[Day-9] About me, or 9-28-95-5-78-7-65536-9 (Part 2)

Note: in case you landed in here by accident, here is the PART 1.

PART 2. PARIS

My Parisian journey started in 2011 (so goes the 4th number of the title)  with a traditional Business School graduate career path. I was a digital learning and digital communications manager in a big international corporation – L’Oreal.

2 years in, I realised that the corporate world wasn’t my cup of tea and decided to shift gears to pursue a start-up career instead. I joined Assessfirst (HR Tech offering Personality and Motivation test for recruiters and candidates). During my time there I worked on rebranding, product positioning, marketing strategy, website creation, and digital marketing … It was an ultimate piscine-like experience that made me absorb a ton of articles, tutorials, books, peer-to-peer learning, and “learning-by-doing” lessons in a short period of time.  But my biggest takeaway from this experience was the fact that I’ve got to review and reform my way of doing things: from the corporation’s “perfect planning” to the life-like “done over perfect”.
I’ve got the first taste of all the excitement and hardship that a start-up life has to offer. And I realised I could never go back to the classic job environment: the one that doesn’t have this dynamic, demanding, engaging and all-consuming energy that a start-up does.  And it was then that I first started to seriously consider starting my own company in a not-so-distant future.

With all this in mind, I started to think of every next job as a stepping stone on my path to this “not so distant future”. Considering every position as a learning experience of the “entrepreneur essentials” course. And I figured that the most essential among all would be the technical skills.

I started with the baby steps – learning HTML and CSS3 online so that today I can read and write the web pages, modify templates, and be on the name basis with WordPress (yes, I know that it’s still very basic, but nevertheless). And then I found a job in a consulting firm that combines Business Processes focus and Technical expertise. And so here I am today, 2 years after (surprise surprise) working on Salesforce (SAAS software) implementation projects (or as we fancily call it here “digital transformation”).

If you had the patience to read up till here you can certainly see that the 42 has a pre-destined place in the story.  What you might not know yet, is the bigger WHY? behind my decision (there is a whole other article in fact, but I thought it would be worth spending my summary vacations at the 42 retreat).

What  I am looking for at 42, is, first, finding back the atmosphere of my childhood that was “rich” on brain exercises.  Back then I used to being surrounded by people who think fast and have at least 140 IQ (even though I know it’s not the most accurate measurement, it does its job to illustrate the idea). Secondly, it’s a personal challenge to test my limits, and learning capacity (just to make my brain isn’t getting rusty with age). And last but not leat, is to meet new friends and create memories worth being told to my grandchildren someday haha

Looking back on the post I have realised that it got way too long again and so the rest will come in the next one – PART 3, or EKATERINA’s USER MANUEL.

 

Leave a comment