Careers

Career progression is never easy. If it was, it wouldn't be worth doing. Fact.

Let's face it. If you're anything like me, whilst you were at school, too young to know better, you were probably told that you couldn't be a racing driver and realised becoming a football player was impossible and you were told that you had to choose a career. Suddenly, thinking "I'll get started on my career when I graduate" or just "I'll get a job after school" wasn't an option and you had to make decisions that would shape the rest of your life.

My choice was IT and I want to state right here right now that some of these posts will will be with an IT bent, but this is not an IT Manager specific blog. IT was something that I'd always enjoyed and had an aptitude for. However, I wasn't satisfied with just working in IT. I was damn sure I was going to be up with the big players, and I was willing to work to do it too. In fact, I'm aiming to make CIO/CTO by the age of 40.

When you come out of University nowadays, you've been told for three years that the world is waiting for you and that you'll roll into a £30k job. Then the real world slaps you across the face and you realise that your qualification isn't really going to help anything and that you need a new plan.

I wanted to get ahead, but I found that the workplace is confusing and social skills to do so are hard to get right. Through this blog, I hope to shed light on all those things that I always thought everyone else just knew. The kind of things that are so obvious when you hear them, and so integral to your day to day life when you have them, you wonder how you did without them. Also, I want to make sure you can learn from my mistakes and keep these things as a record for my further perusal.

I will cover general leadership, organisation, organisations, NLP, management, social and interaction skills, presentation skills, appearance (yes, really), motivation, project management, social media, 'power' and coping strategies for the aspiring manager. All of this will be shown through research, books/further reading and real life experience.

Let's kick it off shall we?