Advancing Your Career, Advancing Your Life

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Notes from the Panel

There were 3 speakers on the panel: Robin Wilensky (email: Robin.M.Wilensky@gmail.com), Barbara-Ann Fox & Cecilia Aragon.

Robin's notes:

  • Career Path and Associated Personal Situation
    • Information Builders in Tech Support; Living "at home" (aka with parents)
    • Netscape as an SE; Single Life in "the City" (The City being NYC)
      • Learning about relationship building
      • Using business saavy skills
      • Rebranding myself
    • Sun Microsystems as an SE: Single Life getting old
      • Finding a niche - software at a "hardware" company, insurance expert, making my own role
      • Learning to make the right decisions (e.g. GHC 2007 vs. Moving/Unpacking)
      • The Turning Point - 9/11, Debbie & Liza
      • "The Dating Pipeline" -> See below...
      • Setting new expectations at work and for myself. How to balance this life of mine.
    • What's next? My future path.
      • Entrepreneurship ?
      • Writing ?
      • Passions - edu & environmental issues; stay the course on software
      • Less travel - more time for family
  • Challenges along the way
    • External - "drinking buddies", how to avoid social work events but remain respected at work
    • Internal - my own Type-A personality and wanting to be the best, how to do for me
  • Tools used
    • Stay focused on the goals (both personal & professional) and learn to adapt the goals as necessary
    • Make Pro/Con lists
    • Maintain a personal SMART list (SMART = Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound. See http://www.topachievement.com/smart.html for more detail. A typical business SMART goal is: Achieve 10% growth by selling x new product into y customer by the end of Q1. An example of one of my personal SMART goals that I used with my dating pipeline was: Line up 5 qualified dates from at least 3 different events over the next 6 weeks.)
    • Have a clear career development plan
    • Be honest with yourself about what you want
    • The Dating Pipeline: "http://blogs.sun.com/robin/resource/DatingPipeline.xls"
  • Summary
    • You must be able to rebrand yourself. It's up to you to change expectations and perspectives of those around you.
      • Example 1. To grow my career, I set out to be the Virtual Desktop Specialist and Green Computing Expert. I let people at work know that this was an area of focus for me and I eventually garnered respect for these. I didn't know everything about it at first, but I learned along the way.
      • Example 2. To grow my life, I set boundaries on my time. I decided to give up 1am work nights and I decided to stop doing work on Saturdays. I didn't make a grand announcement about this. I just stopped checking & responding to emails after hours and on Saturdays. Eventually people got the hint and it didn't hinder my career at all. It did however allow me to have a social life!
    • My advice: If you pretend to know what you are talking about, people will think you know what you are talking about and eventually you will know what you are talking about.

Hope this helps! See some pictures & my comments about this session and conference in general on my blog: http://blogs.sun.com/robin/category/Women+in+Tech You can also find a link to this page at http://gracehopper.org/2007/participate/community/bloggers/


Notes from Barbara-Ann & her presentation can be found here: http://web.mac.com/barbaraannfox/Barbara-Ann_Personal_Site/Blog/Entries/2007/10/18_Grace_Hopper.html
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Notes from Cecilia to follow.

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