Striving into a job helps you to make a better call about when the job is truly done. In fact, it’s the biggest part in getting things done right “the first time every time.” If you want to gain excellent results with the tasks you’re given, you must always listen to your common sense when it tells you a job isn’t quite complete. Always keep in mind that it’s you alone who brings the last measure of your work ethic with you wherever you go. Never mind your boss. No matter how much your boss might threaten you, that source of stress only accounts for about 96% of your best effort on a good day. The remaining 4% of effort, the part that makes you an excellent technician, is something you must bring to the job on your own. At some point you must move beyond the simple job order and take ownership of the work you do. It’s in the pride of ownership that you find that final 4% of effort. Never settle for the 96% solution, even if it makes your life easier for the moment. Let your common sense give you the clarity you need to cover that final 4% on your own and you’ll gain excellence in no time.
Scope
If you want to be a superstar, or at least the best tech in your department, taking single steps at a time is the best approach to follow…no matter how ambitious you are. If you’re addicted to accolades or just like having a say in how things are done, the status of an excellent worker is how you can achieve your goal. The important thing to remember is that you must never overreach or your efforts will end up doing more harm than good. Never lose track of how much you can legitimately do and only push a small step beyond that limit each time you’re ready to move ahead in your career.
Taking on a job too big for you to handle or taking on too many jobs at once can damage your credibility if things go wrong. On the other hand, stepping forward to volunteer for the tough jobs on a regular basis is a great way to move your career upward. You must always temper your ambition by taking careful measure of your current ability; otherwise you’ll end up biting off more than you can chew. How you balance the need to excel with the common sense of being careful about what you’re willing to get yourself into takes some experience. It’s all about understanding your reach.
Never mind your physical arms; they aren’t part of the reach being discussed here. Instead, try imaging you have virtual arms with the strength of a small construction crane. You can reach those arms way out and pick up very heavy things. However, like any crane operator, you still need to know the limits of that reach or you’ll tip yourself over. This limit can be called your professional reach, or more accurately, your extensible reach. Your extensible reach is the combination of your courage and confidence, your ability to focus, your effort to train hard, your willingness to take the lead when called upon, and what you can actually can do today, all added together. It’s the blend of these things when taken as a whole that give you the proper sense of scope when taking on new assignments.
Going beyond your extensible reach will always lead to things which are best avoided. For example, even the best techs can only multi-task so much before they realize they’re spending more time moving between jobs than they are on the individual jobs them-selves. It’s not always a clean jump from one task to the next. Knowing your limits here is critical. If you find yourself constantly stopping to review before you can move to the next item on your list, you’re doing too many things at once. It’s not that occasional review is a bad thing, because it isn’t. However, constant review means you’re struggling so much to keep tasks organized that you’re losing efficiency. If you’re juggling so many multi-tasked tasks that you keep forgetting what each one is about, then it’s time to slow down.
Even if it means telling the boss you’re too busy, don’t feel bad. Going beyond your reach can make you a liability to your department by putting you in the position to make bad choices. Trying to do too many jobs at once can cause you to replace good work with marginal work. It’s far better to deal with credibility issues caused by a lack of time or knowledge than it is to work through credibility issues caused by major mistakes.
Some of the blame may also go to managers who aren’t allocating resources thoughtfully; however, you shouldn’t use this as an excuse. You must find ways to take charge of your workload well enough to make it through each day with balance. Ultimately, it’s your career to manage and no one else’s. Trying to gain accolades through reckless behavior could lead to mistakes that destroy your chances for dream jobs down the road. Mistakes have a way of following you around, even if you’ve hidden them from your resume. Have the strength to take charge of your career and don’t let anyone, even a boss, talk you into recklessly going beyond your extensible reach.
While the courageous tech will take opportunities when given, the excellent IT professional will only take jobs he is certain he can deliver on. Know the difference between good courage and reckless courage. Overreaching and gambling are both pretty much the same thing; except that in IT you’re gambling with your career as well as your department’s credibility in the eyes of your company.
A good way to prevent overreaching is augment your current skill-set before taking on a wider range of tasks. After all, there’s really no use in being able to do a variety of different things margi-nally well. Being able to do a few things really well, and then gradually adding to that list of things, is a better long term approach to a successful career. It’s also an easier way to handle skill-set management. You should try to avoid being too much of a generalist, even if you’re running a small network on your own.
Certifiable skill-sets add confidence and will create success. If continuous skills training seem tedious, that’s because you haven’t felt the pain and embarrassment that comes from totally screwing something up. Mess up an important system a couple times and all that studying won’t seem quite as painful anymore. Stay ahead of the knowledge curve by anticipating as best you can what it is you’re going to need to know in the coming year and start running down the learning track early. Not only does this take away much of the pressure which comes from trying to learn in catch up mode, it also puts you in a good position to be one the first to volunteer for new jobs that come along. Preemptive learning is the safest way to push the envelope and extend your extensible reach.
Always begin a job with a strong foundation. Never pretend to have skills that you don’t and never plan to learn how to do some-thing after you’ve already volunteered for it. Both are paths to disaster. It’s one thing to drop the ball on something you’re familiar with because you can always recover yourself and do it correctly on the second try, but if you’re working in an area that’s new to you and you don’t have solid knowledge about it, then there’s nothing to fall back on. There’s no deep understanding of what you did wrong to help you recover quickly because you have no real understanding at all.
The best way to stay in front of the knowledge gap is to maintain the scope of your career within a particular area of expertise. When you first start a career in IT, you’ll find there are the many paths to choose. You can go into network engineering, application development, WAN storage, software programming, disaster recovery, telecommunications, systems security, systems administration, and so on. Each is different from the next, but within those diverse career areas are even smaller, more specific career paths too. You can broaden out a bit as the years go by if you think it makes you more employable, but try not to broaden your scope too much. If constant learning and knowledge maintenance is tedious for just one area of IT, imagine how difficult it can be to manage constant learning across several areas of IT. This’ll be covered in more detail later in this book, but suffice it to say if you aren’t careful there could be a point when you’ll have too many things going on with your career to reasonably keep track of.
Most IT professionals find it’s far better to concentrate their skills on just one or two paths at most. Being a jack of all trades doesn’t work so well in IT. Begin by finding a niche to excel in to start your career foundation and then scale out as you go. If you’re new to IT, then this niche might be even handed to you by a boss. Even if this task is not your first choice and you had planned to go in a slightly different direction with your career, do a good job anyway. If the skills don’t stay with you after you move on to something new, the professional work ethic you maintain will. Always have a