Yesterday was my two year anniversary here at Nextfly. Since joining the Nextfly team I have learned a slew of things from development to being social. Day one at Nextfly I didn’t talk to anyone but Julie, I was nervous of messing up. This was my first job in my field. I knew WordPress but not as much as I probably should of known but I somehow figured it out fairly quickly if I remember right. Day one I could not tell you the difference between advanced custom fields or custom post type, how to edit the header or internal pages. Google, Stackoverflow WordPress Codex saved me so many times, but I have gained the knowledge these past two years and am here to share my experience with you.
Here is a list of the top 5 things I’ve learned since working for Nextfly.
- Show Up
One of the most important parts of any job is just showing upYou might think “this is simple, anyone can do this,” but that’s not the case. There are many young professionals that enter a new work environment without much work experience or maybe without any experience at all. The first day or so they show up on time, but that quickly begins to fade and excuses start to come. I wanted to set the standard at Nextfly that I was taking my career seriously. . I have made it a point to show up to work on time, every day, since I have started working at Nextfly. I rarely call off and I stay late every once and awhile when a project I am working for calls for it.
2. Google First, Ask Second
Like I’ve said earlier, I came into my position without loads of experience in WordPress. I had a lot to learn and I knew that the best way that I was going to learn was through doing. I got up and running and quickly got to a point where I was stuck. I didn’t know the answer to something and felt bad. Time is limited when you work for a small company and often my coworkers are stretched very thin, due to this, I’ve quickly learned how important it was to put in the work to see if I can find a solution to something with the power of a quick Google before bringing my question to someone else. With Google, I’ve been able to find solutions to about 80% of my problems saving myself and my coworkers time and frustration. I believe this has significantly helped me get to the next level of my career.
3. Learn by Doing
In the development world you learn by doing which can be hard at times. You don’t know if something will or wont work until you try. For example for there was this slider that was cropping the top of the picture so I thought what if I put a image inside a div making the opacity 0 and then using put the actually picture as the background and cover it. I know it is not the “right way” but it works and thats what development is about making things work.
Although my list is only 3 items deep, the things I’ve learned while working at Nextfly can be a mile long. I’m happy to have had the two years here and can’t wait to grow my list by adding a few more items.