The Inner Chad

This is an assignment that I just completed for my Career Development class.  If anyone is interest in the "deeper me", I believe this essay will tell you a bit more about me.

Values:

I have many values that make me who I am: loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage are the values that have been instilled upon me by the US Army.  I truly believe in all of these values and some other values that I see as subordinates to one of these major values.  However, the top three values that I feel are the most important to me would be loyalty, integrity, and respect.  These above all other values are the subjects that I believe others would base their description of me upon.

I feel that someone who lacks any of my values, especially the top three, have no business working around me.  These values are what makes a person dependable, honest, respectful, and willing to get the job done for whoever they are working for or with.  They understand that it is not necessarily about pleasing your supervisors or managers, it's about doing the best job that you can do so that people will ultimately recognize you for your work.  If you perform your tasks to the best of your ability every time, all of the rest will fall into line.  Employers know that not every job is perfect and that mistakes happen.  However, they also know when things are happening because someone on the team is lacking interest in their work and when something is happening just because of mother nature.  If the management in a company is NOT able to acknowledge these types of issues, then I believe that they may be lacking some of the proper values and I would look elsewhere for proper employment.

Interests:

Being that I love to learn, I have many interest.  I love to figure things out that I am unfamiliar with so that I can better educate myself to different technologies and different crafts so that I can apply that knowledge in other aspects of life.  It doesn't matter if the topic is nuclear physics, going green, mechanics, or wood working, if I have the opportunity to learn it, I will take it.  Having all of this knowledge I also feel is a waste if it is not properly utilized, so I believe my another top interest of mine would be to teach and develop others.  I have a vast knowledge of random things, so to not use that knowledge to educate others would be a waste.  I take every chance I get to teach my workers how to better themselves for their career, their abilities, and their families.  I see this as my way of doing my part in my community and my workplace.

Favorite Skills:

My favorite skills have to be troubleshooting IT equipment and teaching.  Both of them seem to get me into a kind of zone that I love to be in.  My whole focus is on either understanding what is happening step by step if I'm troubleshooting some equipment or reading the faces of my pupils if I am trying to teach them something to make sure that they understand it.  I have a great deal of patience when it comes to both of these subjects, because my passion for completing the task outweighs just about everything else.

Those being my two favorite skills, I still have plenty more.  I am also a great leader, problem-solver, and critical thinker.  I am not shy to take charge of a situation when duty calls.  I will analyze a problem, think about possible outcomes of each solution, and then lead the way to the intended solution.  Of course this doesn't always come out perfect, however, I am able to adapt and overcome to find the next best solution, given the point that has already been reached.

Reflection:

Ever since my father brought home our first personal computer and I learned how to write a batch file that would corrupt the entire computer, I knew that I wanted to be in the information technology field.  I have all of the values and traits that I believe it takes to be able to sit down for hours upon hours and devote my life to figuring out why one computer is not talking right to another computer.  It is one of those things that I just have to figure out.  I may jump right into it sometimes not even knowing what is wrong.  However, through experience and education I have learned how to navigate through a system or network to start finding the logical causes of the errors.

All of this eventually culminated to the fact that I love to start and do new things with technology.  I love to be on the breaking edge, so that I can learn how to fix its problems (pun intended).  Then I can ultimately share the knowledge that I have learned with others.  This then adds to the underlying ambition for me to not only start my own IT business, but to also start teaching my own IT classes.  I believe that by doing this, I will not only be satisfying my inner itch to keep up to date with IT equipment, but it will also allow me to download the vast amount of knowledge that I have unto others, so that some day they may have the same fortune that I have had in my life.