van Bolhuis, M. (CC) 2015. |
In 5 to 10 years I want to begin to settle into a steady position somewhere in the sport industry. In the preceding years I will have been getting my feet wet, working in the trenches, and just steadily building that experience base. But at this point I want that work to begin to payoff. I'm not too fussy about where this is taking place, but I think I'm leaning towards the non-profit or public sector, running a city's youth sport league or some similar sport program. From a personal stand point, I want to be involved in my community and be the part of something bigger than just me. The biggest difference between now and then is fairly obvious. It's simply a different life stage. There's a big journey in between now and then.
How do I get there then? Well, as I touched on before, it's about building up that experience. You have to start somewhere, and that probably means at the bottom, doing a lot of grunt work. Besides just the basic skills required of any position, I will work on honing organizational and networking skills. These will be key to attaining that future vision.
My current environment revolves around a lot of academic things. This will have to be tweaked eventually to better suit the change of setting after school. For networking, adding a LinkedIn account could definitely be a positive step, but just looking for other networking sites and tools will not only help in the search for a starting position but will also be invaluable down the line as well.
Habits is the final thing. I really want to work on getting out and volunteering more. This helps build that network, gives real experience, and should give me a better idea of what exactly I want to do. There just doesn't seem like a lot of time to do this right now, so working on creating that time is something I have to seriously consider.
I can see where my PLE is now, but just thinking about the future makes me realise how much it will have to evolve down the line. I think a lot of the change will be natural, but some will also require some determination and concentrated effort on my part.
Finally, the word cloud. I'm a straight forward thinker, with a linear approach to learning. You might go as far as saying that I lack creativity. So an activity like this usually has me scratching my head. But what I thought was kind of cool was the fact that despite only having the major words, you got a sense of the main point of the piece of writing. Only the main concepts are needed to get a basic comprehension of what the writer is trying to convey. So that was interesting.
van Bolhuis, M. (CC) 2015. |
I guess I'll end on this point. I found this week to be more structured in how we had to construct the blog post. I'm hoping that there will be more flexibility in the weeks to come! But I guess we'll see next week.
- Matt