I’ve been harping on myself lately for missing out on writing about current events in my life. Before Connor, I spent most of my evenings blogging or journaling longhand about the goings-on of a given day, or writing in-depth about some tiny philosophical point. Nowadays, I tend to skip past delving into even major life events in favor of a quick 120-character tweet.
Not today.
Today, I got the promotion I’ve been waiting years to get.
I’d taken Friday off of work for Connor’s myringotomy, and some stuff at work had gone awry on Thursday evening (luckily, nothing I had to deal with). So, once my e-mail client finally managed to connect to the Exchange server first thing this morning, I had 88 new messages to wade through. I opted to start from earliest to most recent — which meant that the meeting reminder for my performance review came up before I’d even had a chance to accept the meeting.
The forms were attached, and I scrolled through a surprisingly even smattering of Successful and Exceptional to get to the good part. Sure enough, in the Comments area at the end, I saw my supervisor’s hearty recommendation that I be promoted to Data Warehouse Engineer II.
[insert happydance here]
During the review itself (which she kindly started by asking how my son was recovering), I came to some realizations about myself and my work ethic and my passion for what I do and how that passion is perceived by others. I guess I hadn’t really realized how much preparation I do in general, just so I’m up to speed with whatever project or subject is at hand, and so I can give informed answers and suggestions when asked. I already knew how much I research dashboarding and data visualization and business intelligence in general, but I hadn’t realized how much of that research I pass on to the team by means of my own documentation and suggestions and by example. I like to pride myself on my communication, but it hadn’t occurred to me that people actually seek me out for explanations of things, for training, for help, for techie-to-layman translations.
It feels good to know that I got this promotion not by being fake, not by trying exceptionally hard to get promoted, not by staying late or coming in early or purposefully doing things to get noticed — but by being myself. Doing what I do, and doing it well.
Except for that punctuality thing, which surprisingly did not come up once. Not on the record, not off the record, not at all. I was expecting a knuckle-rapping about it, especially since my arrival time has been up and down all year. Some weeks I’ll do awesome, and come in only five minutes late on average. Some weeks I’ll be horribly embarrassingly tardy, and I won’t be ready to get started until after 8:30am.
I expect that if my arrival time doesn’t consistently improve, I may get a talking-to, now that I’m a Level Two and should be performing at higher standards. Connor is going into daycare an extra day starting this week, though, so that takes one X-factor out of my mornings for three out of five workdays.
My punctuality and my need for more developed technical troubleshooting skills are my main areas for improvement, and only one of those is on my review, although they’re both completely valid. And I’ll continue to work on both of them over time.
During the review, my supervisor asked me about my career goals. I was honest, and told her that I like making widgets. I like taking our data and helping to present it to our users. I have no desire to go into management. I like where I am, and I want to keep doing what I do and getting better at it.
She liked that answer, since she apparently likes me where I am, too.
…You know, it occurs to me that my promotion has not been officially announced to my team or the rest of the Systems Development staff yet. Apart from my husband and one work friend, my boss and I are the only ones who know.
Until I hit Publish…