DarqByte

We had our performance reviews for my department last week. They’re annual, and I always get nervous and worried. Despite last year’s review being pretty good and smooth, I was still worried about this year. I knew I did a good job this year, especially on items that were so-to-say, “marked for improvement” from last year. I at least improved moderately on all of them, and on most of them I think I improved a great deal.

So this year’s review has come and gone and it too went well. There was a good deal of praise for certain things, but they made sure to come full-circle to things that I need to improve upon. Some people don’t like this approach, as they feel that what they’re doing is never considered good enough and they feel like they’re always being dragged down. Not me. I welcome areas to improve upon because I always like to improve myself and my skills. The better I can become, well… the better.

So one of the things that was brought up as… well, as an area of improvement, since I can’t think of any other way to put it, is for me to be more proactive, more-or-less. Basically, the point that came across was that my lead and manager want to see me put a little more effort into coming up with ideas on improving our systems, processes and whatnot. They basically relayed to me that being proactive is on the route to becoming a lead… More-or-less. So this is good, except…

Being proactive is actually a challenge. So far today, my first day of trying to keep proactivity in mind, I’ve come up with a couple suggestions on my initial list of improvements, but it’s still pretty tough-going. I guess that’s why I’m not a lead yet, I dunno.

So yeah. 2007 and 2008 were good years for me here, let’s hope 2009 follows suit.