As you may have seen from my Twitter feed, I'm off to La Manga (Google it, it's a posh resort in Spain). It's the prize for an internal Yell awards thing called the Gold Awards, which as you've probably figued out I won yesterday. I have a little medallion on my desk to prove it and everything!
It's been a fairly good year all round for my career. We get a yearly mark (out of 6) for overall performance, and I managed to wangle a 1 this year, which is sort of unheard of. The surprising thing from my point of view is that I've not been on any high-profile projects... I tend to work on the "nuts and bolts" projects, typically involving lots of data, and trying to make it comprehensible, hardly glamorous! On the back of the Annual Appraisal I was put forward for something called "Superbonus" (for an advertising/marketing company we have really gay names for our awards...). This doubled my yearly bonus (and also my tax for the month depressingly), and thats being injected into my garden as we speak (fingers crossed for a barbecue at some point in the not too distant future). I was particularly chuffed with this, not only for the extra cash, but also as its only given to 50 people company-wide (and when the headcount is near 5,000 you get an idea of how rare it is...)
Finally, I got the Gold Award. These go to about 100 people, a fair number of which are sales. Mine is within the particular category "Sustained Contribution", probably as I've been nominated for the last 7 years. I've always said I'll never win, as I refuse to dress smartly (and indeed I did go and pick up the award from the MD wearing army boots...). I suspect they just want to get photos of me in a tuxedo!
My next trick will be to convert all this into a promotion. In October we have a department-wide assessment of everyone to see who should be working at a higher level. I'd like to think that being marked as one of the top 50 in the company, getting a Gold Award, and a perfect score on my annual appraisal should count in my favour in that respect...
Comments
Congratulations, mate! Well deserved. All that effort you've put in has finally paid off. :)
La manga looks like a right laugh too. How long will you be off for?
Just a long weekend...fly out Friday, back on Sunday. Luckily Gill can get the Friday off, as she has a big implementation spannig that wekeend.
That's luck for you! :)
Looking forward to the BBQ, the garden is coming on at a rate of knots and the plans look great too! :)
Its amazing what an injection of cash will do for a project!
It will be a big change having the hole gone, and replaced with a decent sunken patio instead...
Its nice to see hard work being rewarded, good job Pete.
Nice one mate, well done!