It’s a casual plan

There’s not much left of my career to plan. I’m sitting here at 59, with my 401k in decent shape. Retirement is about five years away, the gods willing. I’ve written plenty about not looking too far into the future. It is folly.

I’m fortunate enough to work for a big European company. I enjoy my work with a web content and design team. I’m a business analyst, so I assign tasks, make sure tickets meet the “definition of ready,” and prioritize their work. My boss says I keep the “wheels on the bus.” 😜 Any other “Agile” people out there?

I have opportunities to learn new things and even move to different departments if I choose. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, lately. I like my team, and I’m good at what I do, but I prefer to be getting my hands dirty and create something.

Recently, I jumped on a project that several people have attempted, but to which no one has been able to produce any output. It was to revamp our training program for our content management system. We have a large number of stakeholders who are able to build their own pages, but are not able to publish them. My team reviews these pages for grammar, SEO and best web practices and publishes them. Once the page is published, the stakeholder can make edits as they see fit.

This system works well for the most part, but training has always been an issue. We currently can only offer live training, and we dedicate about an hour. It would be a miracle if the trainee retains more than 3% of what we show them. Of course they can always come back for a refresher, but essentially, a lot of mistakes are made – and often after our QA process when they are given free reign to make edits.

So, I came up with the idea of creating a video series for self-paced on-demand training. Topics are broken down in to short videos between 6-10 minutes long. Grouping them in this way allows us to also give them a training plan so that they don’t have to learn about components they won’t use. As an example, we have an e-commerce hero that pulls in pricing information from our digital exchange center. But if you are working on legal pages, you will never use them.

Anyway, this is the first project in a long time I feel energized over. It’s been a lot of fun coming up with an overall outline. I just finished the script for the first video. I can already see in my head what screen grabs I’m going to use, where the trainer will be on camera, transition to certain graphics and all that fun stuff. I think it’s going to turn out really well.

So for the short time that I have left at my company, I’d like to say that my final path may move more into education and training, although it may never be a formalized position. It’s kind of funny because both my parents were teachers, and I never thought I would like teaching. I couldn’t stand school. It wasn’t until much later that I realized learning and school have almost nothing to do with each other.