Thursday, January 24, 2013

Goals for 2013

Over the final months of 2012 I started considering my professional and personal goals. After starting with a large list, I’ve narrowed it down to the following. I am comfortable committing to these publicly, which I hope will encourage me to keep to them.

1) Assist in developing the careers of my co-workers - I work with a great team of network engineers, and I consider one of my primary responsibilities to assist them with their professional development goals. I do this by providing recommendations for training and assigning skill-stretching projects to my team. They always respond well to these challenges. I already get helpful feedback from my team, so I will continue to rely on this feedback to measure my success.

2) Continue offering industry-leading training for the Cisco Certified Design Expert program – I’ve been fortunate to assist dozens of excellent engineers with their pursuit of CCDE credentials. In 2013 I will continue offering my CCDE Practice Exam Training, as well as further develop my classroom-based CCDE Bootcamp offering. If you are interested in attending in-person classroom training for the CCDE, please send me an email. I will measure my success by the feedback I receive from training participants.

3) Spend at least 40% of my professional time creating – In past years one my goals has been related to learning. That one was always too easy, as I find that I am constantly reading and studying simply to keep up with the industry and my projects. This year I am going to flip this around and hold myself accountable for creating content. In this category I am including blog posts, course development, writing projects and professional projects. My plan is to measure this based on output, with some guesstimating about the amount of time each project requires. It’s an art, not a science! Smile

4) Get healthier – This is clearly a personal goal, and it is my hope that by publicly announcing it I’ll do a better job of sticking to it. I will measure this goal’s results by feedback from my physician during my annual physical, plus on whether I keep to my exercise goals. I also committed to my son that we would run a 5K in the spring. I *think* I am on track for this… wish me luck! We also run the Newark Main Street Mile in October. I intend to beat my 2012 time by 30 seconds.

I’m going to keep this list to four items. Any more and I will lose focus. If at the end of the year I neglect to provide a ‘How did I do?’ post, please let me know!

Thank you for reading!
Jeremy