Skillz
It seems my most useful skill at work currently is my ability to work from home and my practice dealing with my boss remotely.
Well, possibly not the most useful; but with a desk set-up and my own office space, I seem to be doing better than a number of my co-workers.
Kunama asked about skills I use in work, and I’m going to talk first about one I don’t get enough use out of right now – Excel.
I am pretty darn good at excel, but those skills are sadly not needed nearly as much at this job as they were at the last (Trade-offs. This job is not driving me insane. You know, plusses and minuses.) One year at my old job, my boss gave me an unwitting birthday present of creating a spreadsheet that literally took me the whole day to make. It was great.
My wordcount spreadsheet is more complicated than anything I have to make in this job.
/melodramatic woe
On the other hand: copyediting! I am seriously listed as copyeditor on a formal journal and that is a reasonably large portion of my job (not enough, the editors move slow and the reviewers move slower). I am learning LaTeX (slowly) and learning enough statistics to be able to tell if something is a typo or just Written in Stats. I regularly copyedit my boss’s proposals, fancy emails, and the like as well.
Lately, it seems my most useful skill at work comes from LARPing.
Specifically, Vampire LARP, playing politics with handfuls of other nerds pretending to be centuries-old vampires.
There’s a lot of learning how to say what you’re saying without saying it going on in that sort of politicking environment, and there’s a lot of learning to listen to what people aren’t saying in response.
(It leaked into Fae Apoc more than a little, which is unsurprising considering I was fresh from 10+ years of actively playing the game when I created Fae Apoc.)
The Dean talks. The Vice-President of the Uni talks. The President of the Uni sends e-mails. The Associate Deans talk.
And I listen between the lines a lot.
(I think I like the copyediting more.)
How are you doing with your job skills? How are they translating to the current situation?