We get to pave our owns paths, and to discover what we are really good at – and what we’d rather not be working with at all.
Dipping my toes in the challenge-pool
At first, I was a little unsure of what I could demand in return from my project owners – I was unsure of how far could I stick my head out before I was just an arrogant annoyance. When I started feeling like I needed bigger challenges, I began carefully dipping my toes into the challenge-pool, to see at what point the managers and project owners would start getting bothered by my presence.
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To my big surprise, that point has yet to be reached. During my first two projects, which were about communication and market research, I had several times when I felt like my tasks did not properly reflect the challenges that I would like to be exposed to. Sometimes it was because I did not yet have access to the proper tools, sometimes it was because I did not demand enough time from key personnel, and other times it was because my project owners had overestimated the time needed to complete the project tasks.
Each time I approached someone about my situation, I got more comfortable about going forward the next time – because each time I did, the confidence in my own abilities grew, and I noticed how Visma’s confidence in me grew as well. The only thing stopping me from getting bigger, harder challenges was my own ability to address the need for a challenge in the first place.
Learning how to swim
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On my third project, the very enthusiastic Commercial Manager for the Accounting Office industry in Visma had applied for a trainee for a Business Intelligence project. I was given access to the corporate data warehouses, along with a license to the data visualization tool Tableau in order to make standardized reports for the Accounting Office industry. My project owner had great expectations of me. I knew nothing about Business Intelligence, I knew nothing about Tableau, and I knew nothing about data warehouses. Boy, was I in for the learning-curve of a lifetime. At this point, Visma shoved me off the deep end into the challenge-pool without a second thought and said “He’ll be fine, he knows how to swim”.
Now, four months after I started my third project, I have been getting increasingly difficult tasks relating to data, numbers, business intelligence and decision making – I love it. I get better each and every day, understanding things I did not understand before, and doing things I did not know how to do before. The people around me trust in my ability to generate results, and if I want to do something I have not done before, they trust in my ability to learn how to do it. I get to take part in strategic decisions through the analyses I have created – my coworkers have confidence in the things that I present to them.
My place in Visma
Here in the intersection between strategy, technology and finance is my place, and as long as I get to keep diving into the deep-end of the pool without anyone trying to strap a life jacket to my back, it will continue to be my place – the place where I can grow and produce value both at the same time.