Last week con­cluded my first three months at my first job out of col­lege. Accen­ture has been great! I’ve learned a lot, met a lot of great peo­ple, and am excited about the career ahead of me.

A Month of Training

The first five weeks were actu­ally all train­ing. It was like boot camp for cor­po­rate life. We were show­ered with branded writ­ing uten­sils, a locked down com­pany lap­top, and a cor­po­rate AMEX while being intro­duced to the end­less online por­tals. It took a few days to cover the company’s core val­ues and over­all struc­ture. I still pause when peo­ple ask me what “group” I’m in (sim­plest I can put it: Tech­nol­ogy Con­sult­ing — Secu­rity — Iden­tity & Access Man­age­ment). There were two weeks of learn­ing the “Solu­tion Deliv­ery Fun­da­men­tals” which was really encour­ag­ing to see how seri­ous they were to stick­ing to good devel­op­ment prac­tices. The final two weeks were spent out at the Q Cen­ter in St. Charles, Illi­nois with  230 other new ana­lysts from across the world.

Core Ana­lyst School was chal­leng­ing for me, but we made sure to have fun. My tech­nol­ogy back­ground came in handy for a total for 2 hours for the entire 2 weeks. There was a lot of team build­ing, busi­ness work­flow, and mock client meet­ings. They put together this video at the end along with a photo album that kind of sums up the rest.

(at 7:51 you’ll see my idea they used for our section’s mas­cot :) )

A Month on the Bench

We fin­ished up CAS on Decem­ber 18th just in time for Christ­mas. And New Years. And the week after New Years. One of the down­sides (perks?) of con­sult­ing is that you don’t go to an office M-F 9–5 but if there isn’t a project going on you don’t work at all. I learned that noth­ing really gets done between the week before Christ­mas through the week after New Years, and then it takes another week to put together logis­tics. I got a lit­tle stir crazy but ended up help­ing out on a few tasks that peo­ple in the secu­rity group needed done.

A Month on a Project

Finally on Jan­u­ary 18th, I was on my first project! The wait­ing paid off as I got to escape from the cold Chicago win­ter to sunny Los Ange­les from Mon­day through Thurs­day for four weeks. The work wasn’t glam­orous, but the nightlife made up for that. I think that’s one of the biggest mis­con­cep­tions by kids right out of col­lege. They think they’ve put in their time and now it’s time to have a dream job, but that’s not really how it works out most of the time. You have to put in your time and wait for your dream assign­ment. If you’re in a field you really like (or love) then wait­ing shouldn’t be hard.

What I’ve Taken Away So Far

There’s still so much to learn about — busi­ness, tech­nol­ogy, secu­rity, career devel­op­ment, net­work­ing (peo­ple kind), the list goes on. I’m tak­ing it all in but so far:

  1. I’ve tried to not put a whole lot out there about my new job on Twit­ter, Face­book, or this blog. I’m still feel­ing out what’s accept­able and work­ing on secu­rity related projects makes that even harder.
  2. Cor­po­rate Amer­ica (esp. a tech com­pany) love TLAs — or three-letter acronyms to the lay­man. Every day I hear a new one or at least some sort of abbre­vi­a­tion for a word or phrase.
  3. I didn’t think “build­ing my net­work” was going to be enjoy­able or worth­while, but I was totally wrong. I might just make it as a peo­ple per­son after all ;)

Now I’ve started the next chap­ter in my Accen­ture expe­ri­ence at a new project here in Chicago. I was a lit­tle bummed to stop trav­el­ing (i.e. rewards points), but the work is more inter­est­ing and chal­leng­ing. I also hear Chicago has a sum­mer if it ever stops snowing.