First, a little follow-up from my last post: The Credly thing was a little weird. There’s a working LinkedIn integration that will add the credential to your profile and let you post about it. So that’s good. There are options to share to Twitter and Facebook too, but neither worked. I manually posted the credential link to Facebook, Twitter, and Mastodon, just for yuks. So maybe I’ll get some “likes” out of that. Not that it matters, but I crave attention and validation, like most 21st-century humans.
On the broader topic of education: I’ve been working on figuring out some of the newer .NET Web API stuff lately. My existing .NET Web APIs are all .NET 4.x. Until recently, I hadn’t tried to create one under ASP.NET Core. I’ve been working my way through this course on Pluralsight.
I still get access to Pluralsight through work, which is great. My company recently discontinued access to Percipio though. I wasn’t really using Percipio that much, and I still have access to it through ACM, so it’s no big deal that work has stopped paying for it. That got me thinking about O’Reilly Learning again. When I got the email telling me that we were dropping Percipio, I responded with a suggestion that they look into O’Reilly. I don’t have much hope that our L&D folks will want to spend the money on O’Reilly, but I thought I’d suggest it. You never know.
Our L&D folks (and I guess someone influential in management) have been pushing a lot of leadership stuff lately in a couple of areas that I wasn’t previously familiar with. First is John C. Maxwell’s 5 levels of leadership. I guess that Maxwell is actually a pretty big name in the “leadership” area, though I’d never heard of him. He’s written a bunch of books. I’m considering picking up the 5 Levels of Leadership book, either in Kindle or Audible format. I’ve got mixed feelings though. On the one hand, I want to learn stuff that might be important and help make me a better manager. On the other hand, I’m about halfway through the third Wheel of Time book, and I don’t want to get off track on that.
The other big thing they’re starting to push at work is something called Emergenetics, which sounds pretty fishy to me, but is apparently not a weird pseudo-religion or anything like that. I don’t have much to say about it, since i haven’t really started looking into it yet.
I’m not really sure where these two initiatives came from. It might be somebody in L&D, or somebody in management. We do have a bunch of new high-level managers that have been hired from outside recently. We used to get most of our high-level managers from internal promotions, but I guess our president wanted to bring in some fresh blood. Overall, there’s a good bit of uncertainty in the company, due to all of the new managers coming in, and various changes going on. I’m trying to take a “wait and see” attitude, and keep an open mind.
I do have three direct reports now, so I should probably try to keep up on the management philosophy stuff. I haven’t really been an active manager in a long time. And, since they made me a manager about six months ago, I’ve actually done very little management. I’m mostly just letting my direct reports do their work, and leaving them alone. But I should probably try to more actively engage with them. At some point, I’ll probably have to do performance reviews, so I guess I should at least engage enough to be able to do that properly.
It’s hard to juggle all of this. I want to keep up on all the technical stuff, like ASP.NET and Power Platform, and so on, but I also need to work on the “soft skills” stuff.