1.       Tacit knowledge is taken for granted

I’ve realised how many quirks and ‘I just know’ tools I had in my locker in my previous job, and now they’ve all disappeared, I feel very exposed.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for me because it’s a learning experience – I started without all of those ‘You just have to click it in this specific location 3 times, spin around, and sacrifice the weakest member of your team’ type fixes before and I acquired them over time – and it will be the same here, except the things being fixed are different.

This is a problem for businesses though, and more specifically, the ones being left.

Tacit knowledge is very much shrugged off – “Oh how difficult can it be for somebody to learn that, just train them” or “Can’t you put that in a guide? People can read can’t they?” – but the reality is that this knowledge is more valuable because it’s through experience. When you don’t have the option for ‘So-and-so knows how to do that’, you’ll soon realise what you’ve lost. This is not meant to be an ego thing either because nobody is indispensable, but some people are more indispensable than others, and you need to realise that people with experience are difficult, if not impossible, to replace.

2.       Office cultures vary…

I’ve been through a new experience this week of worrying what to wear for work. I know what you’re thinking – this shouldn’t be a new experience, nearly every person in the world has been through this before, surely? – but I’d been in the same job for 4.67 years (as you well know) since leaving university and during that time, I’d only been allowed to wear plain blue or white shirts, with a grey or navy suit, and black or brown shoes. That’s really not a difficult decision to make on your attire; and now to all of a sudden be thrust in to a world where ‘as long as your shirt has a collar on, it’s probably fine’, is quite daunting.

I’m not an advocate of a dress code in business, particularly not one that removes any hint that you might have a personality beneath your dull, tired, robotic exterior; but there is something to be said about not having to make that decision (ask Homer Simpson or Barack Obama), and I’ve not been brave enough yet to get away from my corporate garb.

It was dress down though on Friday, so I went with a blue shirt that had stripes on. Small steps.

3.       …but the same problems are still there.

This isn’t the fault of either of the companies I’ve worked for specifically, it’s more an environment thing in that the office setting itself is just not conducive to working productively.

I think offices tend to go one of two ways; they either promote a raucous atmosphere that gets you pumped for work, whilst simultaneously distracting you from doing what you’re supposed to be doing; or they create silos of activity that mean you get stuff done, but nothing is shared between teams leading to resentment at best, and complete hush at worst.

What I’ve realised, or rather reaffirmed very quickly, is that I’m not suited to an office. Not only do I hate gossip and petty rivalry between teams, I also hate sitting in deathly silence while the clock ticks down to the end of the day. Even further to this, I just hate being inside all day. If it wasn’t bad enough being depleted of vitamin D and any morsel of happiness through winter just by the grey, miserable, British weather – my new employers have removed any hope of respite from the low winter sun by tinting the fucking windows.

Put me in a field or up a mountain – I’d take frostbite over this.

4.       If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room

I saw this earlier today on the twitter feed for @thehumanxperience and it’s pertinent to the situation I’m in and it’s made me realise what an idiot I’ve been.

In my old job, I treated certain people with a level of disdain for asking ‘stupid questions’, but I should have realised that they’re just trying to learn from me – they’re not asking questions to be annoying, they want to understand so they don’t have to ask the questions. Admittedly, this only goes so far and if you’ve asked me the same question a thousand times and have not even remotely attempted to learn (See: Where has the initiative gone?) then I feel I’m within my rights to ignore your stupid questions and file you away in the drawer in my mind marked ‘fucking morons’ where you will remain for eternity.

Now, that being said, my mistake has been twofold. As above, I shouldn’t have reacted to questions so badly, when they were genuine attempts to understand something new; and secondly, I should have been in more rooms where I had the opportunity to ask the questions (or taken the opportunities when they presented themselves) because now I’m in that situation myself, where I have to ask the questions because I don’t understand, it’s a very different feeling.

5.       You can’t learn 10 things in 5 days

I could probably stretch to 6, 7 at an absolute best, but I’d be scraping the barrel (I mean really this doesn’t even count does it, this is a thing I’ve learnt over the course of writing this post) so I’d rather wrap things up there so there’s not any noticeable asymmetry with the last article.

Maybe you can learn 10 things in 5 days, I’ve not particularly tried.