1

Well this gig has been great, but it was always going to be temporary, I start my new job on the 12th of February. I’m going from a one man IT shop to doing access provisioning at a much larger company with offices from New York to Hawaii.

Wanted to let everyone here know that this community has helped me out a ton over these last few years here, its been a great place to get some good info, and also been a great help when questions came up.

I have one question left, what tips do you have when moving to a large company from a small one?

15 Spice ups
2

You are the new guy and you will have to prove yourself to the rest of the team, learn the roles that everyone plays cause they will want to do things the way they have been doing them.

4 Spice ups
3

I like to figure out my daily routing. Like where is the break room, the bathroom, peers that I will be working with on a day to day basis, etc… Reason being is that even though everything is very new and foreign, my daily route becomes a routine that quickly becomes familiar to me and helps me stay grounded. Also, I would pay attention to company culture, what processes they have in place, WHY they have them in place, and learning as much as I can about the people who are on my team. Listen more than anything. Learn all you can and earn your stripes. That’s served me well in the past. Congrats and best of luck to you!

1 Spice up
4

I have one question for you. Any openings in the Hawaii office?

3 Spice ups
5
  • Don’t act like you’re in charge anymore. It’s difficult to get accustomed to going from domain administrator privilege and access to All the Things down to Regular User (or maybe slightly higher, depending on your role). But that’s the trade-off of going from small pond to big pond.
  • Don’t kill yourself trying to learn everyone’s names and faces in the first week. Learn them by proximity, and take your time.
  • Don’t fall into the trap of “hurrrrr I’m not lurning anything new!” because of your more specialized role. That seems to be the common complaint of people in the IT Jobs/Careers forum when they move from being the go-to person to just another cog in the machine (and then the resident SW Quitter Crowd pipes up with the “polish up the resume and get outta there!” tripe…). You have an opportunity to become the expert in the Thing That You Do.
  • Use the above to your advantage by finding local and on-line user groups that specialize in That Thing. Discover what you didn’t know.
  • Learn the policies and procedures, especially for change implementation and control. Know who to talk to and how. Play within the system. Don’t try to disrupt the system just because you think it’s stupid. Learn the ropes first before upsetting the golf cart (or however that idiom goes…).
  • Get all your fellow Spiceheads jobs at the Hawaii office. It doesn’t even have to be on Oahu. I’ll take a nice, quiet, low-key position at the Maui office. I’m not too demanding. :slight_smile:
4 Spice ups
6

Will you be going to Hawaii? if your on Oahu prepare for a lot of traffic in the early mornings and around 1500, a 20 mile drive can turn in to a hour waiting in traffic

7

I wish haha, no this position will be in the headquarters in Illinois… a bit different from hawaii

2 Spice ups
8

Thanks for the tips, definitely gonna be a change when I go from admin to user again. It’s been a while since that’s happened. Oh well I’m actually really looking forward to being on a team again, because solo work was great, but I prefer to have people around to bounce ideas off of.

2 Spice ups
9

Be aware of siloing, and don’t assume it’s bad.

There will be things that are done that don’t make sense to you, that you’ve never heard of before, or that you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. Frequently, the reason those things will be so foreign to you is that you don’t have the whole picture. Decisions will be made multiple business units away from anything you and your team members are doing. They may seem wrong, but those decisions were made by people who are looking at much more than what you’re involved in. Trust those decisions, do your part, and watch. If the decisions were good, you’ll see the company benefit from your work - and that’s why you’re getting paid.

Of course, if the decisions were bad you’ll see things fall apart and it will seem like it was obvious from the beginning. That’s always a possibility. Why? People, man.

Vaya con dios.

1 Spice up
10

Also, keep an eye out for something you enjoy doing, that has to be done, and that nobody wants to do. Start doing that and doing it well, and you’re golden.

4 Spice ups
11

Figure out the hierarchy of the office so you do not step on the wrong toes. Avoid office gossip as it can taint your impressions of people that you may not have even met yet. For example “George will tell you that Frank is a piece of human garbage, but won’t tell you that he says that because Frank worked harder, got a promotion before him and he is bitter, or he got a with some girl that George was interested in.”

3 Spice ups
12

Watch and learn what is happening around you. Hopefully they will have some onboarding procedures to ease your transition in. They may have peculiarities with this, so be prepared mentally if, say, you don’t have a PC right away, or other privileges you need to do your work.

If you can find some dumb thing that everyone else hasn’t been able to fix, you’re golden, though be careful not to raise expectations too high.

There’s going to be some hierarchy and dominance setting, be prepared for graciously stepping aside if necessary, and be polite about establishing dominance. If you have underlings, they are going to have concerns you should proactively address. Sometimes it helps to explicitly say you aren’t coming in to disrupt anything and want input (unless of course you are being hired to clean house).

There are bound to be some blowhards or what-all, be careful about getting on their bad sides too quickly. Sometimes they can be impressed if you push back on something they think they know, but you can demonstrate a better way.

Find a mentor if possible. Get to be buddies with administrative assistants, if execs have them.

Make friends.

13

Some of the people who will be the most friendly to you off the bat are probably the ones that are the most unpopular and are the saboteurs. They are isolated in the company and will be looking to recruit you to their clique. Aligning yourself to their groups can hurt you later.

Be friendly to everyone, but hold off on picking a mentor or buddy or group until you are better able to get the feel for the company’s politics.

2 Spice ups
14

My advice would be to get used to working in a more siloed, regimented role. I used to work for a small service partner and when i moved to a multi national I stopped being a jack of all trades to being an exchange/skype and print management guy. It goes against you instinct to bounce calls to another team but thats how it works in a big company.

1 Spice up
15

Very good point I had not thought about that yet.