Year Five
Focusing on longevity
By the fifth year of your tech career, you’ve likely decided that you’re in this for the long haul. Whereas earlier in your career it might have paid to play things a little more loosely, you’re now in the position to think about things in a much more long-term way. With that thinking comes the need to build a solid foundation for the future. How do you go about doing that? Here are some ideas: Focus on longevity, consider whether to jump career tracks and begin planning for a potential advance into senior management. In addition, you’ll want to continue growing your skills and maintaining your happiness.
WORKSHEET
Settling Into Your Tech Career
Download and use this worksheet as you navigate Year Five to jot notes and answer questions that will help you make decisions about your own career.
Ways to Focus on Longevity
Build your long-term network
It’s never a bad time to give your network a “soft audit.” During your tech career, your list of contacts has likely swelled to include everyone from former bosses to current side-gig clients. Some of these may prove more valuable than others for your long-term career; prioritize those, and make a point of keeping in touch (via email, in-person meetups, calls or whatever other methods work best for you) and offering your help when needed. Also, it’s important to stay open to new contacts.
More advanced “soft skills”
Whether you’re actively pursuing a management track or focused on becoming a master of your specialization, you should refine your “soft skills” to reflect your evolving position in the tech industry.
- Hiring Well: Learn how to judge whether someone would be truly effective on your team. Do they have a positive attitude? Are they engaged with your mission? Do you see eye to eye on the team’s ultimate goals?
- Talent Optimization: Once you make a great hire, focus (as the best leaders do) on how to help that person become as successful as they possibly can. For individuals, this takes effort and a consistent attention on personal and professional development. If you can put in this level of effort for your full team (and drive results), leadership in your organization will take notice.
- Impactful Coaching: Great coaching takes a good deal of empathy and active listening. You need to understand what someone’s going through, as well as their current blockers, and come up with effective solutions for moving them forward.
- Strategic Delegation: Effective managers know they can’t do everything themselves; they have to delegate responsibility to others on the team. You need to communicate goals and expectations clearly and learn to trust that stakeholders and team members know what they’re doing.
With the rise of automation and AI, many mid-career tech professionals are wondering how best to “future proof” their careers. The answer is simple: focus on skills and career tracks that require intuition, creativity, teamwork and problem solving, which are all things that software has a hard time replicating. Management involves many of these skills, as do many senior developer and engineering positions. As you advance in your career, soft skills and experience increasingly come into play.
Jumping Tracks
It’s a scary but exciting prospect: At some point, you might want to jump to a slightly different career track within tech. For example, many data scientists have decided to pursue a job working with AI and machine learning. But how can you make this leap without losing your career momentum?
The first step is to create a personal learning plan; you’ll need to demonstrate you have the necessary skills. Make a list of your core competencies, as well as those demanded by your new specialty or discipline; if many of them overlap, it’ll reduce your learning time. You should make a time and resource commitment to acquire the knowledge you lack.
Once you’ve mastered the fundamentals of your new discipline, you have a higher likelihood of maintaining your current salary and job title if you stay within your organization. However, if you’re jumping to something particularly cutting-edge, such as AI, there’s enough demand out there to spark interest from other organizations that could meet your compensation requirements. Startups, smaller companies and even freelancing opportunities could all prove equally good ways to start out in something entirely new.
Advance Into Senior Management…or Focus on Mastery
When you’re leading smaller teams in the early stages of your career, you often have tactical insight into what each team member is doing. As you advance in your career, though, teams get larger, and it’s more difficult to keep in-depth tabs on all individuals. This is where those more advanced “soft skills” come in: You want to create teams full of self-reliant, largely self-operating tech professionals.
While it’s important for senior managers to grasp the technical aspects of their work, running huge teams also hinges on being something of a generalist: Your ability to plan, manage talent and lead effectively is key, while you can leave the specialized work to those who report to you. You’re there to uplift the team, provide a long-term vision and listen effectively.
For those technology professionals who don’t want to head into senior management, consider whether your current company (or a desired future employer) offers Individual Contributor (IC) leadership tracks (such as Staff, Principal and Distinguished) as well as Architect tracks. These pathways give tech professionals with advanced skills the opportunity to contribute mightily to their organization’s research and development, and they’re ideal for those who don’t necessarily want to end up in a less-technical leadership position.
Gauge Your Happiness
The pandemic has left many re-evaluating their work-life balance. Fewer and fewer people want to spend 100 hours crunching away at an app or service, even if they’re working for a startup and there’s considerable equity at stake. As they evaluate their own careers (and decide whether to switch jobs), they’re wondering what will make them truly satisfied: A flexible schedule? Growth opportunities? The chance to work on projects that impact the world in a meaningful way?
By the fifth year of your tech career, you have the skills and experience to make some decisions about what you truly want — and you have the leverage to make them happen.
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