I guess it would be easiest to talk about this when discussing my old job. Before coming to school, and honestly what probably pushed me to coming to school in the first place was how much I hated my old job. They called it production graphics but that wasn’t really what is was, it was just setting up art supplied by our customer on our templates and making sure it fell within printing guidelines. I think at various points in the process of that job, I would have been guilty of not meeting all three of criteria. Some of these factors I feel like coule be mental more than realistic, kind of like imposter syndrome though. I think for my first job, I constantly thought I wasn’t doing enough for whatever reason but with time you just kind of learn what it means to be a good employee and how to feel secure in your position.
None of that is to say I thought I was a bad employee, I think I was actually a really good one and one of the best ones they’ve had. What comes with a job like that that encourages and necessitates speed is that you do a lot of the same type of work. It’s just trying to get through as many orders as you possibly can during a day while keeping the quality really high. With the high volume of monotonous tasks, it becomes hard to always pay attention and make sure everything’s perfect, so sometimes there just were mistakes.
We had a metric called claims, and you strived to have less that .2% of all your work come back in a claim, and sometimes it was honestly the customers fault, but for 1.5 years I was terrified of that metric. I thought every time I got one I was gonna have a meeting with my my boss and I was gonna get fired. That wasn’t the case, it was all imaginary, so in a way I’m kind of grateful for that job. Not all mistakes are equal but I think it taught me a lesson in comfortability and job security and if you’re a good, hard working employee who owns up to their mistakes when they happen, you shouldnt have anything to worry about if you have good bosses. And if they aren’t good and you’re not treated fairly, it may be time to step away.