Build your own unique learning plan
Tech doesn’t have the same time-refined pathways that the trades or professions offer. There are no licenses, board exams or articles. You’ll find structured learning in university offerings like Degrees and Diplomas, as well as Bootcamp courses, and this will provide a path for a number of months and years, but after that there is no real path anymore. Many companies have career ladders for software engineers, but they don’t always look the same or match across companies.
The consistency is improving, but while it’s inconsistent, this means that you’ll need to figure out your own pathway to continue your learning and ensure you’re moving up and into roles you want.
What this means practically, is determining on your own, what skills are required by the roles you want to move into, prioritising those skills, and making sure that you’re building, taking courses or reading, etc, to build those skills.
Creating your own learning plan, is your way of creating your custom path to the jobs you want. The process is quite simple:
- Collect about 5-10 jobs that you actually want.
- Extract all skills mentioned, including core skills 2.1 This might include any tools, techniques used like TDD, or core skills like project management, stakeholder management etc. Anything that can be considered a skill, you can extract
- In a table, list all jobs in the rows and all skills in the columns, and build a grid of where each skill intersects with the jobs.
- Create a total counter in the last row. This allows you to rank each skill by mention.
Now that you have your list, pick 3-5 of the top mentioned skills. This is your core profile skill set. If you feel comfortable with all of these, that’s great! But not what we need for a learning plan. Go down the list and pick out the few, until you have a list of 3-5 skills that you are not as comfortable with. At this point you have your learning plan.
Next, you determine what you can do to build that strength in those topics. This might be a course, a book, finding a mentor or coach, talking to a colleague or looking for some conferences in that topic.
Let’s do an example:
For brevity, I’ll use summarised example here, but I’ll include a fuller example file below.
Let’s say there are 3 mid-level engineer jobs I’m interested in. Here are the job specs:
Job 1: Mid-Level Backend Engineer (Data Platform)
A growing data company is looking for a Backend Engineer to help build and scale its data processing platform.
Skills:
- Python
- PostgreSQL
- REST APIs
- AWS
- ETL processes
- Batch processing
- Data modelling
- Communication
- Ownership
- Analytical thinking
Job 2: Mid-Level Full Stack Engineer
A SaaS startup is hiring a Full Stack Engineer to build customer-facing features and improve product usability.
Skills:
- TypeScript
- React
- REST APIs
- AWS
- Communication
- Collaboration
Job 3: Mid-Level Backend Engineer
A fintech company is hiring a Backend Engineer to work on low-latency, high-throughput systems.
Skills:
- Java
- GCP
- REST APIs
- Microservices
- System design
- Problem-solving
- Ownership
- Communication
Here is the table:
| Job | Python | Postgre SQL |
REST APIs |
AWS | ETL processes |
Batch processing |
Data modelling |
Communi cation |
Owner ship |
Analytical thinking |
Type Script |
React | Collab oration |
Java | GCP | Micro services |
System design |
Problem- solving |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Job 1 | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | ||||||||
| Job 2 | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | |||||||||||
| Job 3 | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x |
Here are the top 5 skills:
- REST APIs 3
- Communication 3
- Ownership 2
- AWS 2
- PostgreSQL 1*
*technically any of the 1 time mentioned skills can be here.
Let’s say I’m comfortable with REST APIs, AWS and my communication is good. That’s great, but I should pull more items from the list. As they all have the same number of mentions, I’ll select ones that are interesting to me (alternatively, I could select skills that are in the job I want the most).
So my new list is:
- Ownership
- PostgreSQL
- Python
- Data modelling
- Problem-solving
Now, I can figure out how I can tackle these. For example:
- Ownership - look for a chance to own a small deliverable - can chat to my manager
- PostgreSQL - take a Coursera course on PostgreSQL
- Python - do an exercise every Friday from my Python exercise text book.
- Data modelling - talk to a Data Engineer at work and ask them for advice on this.
- Problem-solving - ask a Senior on my team about how they define this and if they have any resources.
This may seem like a lot of work, but GenAI can help speed this up :)
For a larger example table using real jobs, see: Table