This week was a great work experience.
A year ago that would have been a difficult thing to say after the week I’ve had. Two years ago it would have been impossible and I would have been buried in the sheets in my hotel room, comatose in front of the television.
This week was a challenge.
I’m a higher education software trainer. I think that in many ways I’m good at training people in higher ed registration and advising because I have work experience in those areas. Every industry has its own lexicon, understanding and assumptions. Having spent almost 15 years as a registrar, I know the language and best practices.
As a software trainer my weakness is system administration. I don’t know anything about programming, Active Directory software, managing servers or anything like that.
This week was challenging because we encountered a few significant issues that were in realms that are outside of my bailiwick. I hate not being able to help navigate errors and issues.
We were able to resolve all our issues eventually. Many took more than a day and lots of back and forth between the local IT department and different individuals at my company who have the programming knowledge and experience.
In the end, we won together and had a good learning experience.
What made the difference? A positive attitude.
I know that the software works, and it’s high quality. When we hit an issue, I knew that it wasn’t the software, but something in the data that needed to be fixed. When users couldn’t log in properly, we knew that it was something that could be fixed.
Any of us, especially the client, could have been angry and upset. It’s happened at many places where I’ve trained. Instead, we all kept a positive attitude and worked at figuring out the problem, then finding the solution. Unfortunately, for both major issues we faced, we had to go to the software company for help.
Solutions sometimes take time. A second quality that we shared that turned a potentially bad experience into a good one is flexibility. When we hit a road block in one area, we examined the agenda and found things that we could work on. While people at my company were helping solve our issue, we moved on and continued to work. As questions arose or suggestions were made, we paused and answered them, then picked right back up again.
Because of all of that, what could have been a terrible week was a very good one.
Life throws us curve balls all the time. Murphy’s Law is famous for a reason! Computers crash right before we’re going to back things up, not after. Car accidents never happen when we have a full bank account and nothing else to do. We cannot control any of those things. We can control our attitude and our response to events. I’m happy to say that this week we all responded with positive attitudes.
That made our week a great training week.
They probably won’t read this, but many props to Ashley, Chris, Allison, Cindy, John, Michelle, Robert and Ben.
In all of what happened this week, I was able to learn a little more SQL than I knew before, and I now know more about Active Directory softare than I ever wanted.
I also had a fellow Canuck in training. It was great to speak with someone about home.