It has been a little more than two years since I started my first day with Burson-Marsteller right out of college. I had held four internships prior to that job, been working during the summers since I was a sophomore in high school and had long been doing odd jobs throughout my life. Little did I know that during all of those summers and those internships, I was reinforcing critical work skills and ethic that would pay dividends down the road.
One of the funny things I found out about internships is that you always feel like you are learning. And you probably are. But most of the time it is getting into the routine of that work environment, tackling the tasks that your superiors delegate, and simply keeping your mistakes to a minimum. They almost always have an end date and when I would reach my last day, I always felt like I grew leaps and bounds as a worker. I never had to worry about hitting a growth wall because I would hit my last day first.
I wasn't wrong for thinking that. All of that investment of time and effort when I was younger has reflected as I continue my journey as an employee. Lately, however, it sure seems like the growing and learning has slowed to a pedestrian pace.
When you are first starting out, everything is new and it is all a potential learning experience. Even the first few months I was at Burson, I found myself gobbling up every new opportunity that came my way, sometimes even to the detriment of my other work as I was overburdened with tasks. But after a few months, those same tasks that were once tantalizingly mysterious had become so mundane that I often wondered if I was wasting my time where I was.
I started to become frustrated with the projects that my managers assigned to me. They were the same projects I was working on this time last year. Hell, some of the projects were the same ones that I was working on the year before that when I first started. How in the world was I going to keep moving up in this world if year after year looked like Groundhog's Day?
As an intern, your starting base is zero. Every lesson, mistake, success, and utter failure is filed away into a repository to draw from the next day. Soon that repository becomes so full that every moment at work becomes a smaller percentage of the total number of influential events at work. The growth seemingly stops and you're left to wonder "Is now the right time to move on?"
The past two weeks I had been working on pulling together a report for one of my clients. It was a recap of the company's biggest event of the year. The report was the culmination of several months of work for the client and for us as agency. Now, I had done reports like these before and practically in my sleep. This was just a slightly larger one and for a more important event.
As I spent an hour of my day today scanning through the report for any errors, I found myself dropping a bucket into my well of knowledge that contained all of my past mistakes. I picked out the errors that I found and sent the report to my director. Usually when this step happens, I wait for an hour and address whatever corrections she has at that time. It is the way that it always goes. No matter how hard I try, there will always be mistakes.
While I waited for her to review the document, I started to think about the whole process of pulling the report together. It required me to work closely with the client, coordinating its global teams, managing a small team, and managing up with those above me. It started to dawn on me that while this was a report that I had done before in the past, the situation wasn't the same.
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. But that just wasn't the case this time. Because what it looks like on the surface isn't always what you glean. Career development is funny like that. I was frustrated because I thought that I was stuck in a black hole of monotony. But what I failed to realize is that my job was changing more slowly than in the beginning because my well had finally overflowed and needed to move elsewhere. Every drop became that much smaller of a proportion.
I kept learning at the same rate that I did as an intern. The key is to recognize it, appreciate the growth or the shortcoming, and categorize it for use on a later date. Just like the first time I was assigned a report like this, there was a different set of circumstances than the last time. I drew from those experiences and adjusted accordingly. It looked like a duck, swam like a duck, and quacked like a duck, but it was most certainly something else.
My director emailed me back. No edits. Just a good job and her asking me to send it directly to the client. I sat back in my chair and dropped this lesson into my new and larger well.
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