I am always looking for new and bigger challenges, I have loved working wherever I have worked as any job I have ever taken have been my choice, not because I was forced to find a job, but because it have been the challenges that I wanted. However one of the most essential things in choosing my challenges (or jobs if you want), is who I work with and who I’m working for.

I look at education a lot different than most people, I simply don’t believe in 20 years study and 40 years of work. I believe these two things goes hand in hand every day of our working life, experience is worth more then any studies, but the ability to learn from other people’s experiences and from other people view on everything, is the best way I can develop myself.

There is no doubt people learn things in different ways, for me ideal learning is a mix of experience and learning from others and learning from the best is the most important. It’s usually not a problem finding people you can learn from when it comes to what you shouldn’t do, the hard thing is to find the people you admire and the people you feel you can learn from. Who you need around you obviously depend on where you are in your career, but as I see it, the better the people around you, the better you become!

How do you find the right people to work for? Networking is again a key here, when you know a person that you want to work for, don’t be affright to tell them. They might not work in a place where you can work right now and they might not have available space in their team or workgroup, but if you tell any leader that you would like to work with them (you can either specify a job or not) you can be sure that’s something they will appreciate and if it get to a interview situation they know you interest up from and might even give you a heads up around a job opening (unless you have given them a very bad impression of yourself).
Another time to look at this can be in a possible interview situation, try as well as you can to get to meet who you will be working for, before you go into a interview.
If you have been accepted for a interview and say you would like to meet you possible manager/supervisor etc beforehand for a chat, this is first of all a way for you to see if this is not someone you want to work with at all or on the other hand if you get a good impression you can use this in the interview as it will show a big interest and a very serious approach to that job interview. If the person like you, he/she is also very likely to put in a good word for you.

Learning from the best

A good few years back I had a fantastic boss, I worked for her about two years and she was the first really good boss I had worked with at that stage of my career. She had made me realize what I wanted to do in the future and she has been a key part of my early development and I really admired her for her skills.
One day I had a bit of a “wake up” experience with her, we were having a regular coaching session, where she finished of by saying that she “didn’t feel she had anymore to teach me, as she felt I had learned what she had to teach”.
When she said this I first felt a good bit of frustration, as she in my eye’s still had a lot to teach me, but later when I got to reflect over the situation, she might unintentionally have though me one of the most important things I have ever learned by doing that, I started to understand the importance of not getting to comfortable and when things get like that, find a way to develop in a new place or position and find new people to learn from.

I have listed a couple of my personal key points around personal development:

• Find places, challenges and jobs where you have the right people around you.
• Working for a lot of different good people in your field, gives you the best learning.
• Always search for new challenges and opportunities for development and take them!
• The higher the odds are for failure, the more you will learn. Remember success is just as well the ability to learn from mistakes and the ability to fail with no loss of enthusiasm, give you the courage to go for even more.
• Try not falling into the “it’s comfortable here, no need to move” trap
• Just because you have got where you are, does not mean you should slow down learning, however the way you learn might change over time, as instead of learning theory you might start to learn from other people’s experience.