The purpose of this book is to help you accelerate your capacity to stay relevant in the workplace and enjoy a high-quality working life. The concepts are not presented as a fable or a metaphor based on something 'out there' to aspire to. Instead, this book is a practical guide for understanding and translating your unsatisfying experiences in the workplace into more enjoyable and better outcomes. When work becomes messy, complicated, we stop getting good work done, we lose sight of the things that inspire us, and sometimes we disengage. Too many headaches for too long can cause chronic stress and erode our health and well-being. This book can help you translate your headaches at work into useful insights that boost your learning and performance and make your time spent at work a little better. All of this matters because staying engaged and relevant at work comes from our ability to go beyond our job descriptions and add increasing value to the organization. Continuous learning and performance is the best way to stay ahead of the change curve. In order to do this we have to be able to spot and move beyond barriers and the typical causes of workplace headaches that reduce our ability to engage, creatively solve problems, and continuously learn and perform on the job. These two factors – the need for continuous learning and performance and the presence of barriers that get in the way – form what Sostrin calls the hidden curriculum of work. If you want to withstand the down-economy, a shaky job market, and technology that threatens to make you obsolete…if your current job could be outsourced, downsized, or automated…and if you worry that someone else younger, smarter, and hungrier is right behind you, then your best chance of staying relevant in the workplace is to learn how to Navigate your Hidden Curriculum of Work.
