I recently took a voluntary early retirement package from SAP … the VERP as it was called. April 30th was my last day at SAP. It was not an easy choice to leave, as I loved what I was doing, and the team I was working with. Good times! However, the product strategy for PRA was moving strongly towards looking to partners for delivering innovations, and frankly that was what I most enjoyed doing. That outlook had been weighing on me, but then along came a bit of financial incentive to leave with VERP, so here I am now, back on the other side.
I had another round of choices to make as to what to do next. I was not ready to retire. I really loved being on the product side, especially the process of envisioning and creating. I had some thoughts on I might want to tackle as a product or in a product-focused role, but nothing that I felt so strongly about that I was ready to move on yet. I put those ideas on the back burner and decided to re-enter the customer landscape as an independent contractor. While at SAP I missed the closeness to customers that I had in my previous roles. I would thus look for opportunities to be a key contributor to complex and challenging customer initiatives. This type of project work was always very enjoyable to me, something that I excelled at for over 20 years prior to joining SAP. I love a good problem to solve, getting to know it well from the customer point-of-view, and working with a similarly motivated team to get to a highly valued solution.
To get myself re-established I chose to collaborate with those I most enjoyed working with in the past. Much of the formula for happiness in your career is in the people that you work with. These are people I have known for decades, and it feels great to be teaming with them again.
While waiting to get through the onboarding process, I chipped away at my boredom by tinkering with this website. I enjoy giving back, so hope to use it to compile some helpful PRA advice, and perhaps someone might actually stumble on it and use it.
Time to move on. First assignment starts next week!
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