I hope you are having a great week. I wanted to share some thoughts
today about building your career. I hope you read through this short
article and see some of the training events and offers I have for a
limited time.
Recently,
there have been two new homes built right next to me. The noise and mess
can really get to my wife and I at times, but it’s a part of living in a
partially developed neighborhood.
The
house across the street caught my attention the other day. The house has
been under construction for months and now the workers are in the
process of laying natural stone on the entire front of the home.
What
strikes me about this process is how slow it goes.
This is not a process that can be completed in a day or two. This is
more like a matter of weeks. Each stone must be made to fit in a
particular spot to achieve a particular appearance. The stones can’t be
cut in advance because each stone is uniquely fitted with other uniquely
shaped stones.
This got me thinking about how
we build our careers. Your basic education in school is the foundation,
but after schooling is finished is when the real learning begins out in
the
real world.
All the skills we learn, the
experiences we have with people, the books we read, the courses we
attend, the projects we work on, are all stones in our wall. That’s why
the wise person keeps fitting new stones into their wall.
Some
people end up with a fully formed wall (i.e., career), although
sometimes it may need even more stones added. Others lay only a few
stones every so often that may look nice to a point, but fail to reach
the
level they desire.
This is hard work. It takes
time to read the books, take the courses, complete the projects, get the
mentoring, make connections, and do all the other things needed to keep
building a career.
This is also why sometimes
we see people with twenty years experience in their field, but it’s
actually one year of experience repeated twenty times over. You want to
be the person with diverse knowledge and experience. That’s one reason I
went into consulting. I figure that one year of consulting experience is
like three to five years of job experience in that I get to experience
so many new things just in one year.
My
encouragement to you in this short post is to stay at the work of adding
those stones to your career wall. It’s slow and painstaking at times,
but the reward is a beautiful work of craftsmanship – a career that
serves you now and in the
future.
E-Learning Specials
I have five courses on sale through Wednesday, May 13th:
Basic Training in Software Testing - $249 per person, a savings of
$150.
Structured User Acceptance Testing - $349 per person, a savings of $221.
All ISTQB Advanced Level Courses - $100 off the normal price, exam still included! Use Coupon Code "ASTQB12A" to get the discount.
If you already have the ISTQB Foundation Level certification, now is a great time to go deeper with advanced level training!
Live Online Class - Establishing the Software
Quality Organization - May 19 - 20, 2015, 1:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. EDT
This is a great class led by Tom Staab. In
this course you will learn the activities required to establish a
successful software quality organization (SQO). The SQO is comprised of
three distinct quality functions, quality assurance, quality control
(testing), and configuration management, that work in harmony and
complement each other. The successful
establishment of this function requires careful planning and execution.
It is essential that the SQO function provides business value and ROI to
the organization; therefore it is imperative that it has the proper
placement, infrastructure, and governance. This class further defines
all activities related to the successful planning and establishment of
an SQO activity.
Thanks
for reading this newsletter! Please contact me if I can be of any
service to you. I am happy to create a custom quote on training and
consulting for your team.
Best
regards,
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