Solidifying Your Career
Once you’ve launched your tech career, the next stage is to solidify it. As you ascend from entry-level to mid-level and management positions, you’ll find that soft skills such as communication become as vital as technical skills.
Soft Skills
Many senior technologists have spent years learning the skills of their chosen profession. That involves many hours of learning new programming languages, staying on top of software updates and setting up projects for fun and profit. Given that focus on technical abilities, it’s easy to sometimes forget that soft skills are an equally vital part of one’s career success.
As you advance through your career, the ability to serve as an intermediary between tech teams and the rest of the company will prove invaluable, especially if you aspire to land on a management track.
Read on for some of the key soft skills you’ll want to look at mastering.
Adjustment
Everyone has some level of work anxiety, but people adept at adjustment can cope more easily under pressure, without allowing current events to negatively influence their behavior and decision making.
Various studies have shown that reframing a stressful situation as a potential source of growth, rather than a threat to well-being, can help people recover from negative situations more quickly and productively.
Accepting Ambiguity
Are you the kind of person who would prefer tasks to be well-defined and predictable? Or do you relish the unknown? People with a high tolerance for ambiguity can incorporate many more viewpoints before coming to a decision, which means they are less dogmatic and more nuanced in their opinions.
Asking for Help
Open people know that asking other people for help won’t make them seem weak or unintelligent. They know their strengths and weaknesses, and they look to others to fill the gaps; learning from someone with more expertise is a great way to grow.
Conscientiousness
Conscientious people commit themselves to plans and make sure they carry them out effectively, despite any obstacles that might arise. They are good at overcoming their impulses and thinking about the wisdom of their decisions for the long term.
Curiosity
Curiosity helps you to learn more easily and build better solutions by understanding the deeper issues behind the problems you’re trying to solve. It also increases your overall job satisfaction and protects you from burnout.
Active Listening
Curious people know that, by actively listening and paying attention to others, they are much more likely to learn and grow. Instead of seeing interactions as opportunities to prove themselves to others, they focus on the interaction itself, because they know that this is a far more enjoyable and productive approach to people.
Courage
Unsurprisingly, the capacity to deal with difficult situations is critical for management positions where you need to act for the greater good, even when you are faced with opposition. At a team level, courage is key if you want to push your ideas forward.
Deepening Your Soft Skills
How do you develop soft skills? It’s an active and ongoing process filled with self-reflection, including:
- Carving out time to listen to your colleagues and team members. Their concerns are valid.
- If your company offers soft skills evaluation and training (and many do), make sure you take it.
- Keeping your feedback polite and constructive, no matter the circumstances.
- Don’t just give feedback. Encourage your colleagues and manager to share how you’re doing as often as possible.
- Relying on your mentor and any informal advisors to help you with your people skills.
- If you’re given the opportunity to shape your performance goals and evaluation, ask that your soft skills be evaluated on a regular basis. Your manager will approve of your proactiveness (and your company may have such criteria in place already).
BOTTOM LINE: Keep the above in mind whenever you interact with managers and team members.
As you advance through your career, the ability to serve as an intermediary between tech teams and the rest of the company will prove invaluable.
As you advance through your career, the ability to serve as an intermediary between tech teams and the rest of the company will prove invaluable.
Making Hybrid and Remote Work Structures Work for You
Organizations everywhere are figuring out how to best re-introduce technologists to the office. Many team leaders and executives have settled on a hybrid work schedule, which means that technologists will split their week between working from home and heading into the office. Still, other companies have decided to let their employees work remotely full-time.
New data suggests that the rise of remote work is shrinking the “geography gap” in technologist pay. Before, where you worked had a huge impact on your salary. But now, with companies sourcing remote talent from across the country, the gap between what technologists are paid in the traditional tech hubs versus smaller cities across the country is beginning to close. As you negotiate salary as a remote or hybrid worker, keep in mind that demand for technologists is on your side; you can absolutely negotiate for high compensation even when working from home.
Whether you’re likely to have a hybrid or fully remote schedule, keep these other tips in mind:
Set Your Schedule
Evaluate which times of day you perform at your best; if you’re more of a morning person, for example, talk with your manager about starting your at-home workday a little earlier than your colleagues. Make sure your manager and colleagues are aware of your start and end times: A clear schedule with set start and end times (you will need to be responsible for keeping to these, especially when remote) are keys to staving off burnout. Set times will also help your manager and colleagues know the best times to interact with you.
Negotiate Your Workload
As companies settle into new routines, you have an opportunity to evaluate your current workload with a critical eye. Are you overloaded? Are your skills better suited to different tasks? Starting remote or hybrid work is a good opportunity to talk with your manager about your daily workflow.
Make a Point to Engage
If you’re working from home either part- or full-time, it’s easy to lose contact with colleagues and even your manager. Go out of your way to interact with other team members, even if it’s lunch or an informal chat. Quick check-ins with your manager can also go a long way.
Practice Self-Care
You’ve probably heard that one of the keys to successfully working from home is ensuring you have an effective sleep and exercise schedule. It’s also important to schedule “micro-breaks” throughout your day, even if it’s just getting up every few hours to take a walk around the block. Encourage meetings to wrap up a few minutes before the scheduled end time, so that people can more easily transition to their next meeting or task.
Create the Ideal Home Office
If you’re going to spend at least part of the week working from home, it’s important that your home office meet all your needs. You can talk to your manager about assistance (including a stipend for furniture and equipment) in making your workspace the best it can be.
Set Your Schedule
Evaluate which times of day you perform at your best; if you’re more of a morning person, for example, talk with your manager about starting your at-home workday a little earlier than your colleagues. Make sure your manager and colleagues are aware of your start and end times: A clear schedule with set start and end times (you will need to be responsible for keeping to these, especially when remote) are keys to staving off burnout. Set times will also help your manager and colleagues know the best times to interact with you.
Negotiate Your Workload
As companies settle into new routines, you have an opportunity to evaluate your current workload with a critical eye. Are you overloaded? Are your skills better suited to different tasks? Starting remote or hybrid work is a good opportunity to talk with your manager about your daily workflow.
Make a Point to Engage
If you’re working from home either part- or full-time, it’s easy to lose contact with colleagues and even your manager. Go out of your way to interact with other team members, even if it’s lunch or an informal chat. Quick check-ins with your manager can also go a long way.
Practice Self-Care
You’ve probably heard that one of the keys to successfully working from home is ensuring you have an effective sleep and exercise schedule. It’s also important to schedule “micro-breaks” throughout your day, even if it’s just getting up every few hours to take a walk around the block. Encourage meetings to wrap up a few minutes before the scheduled end time, so that people can more easily transition to their next meeting or task.
Create the Ideal Home Office
If you’re going to spend at least part of the week working from home, it’s important that your home office meet all your needs. You can talk to your manager about assistance (including a stipend for furniture and equipment) in making your workspace the best it can be.
Think ahead to where you want to be in five years.
Think ahead to where you want to be in five years.
Long-Term Goal Setting
In contrast to the early years of your career, where your professional situation can change in a matter of months, your later career is time to take stock and figure out where you ultimately want to go. In the beginning, you were likely a practitioner focused on executing projects; but as you get older, your thoughts might turn to whether you should take on management responsibilities.
As you plot your career transition from beginning to middle, it’s helpful to ask yourself some key questions:
- What area(s) of technology do you want to specialize in?
- What types of organizations do you want to work for?
- What kind of technologist do you want to ultimately become?
Figuring out the answers to these questions can help immensely with long-term planning. Here’s a worksheet we’ve developed at Dice that can help you think through the needs of your career at the highest levels.
As you solidify your career, it’s important to not only open yourself up to mentoring technology professionals new to the industry, but also ensure you keep finding mentors who can help you plot your career path. If you aspire to senior management, you’ll want to find mentors on that level who can help you handle everything from salary and compensation discussions to the best ways to manage other managers.
Many Technologists Believe They Are Ready for Management
More on Long-Term Goal Setting
Choosing Your Path: Individual Contributor or Manager?
As you progress through your career, you’ll inevitably find yourself at a fork in the road. One path leads to managerial leadership, guiding larger and larger teams as they execute projects. The other is the pathway of practitioners; technologists who opt for it will continue to hone their skills.
Individual Contributor Path
If you’re in the early stages of your career, you may feel inclined to try and climb the proverbial ladder as fast as possible. And why not? The technology industry seems to mint leaders (and billionaires) at an extremely young age.
But slow your roll: Advancing your career requires a lot of thought, planning and, yes, patience. While many technologists follow the practitioner-to-leadership track, many don’t necessarily want to jump into management. Fortunately, many tech companies, having recognized this conundrum, crafted tracks for senior specialists or technical leads who are:
- Extremely experienced
- Vital to the organizational structure
- Have extensive knowledge of their chosen specialty
- Able to advise and mentor others in the organization
These senior specialists aren’t saddled with the same wide-ranging responsibilities of traditional managers. At the pinnacle of their careers, they may become distinguished engineers or fellows. Their contributions are lauded far and wide, as they often direct the company’s technological direction for years to come.
Manager Path
Even at the earliest stages of your career, you may very well have a solid long-term vision: You want to start your own company or become a CTO of an established one.
Given the long-term horizon, you’d be wise to avoid committing to a complex set of checkpoints and endpoints to reach such a goal: There are too many things that could potentially happen in the interim, many of them out of your control. Keep the biggest goals in the back of your mind and focus more tactically on what you can accomplish in the next few months, or even the next year or two:
- Start by setting goals that include management responsibilities.
- Figure out what you need to learn to become a project manager or team leader.
- Work on your “soft skills” such as communication and empathy.
- Stay loose; things may not pan out exactly as you thought, and you could find yourself rising to an unexpected role (such as marketing leader).
If you follow this path, keep in mind that you’re going to end up managing employees and contractors — hundreds or even thousands of them, if you end up in the C-suite.
Individual Contributor Path
If you’re in the early stages of your career, you may feel inclined to try and climb the proverbial ladder as fast as possible. And why not? The technology industry seems to mint leaders (and billionaires) at an extremely young age.
But slow your roll: Advancing your career requires a lot of thought, planning, and yes, patience. While many technologists follow the practitioner-to-leadership track, many don’t necessarily want to jump into management. Fortunately, many tech companies, having recognized this conundrum, crafted tracks for senior specialists or technical leads who are:
- Extremely experienced
- Vital to the organizational structure
- Have extensive knowledge of their chosen specialty
- Able to advise and mentor others in the organization
These senior specialists aren’t saddled with the same wide-ranging responsibilities of traditional managers. At the pinnacle of their careers, they may become distinguished engineers or fellows. Their contributions are lauded far and wide, as they often direct the company’s technological direction for years to come.
Manager Path
Even at the earliest stages of your career, you may very well have a solid long-term vision: You want to start your own company or become a CTO of an established one.
Given the long-term horizon, you’d be wise to avoid committing to a complex set of checkpoints and endpoints to reach such a goal: There are too many things that could potentially happen in the interim, many of them out of your control. Keep the biggest goals in the back of your mind and focus more tactically on what you can accomplish in the next few months, or even the next year or two:
- Start by setting goals that include management responsibilities.
- Figure out what you need to learn to become a project manager or team leader.
- Work on your “soft skills” such as communication and empathy.
- Stay loose; things may not pan out exactly as you thought, and you could find yourself rising to an unexpected role (such as marketing leader).
If you follow this path, keep in mind that you’re going to end up managing employees and contractors — hundreds or even thousands of them, if you end up in the C-suite.
Evolving from Manager to Leader
So now you’re a manager, and you want to keep climbing... perhaps all the way to the CTO seat. What sort of skills do you need? Soft skills remain key the higher you ascend the management ladder. You need to not only come up with your own goals and agendas but figure out how those intersect with the goals of everyone across the enterprise.
Here are just a few ways to evolve your skill set and thinking to reach your leadership potential:
The Art of Active Listening
Good relationships begin with listening. Carve out time to listen to others’ concerns; ask about their goals and what drives them. Once you understand their issues and motivations, you can begin to construct a positive relationship.
Act Like a Marketer
It’s not enough to simply voice your ideas and concerns: You actively need to market them to stakeholders around you. Utilize your empathy, and picture how achieving your ends can benefit those folks on other teams. Once you explain those benefits to them, they’re much more likely to get onboard.
Be Incredibly Customer-Oriented
Whether your customers are external (i.e., people in the outside world who buy a product you help produce) or internal (i.e., teams and stakeholders you serve by building and maintaining the tech stack), it’s important to sit down with them and figure out what they really want, and how you can help them achieve that. No individual or team exists in a bubble; and rising as a leader depends on the results you achieve in conjunction with others.
Be Ready to Manage Difficult Situations
Not every meeting is productive, and not every team member or executive is automatically on your side. Instead of wasting time and energy on direct confrontation when conflicts arise, figure out how to productively manage the relationship. Positivity is key, as well as anticipating their complaints. Make sure your feedback is always a mix of positive things, as well as issues to be addressed in a constructive manner.
The Art of Active Listening
Good relationships begin with listening. Carve out time to listen to others’ concerns; ask about their goals and what drives them. Once you understand their issues and motivations, you can begin to construct a positive relationship.
Act Like a Marketer
It’s not enough to simply voice your ideas and concerns: You actively need to market them to stakeholders around you. Utilize your empathy, and picture how achieving your ends can benefit those folks on other teams. Once you explain those benefits to them, they’re much more likely to get onboard.
Be Incredibly Customer-Oriented
Whether your customers are external (i.e., people in the outside world who buy a product you help produce) or internal (i.e., teams and stakeholders you serve by building and maintaining the tech stack), it’s important to sit down with them and figure out what they really want, and how you can help them achieve that. No individual or team exists in a bubble; and rising as a leader depends on the results you achieve in conjunction with others.
Be Ready to Manage Difficult Situations
Not every meeting is productive, and not every team member or executive is automatically on your side. Instead of wasting time and energy on direct confrontation when conflicts arise, figure out how to productively manage the relationship. Positivity is key, as well as anticipating their complaints. Make sure your feedback is always a mix of positive things, as well as issues to be addressed in a constructive manner.