Your next career plan in IT?!

Hello all,

in the past months, many people reached out to me and raised similar questions as

What should I learn and how can I improve my career?

This demand motivated me to write this article, where I will consolidate the information based on my personal experiences and opinions. (and surely on what my mentors taught me) In this article I will focus on career goaling techniques and some side advices you should know about. We start off with one of the biggest challenges today.

Distraction

There are many brilliant people out there, which are not making any career at all. One of the probably biggest challenges nowadays is - distraction.

Millennials which are also very often named as Generation Y are open-minded and embracing change, and this is what we currently need. Unfortunately, we are seeing an extreme impact of the massive distractions on a daily base. Internet, mobile phones, news-feeds, social media and unlimited possibilities to retrieve information from, ends very often in stagnation.

Your time is limited. Use it wisely.

If you are doing a specific task, a good recommendation is to eliminate all possible factors for disctraction. Shut down your email apps, set your mobile phones to mute and do your daily tasks at the fitting time spans.

Fitting time spans?

You have different tasks to accomplish every day. Some are very challenging and need your full attention and a good mood. Other tasks can be just accomplished after lunch, when you are drinking a coffee and trying to keep your eyes open. Do the important stuff, when you′re in a good mood.

But at what time are you actually in a good mood?

Well - that depends completely on you, as there are people out there which are happy to work at 6am, and others - like myself - who prefer 10pm instead.

Current Situation

The current situation is that due to the Digital Transformation (read my past article on its challenges and how to overcome them) all people working in IT should recalibrate their current skillsets. (Actually not only in IT) In fact, IT was always very agile and changing continuously. So, if you find yourself in a current mood of not being open for continuous and drastical changes, willing to do a complete mindset reset or working with the currently needed agility, then you should always remember that there has been a time where you have choosen IT for a dedicated reason - and that was definitely not because of its resistance for changes.

Learning is the new knowledge!

But why am I saying this with this harsh tone? We are still seeing a lot of Ops people, IT administrators from the very beginning, which are heaviliy trying to resist against the current evolvings into automation, scripting, DevOps and SRE (take a view here on the differentiation to DevOps). Guys, get your heads up and never stop learning or accepting new ways of working!

Assess your current position

In IT, to a very simplified distinct, you will be somehow working in the areas of either Dev, Ops or Business. You should try to place yourself in the following, highly simplified diagram.

In the top areas you will be working deeply technical, whereover the mid and bottom areas are surely more business-focused. In addition to this three areas, you will also either have dedicated people management or not. This represents your current situation. The next step is to set your aims and defining goals starting from your current position.

Setting your goals

You might have read the following quote many times. Though, it is extremely important that you understand it.

But, what does this actually mean?

Even if you take a look at the most famous IT engineers, which made their way up in the career-ladder - all of them improved over time and accomplished it step by step.

You know your current starting point and it is important to set your goals, which should be divided into short-term, mid-term and long-term goals. I always gave one strong recommendation to my mentees, which was to use quantifiable and / or qualifiable measurements to really prove the fulfillment of your goals. In addition, you should always have a vision, a career goal which you normally would not think that you could reach easily. To all of this extent, it is extremely important that you love the things you do. If you have passion for the work you are doing, then it will be much easier!

Short-term goals

These goals should be realizable either in weeks or a month. In this category could fall reading dedicated books, writing specific blog articles or taking some courses like Coursera or MVA. You need to have a good discipline, and in fact, these goals are a good way to prove or train your discipline. Plan for dedicated times, where you want to work on this smaller goals and try to fulfill them in your personally specified time spans.

Mid-term goals

Mid-term goals should extend from quarters up to one year. A typical goal for this timespan can be to become confident with a specific technology and probably proving this by accomplishing certifications. I am not saying that certifications itself are extremely important, but the learnings you invest to accomplish them are.

You would normally combine many short-term goals together to achieve these mid-term goals.

Long-term goals

These goals should be realizable within one up to three years. They always contribute to your overall career goal. Typical goals here are switching roles or companies, getting a promotion or achieving something you have worked very hard for - like writing a book, speaking on stage etc.

Career goal

The previously described structured plan should be supported with an overall career goal. Ask yourself in which areas you want to work in 5 or 10 years. Which job role do you want to aim for as an overall long-term aim? Do you want to have people management or not; keeping technical, becoming an architect or moving yourself into more business-focused jobs? All of the previous goals should somehow contribute to your overall career goal and moving you in the right direction.

Agility

One thing to know about, which I think should be pretty clear though - your goals may change over time and you will need to continuously recalibrate them. Especially the goals for a longer distance will change frequently. Today, you are desiring a deep-dive technical role as a long-term goal, but this may change over the years. In contrast to this are the short-term goals, which you should always try fulfill, as these ones will train your discipline to accomplish your tasks in a defined time span.

Quintessence

Till here, we have now summarized the learning approaches for your goals and how you can keep track of your career plans. The most important thing - overall - is, be happy with the work you are doing. If you love the work you do, you will do it with passion and in the end, you will reach your goals.

What misses now is an overview of the current situation in IT and the Digital Transformation with its impact on highly needed and also abondonished skillsets. In the next article I will provide some recommendations about technologies, programming languages, certificates, learning materials and long-term goals you can and should aim for.

I hope you enjoyed it and it was somehow helpful - write me a comment on what you think and if you are using a completely different approach.

All the best,

David das Neves