Beyond Job Role

In our workplace we generally do not bother to learn skills or gain knowledge beyond the boundaries of our job role. Eg : If a person is in the MIS team, he or she never bothers to look into anything beyond MIS or even get into the depth of MIS like why this, why that, what if we change this etc...This slows down our growth because we limit ourselves.

I have always been very fond of reading about new topics no matter how irrelevant they might be to my job role. I started my career, in an Aluminium Foil Packaging company IFL - a part of Sterlite Industries, with a short 10 day stint in Finance and then was moved to marketing both domestic and exports. When I became fully involved in Exports I generated a lot of interest for the international non-ferrous market trends and started reading vigorously on the primary metals market which had absolutely no direct link to my job role. My boss used to tell me that I am wasting my time but I did not listen. In 10 months my newly developed passion bore fruit. The global markets became very very bullish and in one quarter the prices reached historic highs. This sudden turn of events made global benchmarking of prices a must and I was the only person in IFL at that time who knew how LME (the benchmark for non-ferrous metals) works. You must have guessed it by now - I became a very important employee :)

The above is just a small illustration of why we should continuously build our skills and should be very well read. Just knowing how to do your work well is not enough. Anyways after a certain time period you master your work, so to ensure faster progress one should always be looking at building new skills, preferably keeping in mind our goal in life. A career is like a jigsaw puzzle, we have the final picture in mind and all our moves should be directed towards putting the pieces in place.