My career journey is now spread over much more than two decades and while professionally, l have done various and diverse things, I could sum it up in 3 categories.
Hello, this is Andrej!
I did sport professionally at the start of my overall career. Specifically, football as a goalkeeper.
I performed most of my career at a league level in my native country of Slovakia but also internationally on many tournaments across Europe or for a national youth team. I played against big European clubs, players, or national teams. I played football both at the youth and senior level too.
This part of my career was really exciting which involved a lot of travelling but most importantly daily dedicated trainings. I value such experience as it gave me a great team spirit, motivation, discipline and built a ‘’do not give up’’ attitude which was extremely helpful further in my career.
Although, I had some interesting international possibilities to play abroad which was my ultimate dream, it was never realized and among the main reasons were those tough transfer rules before 2004.
Despite my massive passion for football, and interesting sport career ahead of me still with a lot of potential, I finally made a huge decision to leave professional sport and pursue longer term career prospects in the corporate world.
As this was around two decades ago, I will not be elaborating on it in more details.
However, it is important to mention the following: I was fully aware that the sport career is exciting and often rewarding but risky for the potential injuries and mainly short, lasting for a limited time.
Moreover, before 2004 (Slovakia joined European Union that year), there were also incredibly unfavourable and unfair international transfer rules for players (I am referring to BOSMAN RULE).
It was incredibly bold decision and very challenging - demanding times leaving a comfortable sport career behind, starting literally from scratch in the complete unknown. But over several years in London where my corporate career started, l managed to build a sufficient education, knowledge and work experience being able to achieve managerial levels at international corporations across Europe within finance-accounting environments.
I started my corporate career in London (UK) in the lowest positions but over several years, I managed to progress in the hierarchy in various managerial positions such as Finance Manager, Accounting Manager, Operations Manager or Service Delivery Manager in various international companies and various European cities. I have now more than 10 years of managerial experience, having managed small and large teams or departments in various European countries or cities but also remotely in other global destinations. Up to now, I have managed people in my teams from 24 different countries and cooperated with customers globally on 5 continents. So, it was truly interesting time having had to also learn about different cultures and cultural differences and then applying this knowledge into practise.
As a manager, I have been always focusing on these 5 critical aspects when dealing with my performance and service delivery. l am referring to ‘’Team, Process, Customer’’ as well as ‘’Timeliness and Quality’’.
Therefore, I have always paid a lot of attention to people ensuring that relationships and team atmosphere are healthy, enjoyable, motivating, and free of conflicts. Such approach has always paid off and it was rewarding to see when team members were succeeding with their work duties and developing their skills, experience, knowledge, and overall career progression. Once the team was happy, under control and a full employee retention was established, then all remaining 4 aspects could be delivered with more ease and sometimes automatically with a lot of appreciation and gratitude from our customers.
However, there is one of them that is the most important in my opinion, without which those remaining 4 aspects would never work. And this is the people in my team and associated people-team management.
In my career, I have done a lot of things for instance a number of international outsourcing projects moving activities or processes from one country to another, process improvements or stabilisation projects. I have also done a lot of things when it comes to managing various areas of those 5 aspects such as employee engagement-motivation-conflicts resolution, employee retention or development but also managing stakeholders or managing processes with areas like KPIs, SOX controls, documentations, and etc etc etc.
Here are the most important skills that I treasure and value most as a manager (Professional Ethics, Effective Communication, Assertiveness, Consistency and Emotional Intelligence).
In 2019, I discovered a new passion and was amazed with the endless possibilities that internet, ever growing technology and powerful software is capable of.
Such technology and software prospects with a right mindset can help individuals to discover always new opportunities and follow their dreams to build either their new own business or various passive income streams.
However, there is one condition to this, which is being able and willing to dedicate a lot of time and effort especially at the beginning to develop something. And even this, does not guarantee success but what usually does is consistency, ever trying and never giving up your dreams. As they say, you might be only one more try away from success.
So, I dedicated a lot of effort and mainly almost all my free time to learn, explore and grow in areas around video production, or web design . These are the main categories, I am able to reveal for now and which I am very passionate about. I am now confident that l made a lot of progress in these areas, learnt, practised, and grew so much. But it was never easy and smooth as my time was limited but also I tried and failed really a lot too. But every failure tested my strength as well as it was a possibility to learn something new and progress even more. So, I am grateful for every mistake I made and for every failure I went through. It was a learning curve. And this was still on top of my corporate career being willing to take every opportunity to learn new things whenever it was possible mainly using the gaps in between various corporate projects, I was undertaking.
I have been producing video interviews, promotional videos, educational tutorial videos combined now with coaching and web design while daily learning new things and progressing further.
I always say that anyone can achieve anything they dream about providing, they have the right attitude, mindset, motivation, and of course maintain some good level of health.
I look forward to cooperating with you too!
