My journey actually started in the summer of 2020. Because of the COVID pandemic, me and my team had worked through an immensely busy but also somehow uplifting period. Enabling our organization to work from home went relatively smooth because we had been working on modernizing the IT infrastucture the past few years and those investments - in technology but also in staff - paid off dearly.
After about 5 years with my current organization it would have been logical to look for an opportunity elsewhere to further broaden my horizon.
But on the other hand, I had been working on a new strategic information plan that I would have actually liked to work on, I had a great team, collegues and a boss that I could trust and our CEO was a strong advocate of digital transformation. I had a great salary and work-life-balance was as balanced (or unbalanced) as I could wish for. So why kill the goose with the golden eggs?
What I did know was that didn't want to risk stop developing myself in the next few years I would commit to executing the information plan that I had written. So I took some time in the summer to think things through and I started to write a personal development plan. Just as a way to get my thoughts organized.
I'm not going to paste the plan here verbose. It's personal, and if you're reading this to get guidance for your own development plans, then you should positively take the effort to write your own, not copy someone else's templates.
The outline, though is as follows:
The results where better than I could have expected. My document was seen as very inspirational and exemplary. My boss and I had a few very good and serious discussions about my plans and how the organization could support them. He supported me in aiming high for the best program I could get into and this led to me applying to IE-Brown.