Non-birthday Activities

Another year over. I canceled my birthday really. However, I picked up quite a few presents from vendors. Registering on webshops has its advantages and disadvantages. Today I choose to see it as an advantage. In total I collected three free gifts on a hair product shop, two pieces of jewels from a groupdealer and €5 from the petshop. Not bad on a non-birthday day.


Incidentally, today I also have my development conversation with my manager in about 25 minutes. I wonder if he planned it like this on purpose. What am I going to say to him? That I’m best at the technical, cold logical stuff, but I have no interest in it? That has been my problem since my career started. I did several capability and talent tests and every test says I’m good at the technical stuff, the building. Communication is not my strongest ability, but with some support and a lot of effort from my part I can do the job. It annoys me, because the technical stuff bored me and I very quickly moved to the more functional stufff which requires more communication. Usually with some support at the start, but always fairly independent and doesn’t take a job effort anyway?

I did not prepare fully as is required. I thought about where I want to go next. I did not check which trainings to follow to further my development. I have however two trainings in mind that been spinning around in my job development for a few years now. I could take the training “Reporting” for a reduced price offered to me after I followed a training that was aimed at a lower ability focus group. And then there’s part two of the Problem and Change analysis training. For the former I need to check if the offer still stands and for the latter I’m not sure if part two still gets executed. There is a part two of another training I once did, Prince2 which focusses on project organization. Except that part two focusses on project managers.

What I really should do is getting to know the products we’re offering to our business. Problem is, I’m really not interested. The main function and how it generally works I know, I don’t know in greater detail how it works. Neither do I necessarily need to know how it works, but it could be handy.

I also need to be more updated about the development in the market, but that’s just keeping up, there’s no training or cursus for that.

***About an hour later***

The conversation went fairly well. My manager had some suggestions and it seems I will actually have a development plan. Oh my, I’m going to develop!

Plan is to develop towards a more functional (as opposed to technical) side. This means developing my people skills and two trainings came up:
- Professional Advice Abilities
- Personal Effectivity (adjusting your own behaviour based on other people’s behaviour)
Sounds actually interesting and promising.

So far, not too bad a non-birthday.