Publish date: 15 January, 2025Can you imagine being in a management position in 10 years? Have you ever wondered if you’re straying from the long-term goal? Or thinking that the skills you have now are not particularly useful for your development in the future, whatever your job will be?
If so, this topic is for you. Today on H512.com, the Job Board for the IT community in Bulgaria, we’re exploring these very questions with our partners at Soft Skills Pills, a platform for IT people to develop their communication and leadership skills and build strong tech teams.
What is today’s topic dedicated to?
“I have been a programmer for almost six years in the same company. Due to a number of circumstances, all the projects I work on are third-party projects and involve a lot of bug-fixing, writing the same tests, a lot of lateral documentation work, and little code writing that doesn’t develop my IT skills.
As a result, my problem-finding skills and finding solutions to bugs are good, but my skills for writing code from scratch or developing a product are virtually non-existent.
I seem to be stuck in one place. On paper I have experience, but in practice I don’t.
I’m considering changing jobs, but I’m worried that my lack of experience writing code in a real-world environment might affect my results in the new place.
What advice do you have for me? How can I bridge this gap between my skills and experience?“
A few months ago, Soft Skills Pills received this question from a listener of the Radio Dot 2 podcast who works in the IT industry. So today we’re looking at a key question for career development – how experience is measured.
Experience is not measured in time
The amount of experience cannot be easily determined with each passing year, for example. Everyone knows people who, despite having few years of experience in a given field, are far more skilled and knowledgeable than others with several decades of experience.
The more situations we go through, the more we develop our skills.
Your experience = diverse situations = lessons learned
To transform situations into experience, the key ingredient needed is lessons learned. They allow us to get better every time we find ourselves in a familiar situation.
Thanks to what we have learned and taken away as a lesson, we do not repeat our mistakes.
Our development is not linear
This is how we used to imagine career development.
For example, we expect the path to a leadership role to go through working in a team, building on that with active communication with clients (emails, meetings, requirements gathering, communication issues), expanding technical knowledge, mentoring one person, then two, and then leading an entire team. This is the path mapped out. This is the plan.
Or, stepping into the shoes of the programmer in this case, that career path might include the desire to develop a product from scratch, write code, etc.
Development is not linear. And to illustrate this, we use the following metaphor:
When you travel to an unknown destination, you turn on your GPS. It plots the route and you just follow the direction. But sure enough, along the way you encounter obstacles that the navigation doesn’t know about and doesn’t respond to – a fallen bridge, a repair, a closed road. Your natural behaviour here is to find a way around it, find another route and get to your destination.
It’s strange that we don’t treat career development the same way. Instead, we draw a plan – how to get to point A(junior developer), then to point B(senior developer or manager), and so follow each next step.
We start blaming the company, the boss, the situation in the country, the client or something else. We refuse to accept the reality that our career path may not look exactly as we intended.
There are many different ways to get from point A to point B. Some of them may slow us down or make us feel like we’re not moving toward the end goal, but if we know what point B is and we want to get there, that shouldn’t be a problem.
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Soft Skills Pills Tips
Vas and Harry have given a few recommendations to the programmer who has contacted them:
1. Writing code from scratch is actually a small part of a programmer’s job
This usually only happens when starting an IT project. A much bigger part of the life cycle of that project is the maintenance, improvement and adjustments. This includes fixing bugs and troubleshooting.
2. Programming skills are probably junior level, but those with technical troubleshooting are more developed
It is often the case that we don’t develop the skills we expected or planned for our career path. Instead, we end up with other skills… and sometimes unexpected ones.
To use another metaphor:
We think our jobs don’t help us develop and our skills evaporate. If we look deeper over things, we may find that we’ve acquired unplanned skills that nevertheless be extremely useful to us.
3. Diversifying current work
What we create at work is not always under our control. But we choose how to do it. Therefore, diversifying work tasks through various automation tools, when possible, can further help develop the skills that an individual wishes to possess.
To summarise
- Our experience is not measured in time, but in the variety of challenges and situations we find ourselves in.
- In order to turn this into a valuable experience, we need to learn lessons.
- Sometimes that means stopping and reflecting that we may have developed skills we hadn’t planned for.
- We can overcome obstacles in our path to growth. If you know where you are going, there are many paths to get there.
This post is based on an issue of the Soft Skills Pills newsletter – A Dose of Soft Skills.
And what skills might you need for your next job? Check out the listings on H512.com’s Job Board and find the right position for you!
