Software engineers and developers are fortunate when they land an ideal job and settle into a company they enjoy, drawing a comfortable pay packet for interesting work. However, it’s also quite common that during our spare time, we may ask ourselves a question: what should we do to help our career development? Sooner or later, this question appears in every software engineering professional’s mind.
Today, let’s talk about what we should do when we do not intend to look for a job and change our current career life immediately. Most of the ideas come from the book Land the Tech Job You Love.
1. Teaching your knowledge to other people
Teaching and sharing are always excellent ways to improve your learning and make your knowledge base more solid. When trying to teach a concept to others, you need to gain your audience’s interest in what you’re talking about. It would be best if you had a clear understanding of where the concept is in the big picture, and you have to figure out how to let a newbie get their hands dirty without getting too confused and losing interest.
An audience may come up with questions that you never thought of. You should be prepared to answer them with as much scope as you’re familiar with, or have a friendly discussion and learn something new yourself.
Sharing your knowledge with the community could also help you expand your social network and amplify your influence, which can show its worth in the future.
2. Starting a blog
It sounds cool, and it is cool, to have a place people can find when they look for you on the Internet. Since a resume can only be one page long, filled with your education and job experience, what you can show to potential future employers is quite limited. But imagine that when people are easily linked to your blog (after you’ve done some SEO) and can go through your thinking by reading the recent 3-5 posts, they can gain much more insight about you.
Of course, here we’re talking about a tech-related blog that deals with what value you can offer an employer. We can blog about anything that we might tell a techie buddy about at lunch or over beers after work. There are plenty of discussions online about how to build an excellent tech blog. Another book Technical Blogging, Second Edition can be a step-by-step guide to plan, create, maintain, and promote a successful blog as a developer.
3. Learning new things, and writing them down
Any software engineer or technical professional is in an industry that is continuously innovating and frequently adding new features and capabilities to the world around us. If you’re not learning something new, you’re falling behind the competition, or at least feeling that you have.
However, there are numerous things to learn in the IT industry whose resources can be very easily accessed. It’s just a matter of whether you have the willingness to learn or not (sounds like another cliche). But here I’d like to mention that another step is quite essential: share what you’ve learned. By writing down or doing some tech sharing, what you’ve learned can become what you know. The new knowledge I mention here can be:
- A new programming language
- A new framework in the language you’re familiar with
- A new OS
- New hardware made for programming
- Other companies’ best practice
- Even another industry radically different from what we know, but which shares similarities with our industry and can teach us some lessons
Whatever you’ve absorbed can be transformed into new knowledge that may be beneficial to yourself and innovative to other colleagues. Continually investing in learning and sharing what you’ve learned pays much bigger dividends.
4. Updating your resume every three months
Add ‘update my resume’ into your calendar and set the interval as every three months. Almost whenever we open the resume after some time, we can find things to add in or to improve on. It could be a job promotion (congrats!), or it could be a new job responsibility or a new project that your team is now working on. It can also be something not done in your office, but an open-source project you are actively contributing to. Whatever adds value to your company and yourself should be added to your resume.
If you cannot find anything worth adding to your resume for six months or so, treat it as a warning. Your career progress has probably stalled, and your skills may be going rusty. It is a good moment to consider looking for more challenges, maybe by switching jobs, or by proactively seeking new challenges and taking on more responsibilities. As the book Land the Tech Job You Love says, “Lather, rinse, repeat.”
5. Growing your network and jumping out of your comfort zone
It is all too familiar: software engineers spend at least 70% of their time in an IDE and would rather not spend effort talking to people. Some developers are not keen to communicate and feel more comfortable letting the code talk. That said, maintaining a reliable professional network can matter as much as any other area of self-improvement (like sections 1-4 above). You might have the best skills, but they’re not much good if your ideal employers can’t easily find that out.
Here are some handy tips we can take up gradually, starting next Monday when we walk into the office.
- Have lunch with people outside your team, and get to know them
- Join the office’s interest group, and break the invisible wall between engineers and non-engineers
- Join a local tech community in your area of expertise, like GraphQL Singapore
- Join user groups in areas you’re not familiar with but would like to learn about
- Keep track of your connections’ updates, and stay updated about their vital information
5 questions for self-checking
As technical professionals, we are blessed to have the skills to be well paid for jobs that we love. Not just like, but love. Please don’t settle for anything less.
Here are five questions that a software engineer or IT professional can ask themselves regularly.
- Is my resume up-to-date?
- Am I competitive in the current job market?
- Am I able to be found online with an insightful presence?
- Do I have at least five people to approach when I’m seeking help to find my next job?
- Do I have at least three references who can speak for my work experience and ability?