Professional Development
My day-to-day job boils down to creating and documenting processes and ensuring compliance to various things (customer requirements, industry standards, regulations).
It was fun at first because I love bringing order to chaos and helping people do their jobs better. Unfortunately, as time went on, I realized people would rather ask the same questions 50 times rather than opening a work instruction or reference material. I also realized that as much as I loved creating helpful things, the more you create, the more you have to maintain. If there's not support for maintaining things, they become obsolete, wrong, or harmful when updates to the process occur. Funnily enough it reminds me things I hear about codebases being messy if they're not kept up with as the surrounding infrastructure changes.
After years of doing this work, I found myself in a slump and I decided to pursue a professional certification. I figured it would push me to take a more active role in improving my outlook at work and also give me something to put on a resume since I hadn't done anything super noteworthy to add from the latest two years in this position.
The one I was looking at was ASQ's Certified Quality Auditor https://www.asq.org/cert/quality-auditor certification (can't hyperlink for some reason). It seemed most appropriate to my current job activities. I took a few free online practice tests to make sure I wasn't in over my head and surprisingly, I already was getting about 70% of the questions correct.
I bought some study materials and submitted a continual education expense request at work so they could pay for the actual certification exam (it's hundreds of $$$ just to take the test!). Luckily, it was approved.
In true me fashion, I procrastinated studying until about a month before the test, and even then, I was doing the bare minimum to trick my brain into thinking I was doing a good job. Ultimately, I took the test and passed, obtaining the certification and became so relieved that I didn't have to grapple with the embarrassment of explaining to my boss and HR why I failed the test I asked them to pay for.
But now I'm sitting here at the same job doing the same things and all that sense of pushing myself to be better / do better is still vacant. I want to care more but every time I try, I end up shouting into a void and things don't change.
I wonder sometimes about the shelf-life of a job. At my first job, there were people who had worked there for 45 years. I haven't been in one position at a company for longer than 2 years other than this current position. I'm starting to think that I might have a different half-life to working one role. I'm starting to think that I'm not built for 45-year tenures.
I don't know what to do with that thought, because I strongly dislike changing jobs. Learning the new people, office politics, and weird cultures that are birthed in the workplace is exhausting for me. But maybe now that I'm coming to terms with my short professional lifespan, I can change my perspective and find some excitement in change.
As a metaphor that makes sense to me, I suppose there are two types of people who go after Pokémon Gym Badges. Those who want to become the gym master (best in field) and then those who want to collect them all. The certification I earned is a nice badge I have proving to myself that the time I spent in this role gave me knowledge I didn't have before. But if I'm being honest with myself, I think I'd get bored being a gym master. I think I'd rather try to find and collect other Gym badges.