Individual Reflection

Thiago Rosa (4512732)

There are many ways to learn. However, one of the most effective path is
through personal experience, that is improved when, instead just do, we take a
time to think and if is possible write about our learning experiences. One thing I
consider is that every criticism is loaded with the personal experiences, cultural
background and own way to understand the communication.
Once, when I was studiyng at technical high school of information systems
(similar to TAFE here), I had a teacher that taught programming with Pascal. I
know that it seems to old, and this guy was old also. As old as he, was his
ideology and concepts about the I.T. industry and career. Every lecture, he spoke
for us, young students majority around 15 years old, that to be programmer
would be the best role in the world for many years ahead. And his speech was
contaminated all students, not just in my class, but of all the classes he had
taught. This made us grew thinking that if we were good programmers, would
not need anyone beyond our computers and skills. Unfortunelly, he was not the
unique to taught me this. Years late, at university this idea was replicated by
more lecturers. All of this context, made a mind set that I.T. professinals just care
about computers and your personal skills are just in the background. As we see
at I.T. industry, it was not my exclusivity, many of the best professinals are a bit
antisocial and unconcerned about the society and the others. One of the most
famous and important I.T. entrepreneurs of the history said: Everbody in this
country should learn to program a computer because it teaches you how to
think Jobs(2011). It is clear for everyone that Steve was a great comunicator but
in your history we see a bit of this style, especially when he was in eraly stage of
Apple. However, this aproach to workteam is not the most appropriate for our
days, when the internet make almost every work colaborative. It is the
importance to learn through feedback. Instead ignore others opinion, is
important learn how to balance the positive and negative criticism. Understand
contructive criticism and ignore descontrutive, is the key to learn with our
mistakes and increase skills wich, sometimes we do not have the exactly
dimension for the world around us.
Absorb the whole experience of presentation and respective feedback,
adding to individual reflection make me look again to my concepts and values.
Rethink the way I have seen the feedback and criticism. Once I watched a video
from Gardner (2009), best selling author of "The Pursuit of Happyness" where he
tell the following quote: What you do, does not define who you are , and I think
that is the way to follow when you are temporarily running a project or working
on something that you don not believe completely. We must always do our best,
independently the circumstances.
This knowledge will be very useful in my career as a project manager,
develop this skills are the biggest challenge to me that planning migrate from
techincal position, sucha as programmer, for a management position as a project
manager. According to PMBOK the one of the most important skills for PM is

show the worth, and it is just possible when we are able to understand and
assimilate the feedback, growing and learnin with it.

Reference List:
Isaacson, W. 2011 , Steve Jobs, 1st edn, Simon & Schuster, New York.
Hamid, Y. & Mahmood, S. 2010 Understanding constructive feedback: A
commitment between teachers and students for academic and professional
development, vol. 60, No3, March 2010, viewed 1 May 2015, <
http://jpma.pakcyber.biz/PdfDownload/1960.pdf>
Lehrer, J. 2011, The Steve Jobs approach to teamwork, Wired, viewed 01 May
2015, <http://www.wired.com/2011/10/the-steve-jobs-approach-to-teamwork/>
Gardner, C. 2009, Chris Gardner UC Berkeley keynote 2009 (HQ), Youtube,
viewed 03 May 2015, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtYpJzQkx1Y >