I haven't blogged in awhile. I don't write that to apologize, or to try and appease my seven followers. In fact, I know from reading all my blogging-blogger friends that I should never apologize for gaps in publishing. That being said, I am at a point where I can look at my journey and feel good about where I'm at. For any of you who read my career exploration posts during the last year (University of Me, and Straddling the Introvert-Extrovert Line), you know that I began my exploration into the L&P field last year. I meandered through eLearning and Instructional Design, facilitation vs. development, and a crazy foray into an unsuccessful Flash class. All of sudden, in July, I knew something felt off. Instead of forcing myself to find a job in eLearning or Instructional Design, I backed off and attempted to let my inner self figure it all out. During that quiet transition, I wrote the post, Listening to Myself,
then I withdrew from the blogging and Twitter world. I felt sort of inauthentic and strange that the eLearning person whom people had come to know wanted to pursue a different direction.
I realized that the entire time, I had wanted to focus on organizations as a whole. It is what I love, and what I do best. And yet I was terrified to admit this. Every OD person who I'd encountered seemed to have an MBA, and I knew this would be a crappy fit for my energy-empathy-compassionate-non-finance-thinkin' self. So instead of trying to figure out how to be an OD person without an MBA, I moved on to the things that I felt I could do without going back to school. My education degree would help me get into ID, while my library degree had offered enough technology experience that I could fake things.
But in July, I hit a wall, and I realized that I don't mind doing ID or eLearning, but I like it because of the context of developing organizations and making them better.
Once I embraced my joy for this, I stopped trying to put myself in a box, and instead I got inspired to go back to school and become even better. I'm in love with my current program and my inspirational classmates. I'm learning that I can always open a new door, and that branding myself once doesn't mean that I'm stuck with that definition forever.
Forget Gen Y or the Millennials--anyone who has grown up with a computer, I like to call the Control-Z Generation.
And I am jealous of how they learn.
At (almost) 39 years old, I am on the cusp of the "computer comfortability" level. A Mac Classic arrived in our home when I was in high school, but most of my technology memories were based on learning how to type on an electric typewriter. I remember filling out applications on my parent's Smith Corona while praying we had enough correction tape to fix any errors. Making a mistake meant cautiously backspacing the carriage while hoping the correction tape was lined up properly. Accuracy was valued over speed and because mistakes were difficult to correct, I was especially timid to try new formatting or design.
Now going back to the Control-Z generation, I think one of the reasons they are so tech savvy is because they are not as worried about messing up. Who cares if they do? They can just time travel backwards to undo their actions. By eliminating the stigma of making mistakes, interactive (e)learning is more powerful than ever. I am trying to learn from their confidence, but I think a small part of me will always wonder if we have enough correction tape in the house.
