This month I decided to perform a complete overhaul of my resume.  I’m in the rather unique situation of having almost all of my professional career with a single company.  To properly showcase my growth here, I decided to break each of my positions in this company out.  Each of my titles is now listed as a separate job.  I really feel this lets me show how I’ve grown and my responsibilities have changed in my career.  Of course this was not a simple change to make.  It’s taken a few days of work.  I still need to ask some of my contacts in HR to review the resume and get their feedback.  I’m really happier with the flow of the resume and feel it showcases my skills in a brighter light.

For my February book, I selected Managing Transitions by William Bridges.  I received the book for free from work almost 2 years ago.  We were supposed to have meetings about change.  Of course priorities changed, and we never did have those meetings.  I put the book on my bookshelf and basically forgot about it.  I was looking at my bookshelf to and the name just jumped out to me.  Since I’d never read it and it’s very applicable right now, I thought it would make a perfect book for my goal of Being More Awesome.

The book feels like it’s geared more towards managers than individual contributors.  It’s not really a problem.  I’ve read other books for managers and taken lessons from them to apply to my individual contributor role.

I did find the quotes on the side interesting.  I enjoyed reading them, yet at the same time they sometimes became distracting.  I’m glad they didn’t appear on every page.

I’m really glad I read the book.  I felt it’s helped empower me with questions to ask my management and things to look for while experiencing a very significant change and transition at work.

Today I took advantage of the massive amount of snow we received in the Mid Atlantic States, and updated my resume.  It was an enjoyable experience, yet also slightly depressing.  I’ve spent most of the past 2 years working on 2 projects.  While they were large, business critical projects, it’s a little sad to have so few updates to make when I haven’t updated my resume in almost a year.  I’m hoping that my update during the second quarter will involve a lot more data.

Overall, I feel very accomplished today and slightly more awesome.

This goal was triggered by a recent change in my work life (I still have a job).  I’ve been known to slack on updating my resume.  I think I once went almost 2 years without updating it!

Goal #2 – Update my resume at least once a quarter (4 times a year)

It’s a great idea to keep your resume up to date.  My resume hasn’t been updated in almost a year.  That is very not awesome of me!  It’s not the most exciting goal ever, but I feel it’s a really important one.

From my first book, I selected The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, wiki article. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, which is one of the reasons I selected it.  I’ve heard so many good things, I thought I should read it.

The writing style is very descriptive but I had no problems reading it.  Unfortunately I found I really did not like Newland Archer, the male protagonist.  Not liking one of the main characters does make a book a little difficult to read.

I am quite glad I’ve read the book, though I don’t think I’ll be reading it again anytime soon.

I love reading, it’s absolutely one of my favorite pastimes.  Fiction and Non-Fiction, I love them both.  While I love reading I just haven’t read as many books as I’ve liked recently.  Which has inspired Goal #1 of being More Awesome.

Goal #1 – Read at least 1 book a month (12 books for the year)

Of course, there are only 9 days left in the month of January, but I’m still going to read a book before the end of the month.  I’ve created a Page to track my goals.