Arrested Professional Development

See, my brain can’t focus on anything too long, so after a decent night’s sleep the anxieties from the day before have disappeared and only the anxiety for the week ahead remains . . .

I’m putting a couple of business trips on my calendar for the end of October and beginning of November – for one, I’m going to be out of town for two nights (one of which is my birthday) and for the other I will be going up and back on the train on a Saturday for a day-long conference. I was told to go ahead and make the arrangements, so I just hope the Random Non-profit is going to pay for all of it. Yes, I know that it should be a given, but the Random Non-profit always seems to be teetering on the brink – so one must take nothing for granted . . .

There is a professional development organization that I want to join – it is a fairly well known organization in the non-profit field, and it has excellent networking opportunities and continuing education programs which would benefit both myself and the Random Non-profit in allowing me to learn how I should do my job, much less learn to do my job better. Most organizations pay for their employees’ memberships – a membership costs around $300 – but the Random Non-profit never pays for anything like that. They don’t even have tuition reimbursement anymore . . .

So I guess if I actually want to do well in my field I am going to have to cough up the bucks for the membership myself – which is just as well – I’m only hoping to stay at this place long enough to get enough experience to move on to a better paying organization, so it is an investment in my own growth, but I do wish the Random Non-profit wasn’t so stingy . . . it actually hurts them, in a way, since people have to look outside the organization to be able to learn and grow, which leads to a lot of talented people leaving . . .

I really need a lot of help – the longer that I am in my new-ish position, the more I realize what I don’t know and what skills I need to get – such as in how to supervise people without seeming passive-aggressive, and how to facilitate meetings better, how to do strategic planning, how to do board development, etc., etc. . . .

I guess it is a good thing that I want to improve – I could easily coast along and muddle through what I’m doing and it would past muster at this place. I just wish that it would seem helpful for the place I’m in right now – rather than in the place I want to be in 5 years . . .

Wait, did that make sense? I’m not sure . . .