• Archive for August 7th, 2008

    Caution Ahead: Industry Training

    August 7, 2008 // 3 Comments »

    Posted in education, work life

    At the majority of industry events I attend, I find that I am the youngest person in the room by at least ten years.  Most of the people I will chat with will be old enough to be my parent.  That’s okay but being baby in the room can be a double edged sword. I get to have some very interesting conversations with people I would normally not interact with but I also know that I will need to hold myself to a higher standard in order to be taken seriously.  I set the bar for myself of needing to be the most professional person in the room.

     

    It sort of feels like the first time you stayed over night at a college and you didn’t want anyone to know you were still in high school.

     

    Recently, my company sent me to a two day course on Document Management, a favorite topic for everyone in the Pharmaceutical Industry.  As per usual, I was the youngest in the room.  I am really just starting my career while the people learning with me had been in the industry for quite some time.  Honestly, I was kind of excited to hear about how they dealt with document management problems. I am not interested in re-inventing the wheel.  And since I work in a small company with limited resources, re-inventing the wheel is a costly mistake that I cannot afford to make.

     

    I was a bit startled to discover how open the other class participants were with information about their companies.  And alarmed.  After all, we all had name tags on that also listed our company names.  Here was a group of professionals sharing information that I would hope would have been protected by a Confidential Non-Disclosure Agreement signed on the first day of employment. 

     

    When you attend an industry event or training, you are not just “You, The Person” but become “You, The Representative of Your Organization”.  The information you share in such a setting is information that will be used to judge and assess your organization.  It might be easy to forget this when you work for a larger organization but for the duration of training, you become the face of your organization.

     

    I think part of it comes from the desire to share in a classroom setting.  We want to talk about ourselves, where we have been and maybe even show our own personal value to the people who surround us.  But as adults, this is dangerous.  The knowledge we possess can have a dollar amount attached to it and the information we may inadvertently share could have a devastating impact to our business.

     

    We all need to ask ourselves questions when we attend these events.  And those questions need to go beyond the “what are my take-aways” or “how will this benefit me”.  The question we need to start asking is “If my biggest competitor was taking this course with me, would I still want to share this information?”

     

    Whether you work in the Quality Group or out on the shop floor, we are all in the business of knowledge.  Successfully managing and controlling the knowledge you possess is a key skill for a vibrant career.