Category: job

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job

Two Months in … Working at Axeda

Two months into being an Innovationeer at Axeda, I ace the “waking up to work in the morning” test with flying colors.  Who wouldn’t want to be at the cutting edge of technology, with knowledgeable peers and mentors actively looking out for me, working on projects that are not only competitive, but compete with entire industries?

Let me say that again – each and every application built on the Axeda Platform models an entire industry.

Axeda’s signature product, the Axeda Platform is a secure and scalable foundation to build and deploy enterprise-grade applications for connected products, both wired and wireless.

Got a vending machine?  Connect it and harvest data for marketing.  Own a fleet of trucks?  Find out their location, speed, and maintenance history.  Work in the health industry?  Monitor your patients’ statistics transmitted from their mobile devices, while they check into their appointment on a kiosk that feeds your dashboard.  Providing solutions as diverse as the products they connect, the Platform’s full potential is waiting to be realized. 

With all this excitement, can you believe they’re still hiring?  You too can witness the emergence of a connected planet, or you can be the one who makes it happen.

Contact me today if you’d like to submit a resume or drop me a line on Twitter where you can find me as @saranicole .

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job leadership

Growing out of Crisis Mode

A term I hear often at work is “fire drill.” Priorities get elevated until there’s a problem and suddenly all eyes focus on it, scurrying for a solution. This surplus of effort detracts from other priorities, allowing them to inflate and erupt in a chain reaction of multi-stress. Not fun, and not efficient. Much of the energy is wasted in commotion which would be better spent re-engaging with the larger picture.

How do we go about de-escalating a fire drill?  First, stop escalating.  Keep control of the urge to move the issue up the chain of command.  Think it through with co-workers on your management level.  Second, relax, breathe, and step away for a brief amount of time.  Write through the problem if it helps.  Sometimes a simple break can give your mind the rest it needs to reset.  Finally, consider a re-do rather than patching up what’s already there.  A whole new version may seem like overkill, but piecemeal edits may gloss over the underlying glitch that created the problem in the first place.

Do you want to leave crisis mode behind?  Or can a crisis improve your overall results?

Categories
job life

Being a Survivor of Change: Does it Get Better?

What does change feel like to you? A trickle? A stream? A firehose? Is there a degree of change that is easy for everybody to deal with, beyond which it becomes a hassle, then a crisis?

When I graduated with my Bachelor’s back in 2002, I had never experienced real change. I was not prepared for that in-between transition that feels exactly like failure. For a student with debt and no job, the years of hard work in school seemed like a waste.

I lived through that transition with the support of my family and went on to find my first full time job. Years later, I changed careers and found work as a software engineer. All in all, it took me nine years to become a professional with a definite career path.

This transition would have been smoother if I had anticipated change and seen it as a normal fact of life. Then again, is it possible to understand that without going through it first? What do you think?