How to improve your career — Part 1 novices guide

Improving your career is not an easy task. With new technologies emerging every day and with expectations raising while you are getting more experienced, it’s easy to give up. It’s not enough to work hard you have to work smart too, to understand and to stay on the top.

Here are some tips that helped me become a senior software engineer and team lead. These are also the advice I give to my colleagues. I can proudly say many become notable individuals and productive team members. I believe that the principles of becoming an expert are pretty much the same in every industry and that these concepts can be applied in many similar circumstances.

I’ve divided these principles into two categories. For novices and for more experienced ones (part 2) because I think there are the right time and right order to take these steps.

Tips for novices

Learn from experts — This one is, but I’ve seen a lot of people making mistakes even on this step. You should learn from your mentor (senior colleague or professor). If you want to become an expert, you have to be a good student and a good listener. Take notes. Ask questions. This is the point where a lot of novices have failed. They haven’t asked questions. They thought it is a sign of weakness. It isn’t. Many not so talented beginners outshined the talented ones because they felt comfortable not knowing everything and asked for help when they were stuck.

Learn new stuff — Find mentors outside your company. Read books and blogs, find online courses, go to meetups. Because there is too much content do ask for a recommendation. Or start a side project. Here you can do whatever you want, so learn something new and fun.

Set small goals — When I’ve got my first job the primary goal was to become a senior software engineer. It took me years to get to that level. Because I was young and inexperienced, I thought being a senior engineer was the next logical step. It isn’t. There are a lot of points in between and so many different paths to get to that title. There was a lot of frustration for years because my skill wasn’t on the desired level. One thing I didn’t know was that I have been on the right track and that frustrations were pointless. What I should have done was setting better goals. When you make a plan with small goals you’ll have a feeling that you are in the right way, you won’t have frustrations, and it will boost your confidence. Becoming an expert is an excellent goal, don’t get me wrong, but it is a longterm goal no matter how smart you are.

Knowing what you want — I’ve seen a lot of developers that started on Java than moved on to Swift and after that to JS. And they did all that in a year or so. Novice should have focus. It’s not easy to switch areas of interest in that part of a career, and you will lose precious time. Also if you create a habit of doing so, you’ll never become an expert. The market is very raw, and there aren’t a lot of companies that will hire a novice with 3+ years of experience or one that is older than 30 years. There will always be a job waiting for an expert, but not the jack of all trades.

Create your own tools — In development, we tend to use a lot of tools created by other engineers. This can be good practice, but not always. You should try to create your own solutions as often as possible. You will learn much more from implementation than re-using other people’s work. And one day you’ll come to a situation where you can’t find any help. The primary goal is to make yourself independent so you can tackle any problem you come across.

Conclusion

These are advice I wish someone told me at the beginning of my career. The irony is someone probably did, but I didn’t listen. I had to figure out all by myself. All of these ideas are simple and well known, but it’s easy to get sidetracked when you are young and inexperienced.

Sometimes you can’t do this stuff. Your mentor will quit the job, and you’ll stay on your own, the boss will move you from one project to another so you can’t have the focus, or there won’t be enough time to make your own tools. That’s the situation you have to go with the flow and step up your game. Those are also the skills you want to have. But that doesn’t stop you from implementing ideas given above outside the job or when the time is right.

In part two of this series, I will give the tips for more experienced ones. But until then go through basics again. To get to and to stay on the top you have to master these first.

Thanks for reading :)

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