How can you make sure your computer engineering career stays on track?

Clearly define your goals. Be precise about what you want to achieve. Ask yourself: What exactly needs to be accomplished?. Establish criteria for measuring progress. Define how you'll track and quantify success. Ask yourself: How will I know when the objective is met? Make sure your goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound).

>>Embrace a Mindset of Lifelong Learning: ->Regularly update your skills and knowledge in emerging technologies & tools. ->Attend workshops, webinars, & conferences to stay abreast of industry trends. >>Seek to Publish an Article at Least Once a Year: ->Contribute to industry journals, blogs, or technical publications. >>Keep Doing Short Courses: ->Enroll in short online courses or workshops to acquire new skills. ->Focus on areas that complement your existing expertise or explore adjacent technologies. ->Platforms like Coursera, Udacity, or LinkedIn Learning offer a variety of courses to choose from. >>Build a Strong Professional Network: ->Connect with professionals on platforms like LinkedIn and actively participate in relevant groups.

Start with what you want to do immediately (atleast 1 chapter/assignment) during the process of setting the goal While setting a goal, do basic SWAGs, Keep achievable measureable checkpoints! Keep prioritizing!

>>Enroll in short online courses or workshops to acquire new skills. ->Focus on areas that complement your existing expertise or explore adjacent technologies. ->Platforms like Coursera, Udacity, or LinkedIn Learning offer a variety of courses to choose from. Build a Strong Professional Network: >>Set Clear Career Goals: ->Define short-term and long-term career goals. Regularly assess your progress and adjust your goals as needed. ->Having a clear roadmap will guide your efforts and help you make informed decisions about your career path.

Being a technical person is a gift from mother nature, an engineer should always challenge the past and constantly research with observation and good reasoning. Stay curious and prove to yourself that you are beneficial to the human race. However, not all the effort can result in acknowledgment from other people. Believe me, most of the research doesn't and it shouldn't be a problem for the engineers to keep on learning or keep on trying. Innovation comes with consistent and periodic proposals, many of the engineers focus only on the development but forget the research. You will never know maybe one day, an idea in the past can come in handy.

Internet is a great place to find all sorts of tutorial and online courses to understand pretty much anything, not only software engineering related. However sometimes, it might be much more effective to ask your network; sending a broad question on a linkedin post, joining a Slack dedicated to the stack you're using, looks for local tech meetups in your city etc... Not only can this get some good insights or solutions to your existing problems, but it can also be a great place to discover some new good practices or even make useful connections with people that might, even years later, be part of your professional journey. So beat the cliché of the social awkward engineer, and start networking!