This part in #careers, I will write about the way to effectively acquire skills which help accelerate your career progress. I wrote about my own progression framework, which consist of 2 major key points — skills and scopes that play a vital part of prohibiting or allowing anyone to grow.
TL;DR: Acquiring skills by doing the real job. Always keep looking for more challenging tasks, projects, and expand scopes. Asking someone more expert to be your mentor and learn from them.
What's wrong with the way of learning
I have done some experiment about knowledge sharing. I shares knowledge, interesting topic, trends to the team regularly (e.g. weekly or bi-weekly). Here's what I did and observed.
I've talk with many people — engineers in my company, candidates in interview sessions, meetups, etc. They are often excited about new technologies, frameworks, tools and eager to learn, try, and talk about it. They may listed those tools as what they have experiences in CV. This is good but I think that over the half of those people are “tools' user” — who know how to use tools but don't understand it deeply.
Complexity
There's types of task's complexity that engineer will have to solve. CRUD or defined business workflow maybe classified as “Clear” so any engineer can simply write a program in a very straight forward way and this type of task is suitable for junior level.
This is going to be a very long post series in #careers. It started from a discussion among my engineering manager team as well as my observation to individual engineers. There's a challenge for anyone who don't know exactly how to advance their career. Even a company provides a guideline, some of them still struggle to actually make progresses.
I'm going to be a stereotype here. I'm pretty sure it won't cover all the cases, it’s just for simplicity and I hope that it should cover at least 70% of the cases.
I divided the problem into 2 sub-problems: Lack of skills and Lack of scope.
Each of these problems could be fixed independently. I'll write more about what I believed a learning process should be. The important thing that you should know is fixing these problems is not a sequential, but it is a cycle to fix a little bit of each sub-problem many times.
