Before I get to the congratulations, it has come to my attention that my new enabling of comment moderation sucks, because I never check the account that the notification gets sent to. I'll fix that, and apologies to anonymous for not having your comment added till now.
OK! I got promoted yesterday at work. It's what I've been wanting for a very long time, and I'm very happy. Three other people got promoted as well, as the bosses announced their plan to restructure the way we run operations. It will be a big, and somewhat difficult upheaval. Look for January to suck for me. But I am now a manager and will be in charge of training people to do the job I do. I will be responsible for monitoring the quality of their work and will be held responsible if I let any errors get through. But I've wanted to be in management for a very long time. It can be very difficult for a person with my skills to get jobs without management experience, and while I have no plans to leave my company, there could eventually come a day when I'll be able to use that magic word for what it's worth. I've seen people get jobs for which they have no real qualifications - jobs that I would never have been able to get despite my talents - simply based on what their resumes say. And I'm unwilling to lie on my resume, so opportunities have been lost in the past. Well, no more! I have the title, I have a job I plan to keep anyway, and everything's working out very well. This incidentally nullifies the promotion I mentioned getting a few weeks ago. The re-structuring made that job obsolete.
So I'm on a quest to improve the job I do. I thought I'd open the floor here for suggestions. What I need is access to research materials. The section I write requires me to research the strength of various industries, and you never know what sort of fact I might need. I've been required to find average household income for Korea, population of Colombia, government expenditures on electricity infrastructure, the names of Madonna's kids, the number of people who shop online in the U.S., the "rise" in crime rates, and more. I have had relative success using just Google, and I've built up my collection of informative websites and facts, but it's not a good system right now. I need to find more places that give factual information on people, places, and industries. Especially free market data. Help a girl out!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
9 comments:
psst, I sent you a message on myspace. And congrats on the whole promotion!
congratulations! wow, what a ladder climber. did i tell you i got promoted too? Not really, because I've always been titled "Director" but now i've got two people in my department, so i actually have people other than myself to direct. pretty exciting.
but anyway, back to you. I don't know of any just general reference sites. And it sounds like you can't lump the information you typically need into only one or two categories. hmmm... no idea. I can tell you about new search engines though... later. Because I want to go home.
New search engines I have been informed of at work:
http://www.hakia.com/
http://clusty.com/
Clusty is cool because it will group your search results into different categories to try to give some organization to the results. It also has a very awesome Clusty tag cloud - http://cloud.clusty.com. Try entering your name as a search term and see what comes up. It also gives you copy/paste code so you can put it on your own site.
Hakia is also pretty cool. It’s a semantic search engine (although I’m not too sure how successful it is as such), which means it’s supposed to handle phrases more elegantly like “why is the sky blue?” It will usually compliment you on your query and then offer suggestions in addition to the traditional search results. Just try it, it’s fun!
Hakia also has galleries for some major search terms – there’s one for Dogs, for example, with all sorts of resources grouped according to topic. Not sure how that works, but check it out.
excellent, thanks!
I would go with the CIA World Factbook for a lot of the stats you need.
Thanks Biff, I actually use that one quite a bit. It's ok!
Congrats on becoming manager. Try not to wander with a coffee mug and suspenders saying nothing but "uhm, yeeaaahhh..." and "mmmkay?"
Believe it or not, the Wikipedia can be a pretty useful resource too. Not the articles themselves, but the reference materials at the bottom of the articles (if there is any). That can help you determine the validity of the info. There is some surprisingly well-researched info in there, with good references, but there is also a lot of hearsay with no backup (I would suspect a lot of celeb gossip at the very least).
Suspenders! That's what I need!
Yes, Wikipedia is one of my tabs that opens when I open my Mozilla. It comes in very useful, even though I never, ever, ever cite it. I mainly use it to find out things like the name of the county a customer lives in or to find out more about their industry or product. And you're right about the references. Sometimes if I'm stuck, I'll just check the Wiki article on the off-chance that there's a useful citation. I'm actually known at work for over-using the Wikipedia.
Thanks!
I say go to work with a riding crop and boots and make those pee ons do the research.
You go girl
Post a Comment