How Side Projects Can Improve Your Personal Career & Care ??

The other day, I was sitting in a classroom in the Georgia State University - J. Mack Robinson College of Business listening to several engineering professionals from companies like Google, Uber, and the Home Depot speak to a number of students enrolled in one of CodePath ’s new for-credit course offerings at the university preparing them for meaningful careers in tech .

For junior engineers seeking entry into the tech workforce, finding a clear path to a good job is extremely daunting. According to Layoffs.fyi over 263,000 tech workers were laid off in 2023. A little more than 3 months into 2024 and over 57,000 more have been laid off as well. Many early career professionals are seeking guidance from senior engineers and organizations like CodePath to understand how to navigate the tech industry and yesterday’s presentation dove deep into the topic of career development and the resources necessary for job-seekers’ success.

Amid the typical recommendations career advisors give any young professional preparing for the workforce — Develop your resume, Create a LinkedIn Profile, Practice your public speaking — there is a uniquely large emphasis for tech workers to develop a portfolio of work that is demonstrable of their talent.

Enter the side project.

Side projects by and large are an expected part of a candidate’s application in the tech industry, and for good reason. The best way to evaluate whether an engineer is capable of working on your company’s software is to see practical examples of their work with your company’s preferred technology. GitHub is one of the tech world’s most important resources, and the company accurately boasts on their website that more than 100 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 420 million projects.

Projects on GitHub range from enterprise code your favorite Silicon Valley unicorn is developing internally to hobby projects started by curious students learning their first lines of code. When a candidate prepares for an interview for a technical role, one of the first things tech recruiters and hiring managers look for is a GitHub link to see a breakdown of the sort of projects, programming languages, and industry frameworks that candidate has engaged with.

One of the things I find most interesting about our industry’s enthusiasm for side projects is that while they definitely serve as a means of showcasing one’s learning and development while job-seeking, side projects also inevitably lead many folks, myself included, into valuable technology entrepreneurship or academic research. Companies like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Craigslist were all started as side projects.

Entrepreneurship is difficult and yet more than 5 million businesses were created last year. Small businesses employ nearly half of the entire American workforce and represent 43.5% of America's GDP.

The tech world buzzes with exciting news everyday about the latest startups to raise funding, newly developed groundbreaking technology and the moves larger companies are mounting to secure their market positions. But beyond bolstering the economy with new businesses, there are many other reasons why side projects are valuable both to organizations and professionals of every background. Here are a few:

Side projects help professionals relieve the stress of imposter syndrome by providing them leadership experience and evidence to their own capacity

Imposter syndrome is characterized as the feeling that one doesn’t belong in a particular space or role. This identity crisis can become career-threatening to new professionals as well as to career transitioning folks with little professional experience in a particular subject area. One of the valuable things projects do is that they give you an opportunity to practice those skill sets and experiences in ways that can help you mitigate these feelings of being undeserving, incapable, or fraudulent in a particular area. Speaking from experience, almost 10 years ago, I took a semester off school to take a mobile development bootcamp with MobileMakersEdu led by Don Bora , a veteran technologist and engineer passionate about bolstering educational pathways for people in Chicago starting their journey in tech. At the time I was very new in the tech space and was already battling imposter syndrome given my experiences learning at the time. I thought it was almost impossible that in 8 weeks I’d be able to feel completely confident in my skills as a programmer but the academic experience at Mobile Makers, thoughtfully designed by people like Jessi Chartier and Stacy Sniegowski , involved us building over 40 projects in the short span of time — and yes many of them made it onto my GitHub. I was an entirely different version of myself after that program and could not find any excuse to calling myself a mobile developer because I just had that much more experience doing the job. This is why side-projects are so awesome. Regardless of what the role is, getting practical experiential learning helps demystify what you are capable of doing. Whether you’re looking to dabble into a technical or non-technical field, identifying opportunities to do so with project based learning can improve your outcomes. This is especially true for folks considering entrepreneurship as a next step in their professional pursuits. Instead of quitting your day job to take a huge risk on your future you can work on a new venture as a side project until you see significant signs of traction. That’s one of the reasons why my team and I at Floreo Labs make space for professionals looking to explore creative passion projects and entrepreneurship in easier ways.

Side projects help professionals develop better time management and productivity skills

In order to work on a side project you need to have time on your side. While many of us wish we could freeze or extend time to give us more opportunity to do what we love, the reality is that our schedules can get pretty full as they are. In fact, a study by Workfront found that 58% of American workers are too busy with daily tasks to consider doing anything beyond their to-do list for today.

Committing to working on something on your off schedule from school, work or family-life necessitates a diligent regimen of scheduling and time awareness. For many, this means mastering their calendar and finding ways to better prioritize and manage tasks — both of which are skills tied to higher levels of executive functioning and organizational performance. Productivity is big business and software providers like Asana , monday.com and Atlassian (Trello and Jira) all have multi-billion dollar market capitalizations for their solutions designed to support project management workflows for millions of teams. These platforms all aim to increase the productivity of their users but besides the increase in work-based performance outcomes, studies have also shown that time management had a 72% stronger impact on wellbeing — life satisfaction specifically. Not every side project is a passion project, but one can definitely make the case that learning how to better allocate time to the things you care about whether for life or work, will have a net positive outcome on your wellbeing.

Side projects help professionals feel a greater sense of psychological empowerment that facilitate org cultures of belonging and innovation

It would be wise of leaders to encourage more of their staff to pursue active side projects outside of their normal job function. Despite conservative thinking that side projects would detract from the “commitment” employees make to their primary roles, researches at the University of Oregon found in a 2021 study of over 300 employees that "psychological empowerment from side hustles enriches full-time work performance”. Again, not every side project turns into a side hustle, but even if they don’t they still have tremendously positive outcomes for both employees and organizations. This was exemplified at the student event I attended at GSU, where an employee at Home Depot spoke to how the company organizes internal hackathons for staff to work on new projects outside of their typical role to both facilitate learning and development as well as source innovative ideas from their staff on ways to improve overall organizational wellbeing. Not only was this engineer proud of the side projects he was able to work on, the company structured this passion in other ways that directly impact their bottom line. Many innovative companies have frequently benefitted from side projects created by passionate employees so much so that they dedicate specific amounts of time to staff side-project creation. Other notable examples are 3M which for over 70 years has encouraged employees to allocate 15% of their time to “proactively cultivate and pursue innovative ideas that excite them , as well as Google where employees historically were given 20% to a similar mission. This spirit of innovation paid off for both companies with 3M creating hit consumer products like the Post-It Note, and Google being able to launch vital services like Gmail and Google AdSense.

As a coach to engineers and entrepreneurs I know the value of a good side project. So much so that I continue to strive to work on some myself for all the reasons I mentioned. In my experience some of the most rewarding learning and career development has come from the activities I pursued initially as side projects: Floreo Labs as an innovation lab developed out of the many part-time projects I was working on with members of my community interested in building products and social enterprises of their own, becoming a member of the faculty at Lehman College happened because I originally was mentoring and teaching CS students on the side of my studies at Tufts University , and joining CodePath as a career liaison came from my personal time contributing strategy to meaningful workforce initiatives in different ecosystem across the country. All of these amazing initiatives were catalyzed by my desire to learn and my willingness to put myself in the driver’s seat of these unfamiliar experiences via smaller projects. That’s why sitting in the room at GSU and witnessing the next generation receiving that same advice brought a smile to my face. Who knows what exciting developments are destined in a future where more people are supported in these project based initiatives and career pursuits. Developing strategies for this is my current side-project (a passion project and side-hustle as well lol) so feel free to reach out if you have any questions! I’m excited to support any one of you interested in that work because it’s exciting what we can build together!

From the lab with love,

— Cam

I’m an engineer, product manager, educator and consultant making it easier for people of all professional backgrounds to work on socially-impactful projects. Follow / Contact me for cool opportunities to volunteer on, launch your own, or invest in awesome projects improving the wellbeing of people and the planet ??