Opening up the floor

I decided to open up the floor to people's thoughts on everything HR and HR-related...here is our first entry of the kind (feel free to e-mail AndrewKatz@brandeis.edu if you would like to submit something for review):

"As I closed up shop this past Friday, I decided to take a look at my calendar and count the number of weeks that I have been officially employed at my new job. Amazingly, I have already been hard at work for ten weeks, which means I have something to look forward to very shortly: my three month review. As I have been reminded several times by my team leader in both a serious and a joking manner, my continued employment, like everyone else in the company, depends on my performance during my first three months. The three month review will serve as an assessment of how well both my style of work and my job skills have fit in with the company’s operations.

While I cannot deny that I remain in suspense until ‘my day of judgment,’ I am doing all that I can to prepare for my evaluation. I expect to receive an equal amount of both compliments and criticisms. I believe that the key to making the most out of my review is to not take personal offense to the inevitable criticisms that I will receive, nor to vehemently defend myself against each and every one of them, but to accept each one as it is and to improve upon each of them to the best of my abilities. I say this having tried the former strategy and having come to the realization that such a strategy only prevents oneself from improving his or her performance.

I also expect that I will be asked to reflect upon my own performance personally, discuss any personal issues that I have encountered up until this point, and most importantly, elaborate on my future career plans and where I would like to go within my field of work. The final question seems daunting and it is, especially for those of us like me who are only a couple of years removed from the safety blanket provided by college. My strategy will be not to elaborate too much on what my future plans are, especially because I am not completely sure what they are. Rather, I intend to verbalize the fact that my focus remains on doing the best job that I can at my current position and that I hope to gain more exposure to my field of work through continued hard work at my position.

I remain optimistic that my review will be a positive experience for me for both the short term and the long term. The advice I gain from this assessment will hopefully allow me to improve upon the work that I am doing in my current position and allow me to improve upon the skills that will allow me to advance to the next level in my field."

-Ben Wolinsky, Customer Support Analyst, Information Technology Department, Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, NY