There are lessons to be learned

By Dorottya Török on 3 February, 2010

Categories: Company, Hungary, Telenor Hungary

During my short but pretty action-packed career I was able to learn more about myself and also about people in general. This post is not meant to be a big teaching on life and stuff, just a small summary of my useful (for me definitely) experiences on how corporate life is working and how I function as a trainee.

Lesson #1 – People

In my company there are mainly three types of people if we consider how they look at trainees.

1. People who know who the trainee is and what she/he is meant to learn and what to do here. They usually welcome you because they look at you as a resource, someone to unsettle the still water. – they are the best people that you as a trainee can meet and work with

2. People who do not really care about that you are a trainee, and honestly, they do not even wan to know it. As long as you have your job done and is easy to cooperate with it is fine having you around.

3. People who know who you are and totally disagree with you being in the organisation. They feel you are here to make their life harder and they assume that you think you are the smartest person on earth (and because of this you cannot be that, of course).

Lesson: if you just keep doing your job, focus on having more contact with the first two groups and avoiding conflict with the third then you will get by pretty good. And even after some time you might find that the 3 rd group did transform into the 1 st or 2 nd. LEARNED.

Lesson #2 - Tasks

The trainee is a quite special workforce if we take a closer look. The trainee is not only doing the job and going home after it, the trainee plans to change the world with every single task. You are always trying to come up with the big ideas, to build the strategy, to re-structure and change the processes, etc. Turn the company upside down.

Lesson: You should really find the golden middle path. Change is usually needed, but good is usually good enough. You should always rather focus on identifying what is crucial to do, where it is needed to dig into questions deeper, basically to build up a healthy judgment standard. LEARNED.

Lesson #3 – Time management

In case of the third lesson, I am not going to talk in generality because it really applies to me (wonder if only to me?). In case of having a few long term projects I easily lay back and wait for the deadline to get so close that I start to feel the actual pressure and start working increasingly faster. These are the moments when you wish you would have started to do stuff months before. But then where is the excitement? In an ideal world I could do detailed plans and stick to them but these times have not arrived yet (and do not seem any closer either). So learning is still ongoing.

Tags: lessons, people, Trainee

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