5 Lessons from 5 Years in the Workforce
I officially crossed the ‘five years as a professional’ milestone on 7th March 2021. When I started my full-time job at the ION Group back in March of 2016, I didn’t think I was going to make it to five years for two main reasons. First, at the time of the offer I had other plans. I had two acceptance letters to graduate programs in the UK and Australia for the September and January intakes respectively. Secondly, I had been hired as a software product manager to manage the development of a commodities trading and risk management (CTRM) system and while my bachelor’s thesis was focused on commodities management, I didn’t really know what agile software product management was all about. It was uncharted territory and I was either going sink or swim.
Five years flew by faster than I thought they would and during that time, I went from being a junior member of the team to a subject matter expert and from feeling like an impostor to understanding the unique ways I was positioned to add value to our clients and the organisation at large. These transformations neither happened overnight nor did they happen in isolation. They were accompanied by powerful learnings, some of which I didn’t anticipate going in. Even though I am currently closer to the six year mark, I can’t help but think about how much I’ve grown as a professional over the past half decade and in this article, I’d…
