POST #8: Knowledge + Experience = Competency
In 2011, I was fresh out of business school with an MBA in hand and ambitions of climbing the corporate ladder. I was lucky to have a job offer before graduation, thanks to a great finance professor at Rollins College, and I was excited to hit the ground running. I have a tendency to get over-excited about new projects and my first big project was to help launch a brand new department focused on International Business Development. I was tasked with creating a detailed 5-year strategic plan which included a budget and financial forecast. I started working on the project a week before my official start date. I spent the entire week before my actual start date researching, writing, and reaching out to anyone that would reply back to a 24-year-old MBA grad determined to have a 50-page department five-year strategic plan for launching a new department.
On my first day of work, I had a 30-page corporate strategy for the department, a 5-year budget, and forecasts that looked great. The strategy made sense and the forecasts looked reasonable as well but only if you applied it to a four-year public university with generic degree programs not a digital media and entertainment for-profit university. As you can imagine most of my assumptions were wrong and had to be redone but it wasn’t a total waste of time.
In one week of learning about and doing research for the new department, I gained a wealth of knowledge about the sector. I reached out to experts that sent me white papers, presentations, and other resources that were invaluable. My forecasting assumptions might have been off but building the wrong model made me question the assumptions that the company provided and I was able to slowly improve the internal forecasts.
I still have my first strategic plan and every few years go back to review it. Of course, some sections are embarrassing to read now that I have 10+ years of experience but I always appreciate the number of items that I got correct and how much knowledge I was able to gain before my first day of work.
Remember, it takes seconds to read a Chicken Curry recipe but years to master it. Unless you get your hands dirty and put in the work you won’t build competency.