On Having a New Job

After college, I struggled to find a new job because most of the companies I applied for wanted someone who has experience. I ended up as a freelance writer for six months. Fueled by my desire to have a more stable job, I sent my application to an SEO company. Writing web content became my bread and butter for three years. I learned a lot from my previous jobs, but I always felt like something was missing in my career.

Last month, I got a job offer from a company that I really wanted. As a member of their content team, I am in charge of making sure that all the words in the videos they produce have the correct definitions, example sentences, and phonemes depending on how they were used in each line.

Lately, I’ve been really anxious of my performance. As a Social Sciences graduate, I didn’t have much formal training in English when I was in college. Most of my officemates were previous teachers in English schools, so I can’t help but compare my performance to their daily output.

 

Why can’t I think like an expert?

 

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Expert thinkers are capable of thinking effectively about problems in their field of expertise. They can easily recognize meaningful patterns of information that novices tend to overlook, they have “conditionalized” knowledge on various circumstances, and they can easily retrieve important information with little effort (Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 2000).

Based on these ideas, we can say that I’m not yet an expert thinker in my new line of job because I’m still having a hard time in choosing correct definitions for some of the words I encounter. Also, my course is not related to English so I still don’t have as much content knowledge as my officemates do.

 

Practice makes perfect

 

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I’m still trying to adjust to my new job. Sometimes, I get really frustrated with myself every time I commit mistakes because I know that I can do better. However, I’m confident that I just need more practice to exhibit mastery in my new line of work. As long as I remain open to criticisms, I know that I’ll learn fast and become an expert thinker in no time.

I believe that the same thing happens to students who are introduced to new concepts. Once they gain enough content knowledge about a certain subject, they can become expert thinkers like their teachers. Also, all of our previous modules stress one important thing: learning is a dynamic process that improves over time. Given the tools and resources, anyone can become an expert thinker in a specific field regardless of his or her background.