By Poornima Vijayashanker
Last week I was on a call to prep for a panel that I’ll be on next week at the LA Tech Week conference. During the call someone asked the question, “How do you keep staying relevant?”
This wasn’t the first time I’d been asked this question. In fact, someone asked me that same question back in March when I was speaking at Pearl Hacks in North Carolina.
I figured it was time to answer it because it’s probably on your mind too!
We all care about staying relevant in our careers, but it can be a challenge because we have a limited number of hours in our day. The added demands of family and our existing jobs makes it even harder.
Avoid Getting Pigeon-holed into Projects
As someone who has two degrees one in electrical engineering and the other in computer science, I chose to integrate the two by building CAD tools right out of college.
But as the lowest engineer on the totem pole I was coding in C, building shrink-wrapped software, and responsible for testing all the code that went into production. While the rest of the world was moving to web-based software products.
Not the most glamorous role building cutting-edge technology like I had hoped for, but it was a good start.
About a year in, I was concerned that I was getting pushed into a role that I didn’t want early on in my career, but it was my first job. What was I going to do march up to my boss and tell him I needed something meatier? I didn’t even know what meatier meant at the time.
So I figured, I’d explore other areas. I got a sense of what was out there to understand what “staying relevant” really meant. I started taking classes outside of work on graphic design, software design, and security.
As I was taking these courses, I realized that I’d have to make a choice: hardware or software. I chose software.
As I was making the choice I did worry about job security and advancement, but I made the choice because I was overwhelmed with the amount of information I’d have to learn in one field let alone two!
Even after I got laid off from my first job, the training I had put myself through paid off. I was able to help build a prototype for a young startup.
As I got lured into startup land I became more enamored with business, product development, and wanted to learn more about building companies.
Five years ago, I again shifted my focus. I stopped writing code everyday in order to build a business, but I started to explore other skills.
Hone Skills That Can Translate to Various Roles
The first thing I needed to do as a company founder was sales, but I sucked at sales big time. I sucked so much that I even sucked at hiring someone to do sales!
I couldn’t take it anymore. If I was going to have a cashflow positive business, then I needed to improve my sales skills. I came across the Sandler Sales System, and took a sales course. That’s when I really began to understand how to do sales effectively.
Now I wouldn’t hire myself to be a VP or Sales, but I can proudly say that I’ve closed sizable 5-figure deals.
For the past couple years I’ve spent time honing my sales skills, and the good news is that it applies to pretty much any role!
I also went back to writing and speaking more. This year, I gave myself two sizable side projects: speaking at TEDx, and writing my first book. Having to do both has improved my writing and public speaking skills.
If you don’t have the luxury of working for yourself then you can also propose projects at work to help you explore and hone new skills.
Rubbing Off the Rust
While I haven’t been writing code every day for the past 5 years. I have managed to keep my skills semi-sharp by doing technical interviews, and training newbies at hackathons.
I will honestly say I haven’t kept up with every single new coding language that’s come out.
The good news is that programming hasn’t fundamentally changed since the punch card era. Many of the new languages and frameworks are just replacing old inefficient methods, as a results, it’s actually gotten way easier to program!
And I still know the basic design patterns, how to debug, refactor, and understand how to architect and scale software.
Just like sales, I recently realized that I really sucked at front-end development. I was being really inefficient, and needed to hone my skills to design landing pages for my products. So I most recently took Nathan Barry’s Photoshop for Web Design and I’m currently working on Sean Fioritto’s Sketching with CSS.
Stick to the Core
It may seem like I’ve managed to amass a lot of skills over the past 10 years. But I’ve actually been really picky, and my basic criteria is that it has to feed the hacker/creator in me.
Hence, I don’t do things like file my taxes and you won’t catch me drafting up legal docs! I find people who are better at it than me, and outsource the bulk of that work. And even for the things I do start I partner with people who are better at it than me to help me refine my work.
For those of you who are technical or evaluating technical career, here’s a mini-course I put together earlier this year called How to Evaluate Your Technical Career Track.
Now I want to know, how have you managed to stay relevant in your career? What are some strategies that have worked for you and you would recommend to others? Let me know in the comments below.
