{"id":198,"date":"2022-02-02T12:34:24","date_gmt":"2022-02-02T12:34:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/greydoesthings.com\/?p=198"},"modified":"2024-01-11T15:07:55","modified_gmt":"2024-01-11T15:07:55","slug":"the-10-year-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greydoesthings.com\/index.php\/2022\/02\/02\/the-10-year-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"The 10 year plan (Part 1: The Past)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I opened up an old notebook this morning, and skimmed to the last page I had notes on. The note just read ‘Remember to predict the future’. Past me needs to get better at leaving me notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Helping friends<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I was running a friend through the question of ‘Where do you want to be in 10 years time?’ last week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are so many jobs that ask this question during interviews, which is how we got onto the subject, and she said that she hates the question. She doesn’t *want* to be working in her current field, she doesn’t *want* to be in her current location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The point of the 10 year plan is this: Your professional life is a project. You are setting the scope of that 10 year project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I explained to her that what she was giving me were a lot of ‘Won’t Haves’ from the Moscow prioritisation, but that I was hearing no kind of ‘Must Have’ points: Everything was about what she didn’t want and nothing was focused on what she actually wants in life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It got me thinking about my own 10 year plan and reflecting on the last 10 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

10 years ago last month, I graduated with honours, a fully qualified Chemist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was working for Hassnet at the time and was already doing the LPM thing when we had cases in, and then took up a local job in the midlands, really putting my degree to use. It was soul crushing. I could have designed a machine to do my job for me. I was so depressed there that I burst into tears on several occasions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To put that in context; I was 25 – I had been working since I was 15. First with newspaper deliveries (I was terrible with that one), then hospitality (which I was great<\/strong> at), and during my time at college, I would do studies during the day, leave college and go to my job as a manager at the coffee shop, then leave there and go home to either work a case if we had stuff in, or to study more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was under the stress of three different competing priorities most of the time, and never cracked, but this one place, with this one awful manager got to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was the day I started looking into better business practices. By the end of the year I had packed that in, trained my replacements (They brought on 2 people to do the work I had been doing solo) and gone to seek my fortune in London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started out once more in a chemistry job – Testing soil for the Crossrail project<\/a> – and while doing that I was studying. Once that came to an end, I returned to Hospitality and continued studying, eventually taking on the GDL and studying law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following year was tough and I ended up moving to Somerset, following a combination of several things going wrong at the same time. While down there, I worked on HPC, as a Business and Systems Analyst, until 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following that, I moved home and helped my mother prep for retirement, which was my 2019. I grabbed my Prince2 qualification while picking up little bits of work for local companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2020 Saw me get my current role and move back to London. I spent three months working, attending tech networking events like Cloud Native<\/a> and then… the world stopped for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have spent the last two years picking up more training – I have my APMG, my BA qualifications, I am now trained in DevOps and have been mentoring others in all of this, working my way up to Senior Consultant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the question is ‘What’s next?’, which… I think I will save for a part 2<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I opened up an old notebook this morning, and skimmed to the last page I had notes on. The note just read ‘Remember to predict the future’. Past me needs to get better at leaving me notes. Helping friends I was running a friend through the question of ‘Where do you want to be in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":222,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1,22,13],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-improvement-concepts","category-steal-this-idea","tag-proud"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t