While starting a career, your immediate manager becomes the guide to finding your feet in the organization.
You could become very close and mimic your decisions based on how your manager will handle situations.
While this is good at the start, it may not help you in the long run. Your manager, at some point, may go higher or change jobs.
You could get a new leader who has a unique style of working.
All these scenarios could derail your career if you had kept all the eggs in one basket.
So these are strategies you can use to stay relevant in the industry.
Your immediate manager may not want you to tell you or may not be aware of themselves.
Key steps are:
- Your career — Your responsibility
- Find a mentor
- Communication is more important than tech skills
- Keep updating your resume
- Keep giving interviews
- Your Career — Your Responsibility
If there is one thing that I want you to take away from this post, it is this.
Your manager is not in charge of your career. You are.
It is one of the most basic mistakes that most beginners and some mid-senior guys make.
They hinge their career on a particular manager or a leader.
It is an excellent strategy as long as the person is your manager.
But managers change, people move, organization changes structure.
You may find you will need to hinge on another person and that person may not share the same view.
It is also hard for you to accept this as then everything that happens in your career is your actions.
Your situations and circumstances can change. A financial crisis or a pandemic strikes you. But what determines your resilience is your response to those changing circumstances.
Find a mentor
I learned this the hard way. When I started, I never thought I needed mentors. After a few knocks in the career and the job, I realized I needed someone to tell me where I am going wrong.
Mentors are the sounding board for you. Sometimes, you could see yourself tripping even you hear yourself talking about the problem to your mentor. They may not even need to give you any guidance and you will be on your way.
Selecting an excellent mentor is a challenge, I admit. The best person would be to ask your managers for guidance and they will either work out a way to find a mentor for you if they themselves cannot do it.
Communication is more important than tech skills
In the tech world, notifications, alerts, and emails swamp us. There is also the never-ending stream of meetings. All this should make communication a second nature. But this is not true. Communication is the least looked at aspect during appraisal, as the benefits of clear communication are intangible.
There are multiple communications that happen:
- Communicating with your peers
- Communicating with stakeholders
- Communicating with leaders
- Communicating with other peers in different team
Each of these communication threads requires different words, tones, and content. Many of the root causes of issues that we observe are because of a missing a vital piece of information.
Learning to communicate is a skill. Unless you work on it, it will never improve. I have provided a few aspects that you can look at:
- Communicate in a group setting, such as presenting a solution or best practices.
- Articulating a problem statement when hit with a technical challenge
- Identifying the level of detail each type of audience needs such as a Business Analyst may not need all the technical debrief while a peer engineer might need all the jargon.
- Avoid talking in jargon
Organization’s goal does not align with your career goals
The organization’s goal is to increase business. It needs happy customers and employees. But, very few organizations realize that a happy employee can only make the customer happy.
You handle your career goals. What an organization thinks is not in your sphere of influence.
This will lead you to subscribe to newsletters and events outside your work. If you are looking after your career, your value to your company increases and thus, the organization looks after you.
You could get special education/training from the organization itself, which is given only to top performers. It will give you a definite leg up if you are looking to move up the ladder.
Keep updating your resume
Industry dynamics are outside the control of your company. Most of the time, even your managers might find themselves flat-footed with the direction in which the industry moves. Industry requirements may change. You need to be prepared for any scenario. It could only happen if you are regular in updating your resume.
The next question will be what will you update.
One of the basic approaches is to update the achievements you make within the project.
It becomes your log of the work you do. This helps both having something to write during appraisal as well in the job market.
The other hidden aspect is you do a review of your skills in your resume. You will identify the gaps in your skillset that you may need with the changing trends in the industry. It gives you the opportunity to discover gaps and create plans to learn the new technologies. It will lead you to take training that you wouldn’t have thought about if you were not reviewing your resume at regular interviews.
Keep giving interviews
The market has many opportunities. Your workplace may be the best place to be in. But your team only faces limited challenges and you cannot grow beyond the challenges your team faces. You are also not aware of how the market dynamics are changing. Giving regular interviews gives you a view of which skills are on an uptrend.
The other aspect is pure practice.
Interviews are uncomfortable.
You will communicate your experiences better as you give more interviews. Your experiences come alive and you could present a way better self when you have done it many times.
The interview is also a great place to identify knowledge gaps in your experience with the technology.
You go back and read the documentation for the questions you couldn’t answer.
It helps in filling the knowledge gaps which you would never know and this would help you in your current workplace.
The last one is you might just get a better company to work with. You will never know about this opportunity if you never go to interviews.
When you get a wonderful opportunity, it might look like good fortune. But it was your willingness to attend those interviews and to feel uncomfortable that landed you the offer.
It is always easier to find a job if you have one in hand. Keeping a lookout keeps you ready for the next challenge.
Network outside your organization
A manager may never ask you to attend a meetup in your city unless there is an immediate benefit to attending it. But keeping an evening free to learn about the happening in the industry would keep you in good stead. You will get new ideas which you wouldn’t have thought of if you had never gone out.
You will talk with cool people within the industry, and it may lead you to your mentors.
You may learn about a new opportunity that may align more with your career goals compared to the current one.
If nothing else, you get a free pizza and a beer.
You can also skip going to meetups if you work at client locations. You get to meet many people from other firms and it is a good place to know about other firms and make meaningful connections.
Conclusion
I want to highlight a caveat. I am not suggesting to keep on changing jobs. But these steps will keep you abreast of the happenings within the industry.
You may get ideas you can bring into your own organization and your organization will benefit from your industry knowledge. So these steps help you get industry knowledge and keep your skills relevant.
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