I believe I learned quite a bit through the Fall semester working at Austin Peay. I passed a milestone of 1 year working here while in this class. This means that the class went hand and hand with me getting more responsibilities and learning more. You could say that I was given the real key to my job instead of the limited one… With that said, my work situation is quite a bit different than some of my classmates.
I work in the technology field and use different types of technology every day. I generally don’t need people to show me how something works. I didn’t have someone to sit with me and show me how everything worked. I found it out on my own which is good because I like to figure it out myself. This is good because you shouldn’t ask too many questions when given an assignment. Now that I have the disclaimer out of the way, I will discuss some of the major things that I learned during the semester.
I’ll start off with the programming side of things. Before the semester started, I had been at Austin Peay for over 8 months. I already knew how to make most programs and do most parts of my job. One thing I didn’t’ have a good grasp on was Web Self Service. It’s a confusing, unintuitive mess of a way to write the program. You have to think differently when you are writing something in self service. During the semester, I was given some time to learn more about self service and was expected to write a program to reset banner passwords. I started by looking at some other self service programs and then started to form my own. After many errors, I got the program working and then tweaked it to make it what it is now. It’s really amazing to see something that you built work when you didn’t have a clue how to do it starting out. Recently, we had our first live test with the self service package and it passed with flying colors. The best part about this is that I know self service now. If another package is needed, I should be able to create it more easily.
Next , I’ll talk about working with other non-technical employees to fill requests. I actually got to do this quite a bit this semester which is something new to me. Throughout the semester, I had several meetings with athletics, HR, and a few other departments. The meeting ranged from software requests, to report requests, to bug fixes. I learned how to ask the right questions. Since these are non-technical users, they generally don’t’ understand how something works. They just want what picture in their heads. This can present problems because sometimes, what’s in their heads isn’t possible or is extremely hard. I had to learn how to effectively communicate what can and can’t be done with projects. I also had to learn how to convert their non-technical requests in to a request with technical details.
Finally, I’ll talk about training. I was in training a little over a year ago. It’s amazing how much things change in just one year. This semester, we got a new employee and I actually got to start training him. I got to show him how all of our programs work, and get him started in the right direction. Training a technical employee is quite a bit different than working with a non-technical employee. The technical employee generally knows a lot more about the technical side of things. I learned that this can be a double edged sword. On one hand, the technical employee won’t ask non-technical questions. They will generally understand how everything works. This lets you move more quickly when showing them new material. On the other hand, the technical person asks more technical questions. The technical person will ask why something works the way it does while the not technical person generally accepts the situation. It’s something that I learned that you need to be prepared for.
As you can see from the information above, my experience was quite a bit different than some of the other students. This isn’t a bad thing though. Throughout the semester, I learned many things. I actually learned so many things that I probably couldn’t detail them all If I was asked to come up with a list. The above is just a summary of some of the biggest things I learned.
