(A VERY old picture of me in office #2)

12 years and 1 day – that’s how long I’ve been at my current job, which I started right out of college.

Those of you who read my blog regularly know that I really do not talk about work that often. I have posted about some of the conferences I’ve gone to with work, clothing issues in the office, and about previous jobs I’ve had, but in general, I try to keep work posts on my work blog, and home posts on my homo blog. But sometimes the two do cross paths.

It’s really not that difficult to figure out where I work, especially since I have provided links to my work blog on several occasions . That blog tends to be more technical in nature, and provides the “world” a view of what it’s like to work at a high tech company in the IT department. I sometimes talk about building technical communities, mobile devices (and what I wish they would do), social networking, and most recently about geeking out with Linux.

But let me come back to my point. It has been exactly 12 years and 1 day since I started with the company, and I have had many jobs during that time. Many of my friends have moved from company to company after graduation, but I have been at the same place. In that time, I have had 6 or so jobs, but only 3 offices.

I started in a group called Database Services doing DBA type work, which eventually led into project and program management. It was hard-core IT work that I absolutely loved – product engineering, 24×7 production support, etc. After about 4.5 years I moved into another part of IT managing a team that did decision support for data gathered by marketing programs on the corporate website. This was also my first office move, from one building to another. It was a fun and challenging job, but I burned out quickly on some of the internal politics.

A silly logo I created for the Global Teams Program

For that, and the next two jobs, I stayed in the same office location but moved from managing the DSS activities to a brief stint supporting corporate marketing then to an HR type job doing organization development. I trained managers on how to effectively handle change and transition in their teams, and I also performed team interventions and workshops to help groups improve their performance. I was also responsible for building the 2.0 version of a Team Effectiveness Toolkit and a Global Teams Program, which I somehow still own today.

During that time in IT HR, I realized that my real passion was management, and I found a job managing a team of systems analysts and snapped it up. This was office move number 3 as well. And so, since 2003 (I think), in some form or fashion I have managed analysts who support some major enterprise software that we use.

And now I am embarking on job #7 (or is it 8). Same office, same responsibilities, different team, different manager, and 75% different employees. One thing that is constant is change, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this will take my career.

So after 12 years and 1 day, I’m still at the same company having survived layoffs, redeployments, reorganizations and the like, and still chugging along.

So what about you? Have you always been at the same company since graduation / post-high school? Have you moved around companies or within the same company? Share your story with us in the comments, or provide a link to your own blog where you may have shared the story in the past.

(And don’t forget to check out the latest on American Idol 2008 while you’re here)