Adventures in systems land

@epredator came up with a great idea, to create a tag cloud from your CV using wordle. The output wasn’t perfect the first run as it didn’t match Mainframe with mainframe, or IBM with IBM’s, but after doing a few global changes, here is what I got. Pretty good summary.

Click the thumbnail for a larger version, or try your own via wordle.net

So, off the back of the careers presentations and posts I’ve been discussing personality types with my eldest daughter, Eloise, who works in HR.

I remember doing the Myers Briggs stuff a while back, maybe the late 1990’s. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember my type. Today while trying to find my folder that has hardcopies of all my PC Software licenses, I came across my “Sixteen Personality Types at work in organisations” booklet, written by Jenny Rogers for ASK Europe plc and Management Futures Ltd.

Right there in the back, was my Myers Briggs type indicator assessment. My reported type is INTP and my preference scores are 23/23/37/9. It’s pretty risky declaring this stuff in public, if it leaked I could always get another US Social Security Number(SSN), but you can never take back a web disclosure of your Myers Briggs type.

Posts on a journal and to news groups might effect your future employment, especially if you are two different people, one in person, and one online. But your MBTI is an insight into the real you or in this case, me.

Looking at INTP.ORG, it has a list of jobs, I smiled quietly as I’ve done four of them, double counting my IT roles, in the list it says “Career satisfaction lies in doing what you enjoy”. Exactly, so I better not try to become a “marketing professional”, since this is a job I wouldn’t enjoy and would be least chosen by an INTP.

Just in case anyone was wondering why I was working for the VP of marketing for Power Systems

Debbe Kennedy over on the Greater IBM posted on career advice, which lines up with my most recent post. I’m making some good recent progress and have some great feedback from my recent IBM ATSM presentation on careers.

No, not the verb, the noun.

One of my early posts in this blog was “A. Seven - Q. Ways to measure progress ?”, a response to an entry on Brian Peacocks internal blog. Thursday last week I had the pleasure of doing the pitch behind the post, to the world-wide IBM Assistant Technical Staff Member(ATSM) community. Although “corny“, one of the phrases that is a staple in the presentation is “Make sure change is something that happens for you, not to you”.

It stuck in my mind. When I got off a flight from the UK on Tuesday night, actually early Wednesday morning, I decided that I needed to live up to that mantra.

And so it was after some frantic last minute activities yesterday, I’m pleased to announce that today I signed form to become a full IBM US employee as of today. Nothing much else changes, I’m still leading the marketing requirements, scenarios and related work on Systems Management. I’m pulling together a number of important threads for the p7 based server, and I lead/own the Power Systems Appliance strategy work. But as of today I do that as a full IBM Corporation employee and will be resigning from IBM United Kingdom, and at least for the foreseable future, no more assignments. Colour me really excited.

Make sure change is something that happens for YOU, not to you.

[Update: I've uploaded the slides after a couple of requests, you can view them online or download from slideshare.net here. ]

Some how I should have guessed that as soon as I restarted my blog a load of opportunities to comment would come up, that wouldn’t have been there if I didn’t have the blog….

I’ve just been catching up with Brian Peacocks IBM Internal blog, its great to see Brian still blogging, he is currently theme-posting, blogging on single themes. This weeks theme is careers. In his introductory(internal) post Brian muses that he thinks it would be good if “one of the Execs (VPs) wrote articles explaining the career path that ends up with an Exec position, something that many of us would find fascinating.”

I don’t think I can offer that but I can offer my “Seven Ways for a technical person to measure their career progress.” Continue reading ‘A. Seven - Q. Ways to measure progress ?’

Sasha asks in her personal and IBM internal blog about the rate of attrition in her sphere and what the problem is? Continue reading ‘The loves and life of an evangelist - no, not me!’