7 Awesome Career Tips Your Manager Will Never Tell You
How to gain industry knowledge and stay relevant in the industry
While starting a career, your immediate manager guides you 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 initially, 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.
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, and the 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 success is your response to those changing circumstances.
Find many mentors
Mentors are the sounding board for you.
Sometimes, verbalizing the problem to a mentor will give you insight into the solution to the problem you are facing.
Selecting an excellent mentor is a challenge. An easier option is to find many mentors.
It will feel less challenging and less risky.
Talking about a problem with many people can give you a more diverse view of solving the problem.
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 second nature. But this is not true.
Communication is the least looked at aspect during appraisal, as the benefits of clear communication are intangible.
Multiple communications 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 implicit assumptions made by someone in the process.
Learning to communicate is a skill. 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 != Your Goal
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.
Subscribe to newsletters and events outside your work.
Undertake training that meets market needs rather than your organization’s needs.
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.
You need to be prepared for any scenario. It could only happen if you are regular in updating your resume.
The simplest approach 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.
Do a quarterly review of your resume.
It allows you to discover gaps and create plans to learn 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 may get a free pizza.
Conclusion
The idea is to go out of your own well and explore about what’s happening around you.
It gives you an insight as to where you are and what opportunities may arise in the near future.
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