Experience – how is it measured?
Vasi is here. Again.
[if you want to listen the songs of the previous doses → the newsletter is on Spotify too ]
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, 10 seconds.
What’s the issue about?
“I have been a developer for almost 6 years now, all of which in the same company.
Due to a set of circumstances, all the projects I’ve worked on for my company have been support projects for third-party products, involving a lot of bug fixing, writing the same tests many times, and a lot of side work with documentation that doesn’t develop IT skills, and very little coding, almost none at all.
As a result, I believe my skills in identifying problems and finding small solutions for bugs are good, but my skills in writing new code from scratch or developing a product are practically non-existent.
I feel like I’m stuck in a dead-end situation. On paper, I have experience, but in practice, I don’t.
I’m considering changing jobs, but I’m worried that the lack of practical experience in coding in a real environment will lead to me not performing well in a new company.
What would you advise me to do? How can I bridge this gap between my skills and the experience I have?”
We recently received this case from an IT person for our Radio Tochka 2 podcast.
I think we should take it with us on the Path of Growth.
The previous dose was about the first stop on that path – How to realize your potential?
Today, the second stop – How is our experience measured?
Enjoy!
Experience is not measured by time
Our experience is not something that can easily be quantified by time. Everyone knows people who, despite having few years of experience in a given field, are much more skilled and knowledgeable than others who have decades of experience.
The more different situations we go through, the more we develop our skills.
Your experience = Diverse situations + Lessons
To transform our situations into experience, one key ingredient is needed – the lesson.
It’s the lesson that allows us to be better each time we find ourselves in a familiar situation. Thanks to what we have already learned, to what we have taken as a lesson, we do not repeat our mistakes.
Our development is not linear
We are used to imagining our career development in a linear way.
If we imagine our career path towards a leadership role, it might look like this: working in a team, building on that with active communication with the client (emails, attending meetings, gathering requirements, communicating issues), expanding our technical knowledge, mentoring one person, then two, and finally reaching the ultimate goal – leading a team. This is the outlined path. This is the plan.
Or, if we step into the shoes of the developer who sent us the case: I want to become a senior programmer, to develop a product from scratch, write code, etc.
However, our development is not linear. To illustrate what I mean, I will use one metaphor:
When you travel to an unfamiliar destination, you turn on your GPS navigation. It maps out your route, and you begin following its directions. But surely, you’ve encountered obstacles along the way that the navigation doesn’t account for – a broken bridge, a newly started construction, or a closed road. Your natural behavior is to find a way around it, to find another path that will get you to your destination.
It’s strange that we don’t approach our career development in the same way. We outline a plan – how to get from point A (junior developer) to point B (senior developer or manager) – and start following it. However, when an obstacle appears, it stops us. We start blaming our company, our boss, the situation in the country, the client, or something else. We simply refuse to accept the reality that our career path may not look exactly like the one we initially mapped out.
There are many different paths to get from point A to point B. Some may slow us down or make it seem like we are moving away from our goal, but if we know what our point B is and why we want to achieve it, this shouldn’t be a problem.
What Hari and I advised the developer who sent us the case
Going back to the case from our podcast, here is the advice that Hari and I gave:
1. Writing code from scratch is actually a small part of a developer’s job.
Developing from scratch happens only at the beginning of an IT project. A much larger portion of its life cycle is dedicated to maintenance, enhancement, and fixing. This includes bug detection, fixing, and troubleshooting… which brings us to 2.
2. Your coding skills are likely at a junior level, but you have well-developed senior-level skills in troubleshooting.
It often happens that we don’t develop the skills we expect or plan to develop on our career path at a particular job. Instead, we end up developing others, sometimes… even unexpected ones.
And once again, a metaphor… directly from my balcony, while drinking my coffee:
We think that our job isn’t helping us grow, and our skills are “drying up.”
However, if we look more consciously, we might discover that we have “cultivated” other new skills that we hadn’t planned.
And these very skills could be incredibly useful to us.
3. Diversify your current work.
What we are required to produce through our work isn’t under our control. But how we do it – that is. So, diversifying work tasks by creating different tools to automate repetitive work can help further develop the skills one wishes to have.
The episode with the mentioned case hasn’t been released yet, but if you want to hear everything we discussed about this case, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel for the podcast Radio Tochka 2 so you don’t miss it.
(*the content is almost entirely in Bulgarian)
And if you’re currently looking for a new job
I recently shared my story of how I got into Tochka 2 – the team we started developing the Soft Skills Pills platform with.
I hope you get something useful for you.
Let’s Wrap Up:
⟹ Our experience is not measured by time, but by the diverse situations we encounter and the challenges we face.
⟹ To turn them into valuable experience, we need to draw lessons and learn from them.
⟹ And sometimes, that means pausing, stepping out onto the balcony, and reflecting on a seemingly neglected flowerpot, where we might be developing skills we hadn’t planned.
⟹ The obstacles on our path to growth can be navigated around.
Because if you know where you’re going, there are many paths to get there.
Stay Healthy, my dear Pill-er!
– Vasi
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