Mentoring

Paul Randall has generously offered his time and wisdom to six lucky people. Write a blog post explaining why you (I) want to be mentored by Paul, and presumably convince him that he would want to mentor you (me) and post a link to that post.

This is that post.

If you’re not Paul Randall you can stop reading … now.

 

Hi Paul.

Firstly on behalf of all of the six eventual mentees – thank you for such a generous donation of time and wisdom. What a great event.

My instant reaction was of course “yes please, I’ve been reading the SQL Skills blogs for years, I’ve watched the MCM videos multiple times, done the Pluralsight training and just about worn out my DBCC bookmarks.”

Then I started thinking about what I would write, why would I want to be mentored by you? If it was two months hardcore SQL Server internals technical training then no question. But career mentoring, that was a bit more of a subtle question. I had to think about what I want from my career? Where do I want to be? What do I want to do?

I had never really asked myself those questions. I’d stumbled into IT, stumbled into becoming a DBA, found that I really loved it and have been following my nose ever since. This is actually one of the reasons that I would love to mentored by someone with your breadth and depth of industry experience. Someone who can help me attack those questions, give them some context and reality. Help me look at my career as an entity to be developed, as opposed to purely focusing on technical skills in isolation.

One of my favourite things about IT in general and being a SQL Server DBA specifically is the sense of community. The sense that most people working in the field are excited about technology. Yes, its a commercial product, and we are paid salaries to work with it, but the people I work with love the technology, love solving problems, love discovering, experimenting and sharing.

This is also one of my personal passions and somewhere I could see my career heading. I enjoy sharing my knowledge, I try to do this with my blog and at work. I think I could do a lot more in this regard and this is something your mentoring could help me with. I’m only beginning this journey but I believe that I have an ability to communicate technical ideas in a clear and understandable way. I get the biggest kick when some one writes to tell me that something I have written has helped them.

Thanks again for your time Paul, and I look forward to hearing from you.

 

Regards,

Matt (DBA)