I’m going to find this topic very interesting when I’m training people more and more. Kathy Sierra gives us four questions to judge someone’s passion for their work:
- When was the last time you read a trade/professional journal or book related to your work? (can substitute “attended an industry conference or took a course”)
- Name at least two of the key people in your field.
- If you had to, would you spend your own money to buy tools or other materials that would improve the quality of your work?
- If you did not do this for work, would you still do it (or something related to it) as a hobby?
Some of this comes down to Mitch Denny‘s concept of a night-programmer, but Kathy has expanded it to cover any field. I guess if I’m asking these questions of people in courses I’m running, then the answer to the first question is “I’m in one”, but I think it’s very different to if I were to ask the people who attend my user-group.
Some people who attend courses are there because they want to be, but others might just be there because their employer has sent them. User-group attendees are generally taking their own time to be there, which generally makes them more passionate. I hope that even if the attendees of my courses came simply because they were made to, they will catch some passion and leave being able to answer those questions better. Perhaps they’ll even do another course soon because they will have caught the bug of Professional Development.
These questions also rank right up there in ways to evaluate whether a potential employee is a good match or not. If you hire someone who is passionate about their work, then you might get challenged as an employer occasionally, but you’ll probably also get a better worker, someone who comes to work wanting to do a good job, rather than someone who just sees each day as waiting for the weekend. I’m all for ‘working to live rather than living to work’, but if you’re passionate about your work, then you probably enjoy your work more and probably have a better work ethic to boot.
