 1.5 months I was managing the entire IT department. Granted that was due to a medical leave by the director of IT but still not bad 😛

Of course he'll be back in another 5-6 weeks and I'll be back to a lowly network admin but I sure as hell have learned a lot

Now if we talk about actual position and salary growth that gets a lot more complicated and depends on how the new products rolling out fair. If they do well we'll need a third facility which means more people which means more IT people which means I move up the food chain. If not my position stagnates but I still gain a lot of valuable experience. If nothing really changes in 1-2 years I'll be significantly better placed for opportunities outside the company
 
Zeze said:
I hear you, but if you want growth, you will be doing less technical grunt work and more 'upper management' stuff. This is true in all orgs.

1. Grunts doing 'real fight' vs a general strategizing behind a desk
2. Surgeons vs a hospital director
3. A coder vs a IT director

If upper management stuff is boring and not worth the $ and growth to you, then... I guess that's it.
Click to expand...

This sounds right in general, but there are exceptions. In small firms guys who are near the top have the luxury of staying involved if they're passionate about something. About half of the (10 ish) partners at my firm still get their hands dirty with lower level decision making, watching for changing conditions, or even writing code, etc.
 
Zeze said:
Is that what your management told you? Sounds like a seedy sales job or MLM.
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Oddly enough, I once had a boss that roped a lot of underlings into her MLM and she was out of the office a lot using BS excuses (doctor's appointment, kid's sick, etc.) supposedly "working from home".
 
I made a career change so I'm back to being a newb. I want to learn as much as I can in my current job and hopefully make it last long.
 
Minimal. I stayed at the bottom in my current job because moving up was only $1/hr extra for essentially double the work. Hoping to move on very soon.
 
There is no growth potential at my current job. At all. None.

(In related news, I'm looking for a new job.)
 
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