Supercharge Your DevOps Career
How to create a breakthrough in your career doing DevOps
A career around DevOps is not only about learning tons of tools and practices.
As well as a successful career is not only a "hacking tech interview" and “sitting on a career ladder” long enough. You are going to want to build that momentum and keep it going in the long run.
Here is a quick intro and a few useful tips on how you can create a breakthrough in your career whether you are a DevOps professional, just considering this path, or just interested in expanding your existing skillset.
The DevOps Shades
Speaking of DevOps in particular, Patrick Debois, author of The DevOps Cookbook, posted an article on DevOps shades saying “DevOps means different things to different people“, which exactly reflects what’s going on in the industry.
A crucial first step to supercharging your career on any level is to understand where exactly you are now and make sure you understand it properly. Then you find the most valuable direction to focus your attention and energy.
How to understand where you are
Figure out what kind of position you obtain right now on the DevOps shades
Make sure you understand your level of seniority in the organization and in the industry
Make sure you understand the essence of what you do and the direct impact it brings to the organization
There is a certain set of questions you can use to ask around in your organization as well as conduct simple research online in order to get answers to these questions.
Where are you heading?
Before conducting a breakthrough you may want to understand what exactly r a breakthrough means for you. Depending on your situation it can be anything from
Enter a new role
Get promoted to the next level within the same role
Switch the role within the same level
Increase your income
These are only a few examples, but in practice, people have similar lists subconsciously and tend to assume that all of them are included by default and that promotion is the only way to grow.
Instead of blindly chasing for promotion I’m going to be sharing techniques and tactics on how to make breakthroughs regularly in different ways, like how to set up a personal system for constant growth, find opportunities within and outside of your organization, and what kind of different ways to accelerate your income are out there today.
Make a plan
After you figured out where you are and where you are heading it’s time to act.
Opinions on developing a strict career plan vary along different experts. Personally, I like to reference Terence McKenna’s “If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.”
There are a handful of books and resources, which describe the step-by-step process of creating such a plan. My favorite ones are The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier and The Staff Engineer's Path by Tanya Reilly depending on which path you pick after Senior - Individual Contributor or Manager (which is a whole topic in itself)
The interesting fact is these books contain a lot of extremely useful techniques even for people on earlier career levels not only senior+. Resources for career builders in the earlier stages might be different, but these are decent. At any level, they help to understand the way managers or staff+ professionals operate, so you can approach them more effectively, starting by finding the best formats of interaction, asking proper questions, and acting in the smartest way. Where is talking about smart …
Act smart
The term “shortcut” has earned a pretty negative connotation, and along with that, I became a big fan of the concept of Smart Cuts, which has its own book SmartCuts by Shane Snow.
After you’ve got a plan for your desired journey, you can apply a handful of useful techniques and tactics developed by other people, who achieved similar results. In a nutshell here are just a few directions I projected onto the topic we are discussing:
Learn how to ride trends (ChatGPT is a great example) and leverage them to your benefit
Understand your learning style, pick resources, and set up regular learning routines
Develop a Bullshit Detector Mindset
Find a mentor and mentor others
Work on personal brand and build a digital presence
Leverage platforms and automation (for everything)
Thank you for reading!
I am going to be creating a series of articles diving deeper into each of the topics from above.
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