#lifeatvanguard and growing up

Today I'm marking 8 years of my #lifeatvanguard. Well, sort of. I actually started here in 2012 as a contractor and then converted in 2016. So, I've been bouncing around here now for 12 years. That's a pretty long time to be in one spot. For me, that means that I started out here still in my 20's (barely) and I'm now on my way into my mid 40's. A LOT(!) has changed for me and about me in the time that I've been at Vanguard . Personally, my wife and I (mostly her) had our 2nd daughter, my 30's came and went, I stopped taking MMA fights and I grew up a little more (maybe).

But LinkedIn isn't really about the personal stuff, although it's nice to get a peek at that sometimes the real value and topic of interest here is professional. That said, professionally a lot has changed for me too and I've grown a ton over the last 12 years. So, that brings me to the point of this post. Here are the top 3 things I've learned and/or changed my mindset on over the last 12...but mostly, probably 8 years that have helped me in my career.

1. Embracing continuous learning

20's me wasn't a big fan. I think if you had asked me 12 years ago about needing (and even wanting...gasp) to continuously upskill I would have not been very enthusiastic. Don't get me wrong. Most of my career has been systems engineering style work so there's always a level of learning that you're doing with that kind of IT gig because you have to figure out why things aren't working the way they're supposed to or how to build the thing better. True time spent learning though wasn't a major feature for me at that stage of my career because I didn't want to invest time outside of work to do it. Fast forward to now and it has become a major feature of my career. I very recently checked off a new certification in AWS and I spent a ton of time outside of business hours studying to get that done...happily (weird right?). I attribute my shift in mindset here to a fantastic manager who took over at my last role a number of years ago kicking me out of my comfort zone and fantastic leadership in my current position who have made room in our work schedules for learning and actively encourage it.

2. Comfort zones are where your career goes to die

OK, maybe that's a bit dramatic and not 100% true. However, it's certainly not 0% true either. I mentioned above a fantastic leader who came in at my last role. When he did I was very much in a spot where I had the things that I worked on, I was happy to be good at those and not looking to branch out or take stretch assignments. When this manager took over he was intentional about shaking things up, pushing his crew to move into newer tech and newer work and getting us to jump into some stretch assignments. At the time I was less than enthusiastic and if I recall correctly I was more "voluntold" to do the first growth type assignment. Now looking back with quite a few number of years of hindsight, I have a deep appreciation for what that leader did and a lot of respect for the vision it takes to push for people to develop like that. I'm pretty confident that without his initial push many of the things that I look at as career highlights over the last several years would not have happened and I likely wouldn't have even wanted to participate in them prior to that mindset shift.

3. Vocally understand your weaknesses but balance that with celebrating your strengths

Something that my experience in the ring (only ever as a reasonably mediocre hobbyist to be honest) taught me was the importance of realizing where you stand on things and being honest with yourself about just where that is. There's something about getting kicked and punched that forces one to be very honest about where they stack up. When you embrace that same mentality in your professional life something really wonderful happens... You learn how to be unafraid to acknowledge your weaknesses because you build real confidence in your strengths. I was never what I would deem a "real developer". Sure, I've written enough code in my time. Generally, scripting back in my Sys Engineer days when I needed to get a thing done or pull info out of a DB or various Lambda's these days when I want to do a thing in the cloud. But I've never really written large programs or done real front end UI work to speak of. My current team is extremely well rounded though. My fellow architects on the modernization team that I'm part of have experience building front end UI's, APIs and anything else you can think of. Learning to openly embrace that I don't understand the UI world as well as some of them has allowed me to make suggestions in the back end world or other areas that I do understand well while deferring to them on things that I don't have as deep an expertise on without fear of coming off as useless or less than. Being unabashedly open about these things has helped me learn how to meaningfully contribute to a well balanced group of professionals who skills compliment each other.