September started out on a really good note for me yesterday. I’m not sure how much fun Dominion had for his birthday, but it was a great day for me.
Since I moved divisions last summer, the biggest frustration in my long term career goals has been that while I do great work, networking is not the most natural activity for me. Changing divisions meant that I would have to work to build up my professional reputation in the new area. The reason this is so important is that promotions are highly competitive and unless you have backing from management outside your direct reporting structure, hard to come by. I spent almost 8 years in the other division and knew people throughout. Changing meant starting over from scratch, but was a better option than staying and letting a jerk use me for his personal gain.
That probably seems like an odd tangent to go on to everyone. Keep going, hopefully all will be clear soon.
Yesterday, the following occurred:
The restructuring of departments that I’ve been expecting for close to a year happened. My department was huge and had two very separate purposes. While I really liked my manager, I’m not unhappy about any of the changes that happened.
I have a new manager. My team and our responsibilities were split off from the department and we have been placed with another department that is more closely tied to what we do on a day to day basis. The really cool part - my new manager reminds me of my favorite former manager from the other division. He’s been very positive about my work when we were in separate areas, so this is a really good place for me to land. Add to this that two of the people I’ve gotten to know the best in the new division are already in department I’m now in and the move is probably the most positive restructure I’ve gone through.
My new department reports through a different 2nd level manager. My managers (previous and new) report to different managers and now I have a new 2nd level manager. I got along really well with my previous 2nd level manager, so now I have people in a peer area that have positive feelings about the work I do.
It gets better. My new 2nd level manager has had a very close working relationship with my local senior VP! So not only do I have a new person that I can impress, he has the ear of people who can make big things happen!
If that wasn’t enough to make a great day, I was also given a bonus for a set of work I did earlier in the year that helped make a huge transition seamless to our external customers.
And we were given half of today off from work to start our Labor Day weekend early. The news yesterday just wasn’t bad anywhere.
Talk about ending the week on a high note and what a way to start September!
