Chronicles of an inverse cultural shock (OK, not that bad ;))

I love my job, no kidding… Well, I mean my main job at RIATE (work in progress, excuse us). Main job as since I came back from California last summer I’ve been working for other clients such as Fundación Marcelino Botín and some schools here and there, always coaching on how to achieve change through community and technology. I love my job because, among many other things, I work with a small group of highly talented people, from developers to social communication people, from educational psychologist to teachers. We are young and quite in a good shape ;)

However, there are many things I don’t like or, to put it in another way, things that I would change. Still, having this feeling is good, innit?! Most of those happen because our team is part of a giant: The Institute for Educational Technology at the Department of Education of Spain. If BIG companies have peculiarities due to their size, Spanish public administration has even more… Among them:
1) People are rarely hired based on their talent, work, and passion. Exams are the main way to get a position into the system and in most cases there is no connection between competences and job positions
2) There are not evaluation systems to measure the performance of teams and individuals. Once that people become public employees, their position is guaranteed besides their merits
3) As a result of all this there are a few features that I often miss in da house –again, not in my tiny team-: Innovation, risk, collaboration, transparency, SPEED.
BUT… it happen that today we got our wifi running (besides our classical network and almost after a year asking for it) and believe me, I’m very happy. For a person that considers himself an independent contractor this means a lot. It will give me freedom to work with my own equipment and avoid most of the inconvenients caused by 1, 2, and 3 (more on that on next posts ;))

As I am saying, I love my job. It will be like this as long as I enjoy seeing pals in the morning and having a good cup of coffee with them.