How Does Your Passion Play Out?

Let’s say you have a passion to work on certain kinds of systems.  But the company that you work for doesn’t work on these systems.  Or your company does service them, but you aren’t quite qualified or experienced enough to work on them. 

For you to experience satisfaction, you’ll need to break down what it is that you love and see if there are other types of work in your company where it will apply.  This will require a focused discussion with your manager.  If you are not experienced, you’ll need to put a concentrated effort into building the experience and education to eventually work on it.

Along the way, most technicians have had some sort of discussion with their manager as to what they love to do.  Problems arise when:

• the technician doesn’t get to do anything close to what he loves
• work assignments start off in this direction but fall by the wayside
• the technician doesn’t maintain communication with his manager to stay on track with desired assignments
• the manager doesn’t communicate with others to keep (or try) the technician focused on work he loves
• the manager is indifferent and does not take the technician’s desires seriously

Be Realistic

If you love to work on a certain piece of equipment and your company services two of them, it’s not realistic to expect your company to suddenly bring on a hundred more pieces just because it wants to help you with work you love.  When equating passion with work, it’s best to look at it through a broad lens.  You like to work with your hands, you like work that is challenging, you like to work with customers etc.  Do you get to do this or not?

The key to going down this road is to identify what you love and to go in that direction with your manager’s help.  It’s your responsibility to keep it on track.  Make sure you place yourself in a position to do the work in the first place and maintain vigilant communication with your manager to keep you moving in the right direction.