Clarify your focus and what excites you.
Things will constantly change as you progress in your career. If anything, change will appear faster. This means the three truths as a variation of Buddhist teaching. Yes, I know, but these variations work well in the tech industry. I learned them from Katherine Kirk, and have found they always work well.
Everything is in a regular state of change so make it easy to adapt as you learn more. Keep learning new things.
We need to collaborate in our work so talk to people regularly to make it easy to align your work (you can’t work in isolation). You need to work with others, so become comfortable collaborating with people.
Satisfaction is temporary so be aware of possible sources of change (and make it easy to apply changes). That goal you strive for is only a step on the way, so don’t fixate on specifics too much.
Each of these applies as much to the work you do, as well as to how you shape your career.
Beware of passion
Apply passion carefully in your career. It is not a reliable indicator or your skills. Lots of people say chase your passions, but I think this is wrong for career advice.
Passion is what you like, and enjoy. Passion is emotional. This is a danger sign. Passion can be a risk. Emotions can lead you astray, as your judgment is impaired in this space. This is also why there are crimes of passion.
Find and create your craft the way you do what you do, and which you enjoy doing. As you do this be open about what you’re doing and experiment to create opportunities in your work.
Knowing your craft; the way you do your work in a thoughtful and skilled manner is more useful than focusing on your passion. The craft you put into your work is what can set you apart from others who do what you do. Explore this, dive deep into the topic, and it will serve you well.
Keep exercising your critical thinking skills as you need them throughout life. This is where you need to be careful about using tools to reduce your workload. By all means use what’s there to automate repetitious tasks, and to generate rough work, but don’t use it without double-checking its work.
You know how the AI tools work: they generalise from what they were trained on. You need to ensure they apply to your context. Explore what can done with them, and find ways to incorporate them in your work, but don’t trust them completely.
Grow your network of people through experiences at meet-ups and other events so that you know more people than you see at work. You will probably work in multiple companies in your career, so always been meeting people in other companies so that you have more options later.
Find you fun regenerative activity that helps you disconnect from work and refresh your energy. This is where your passion belongs. Have fun, get outside and enjoy nature. You spend enough time in a building, you need to spend time outside to recharge.
Compare your thoughts on this with people in your team
This can be a social activity as you grow your network, and get to know your people a bit better. You could do this over coffee, or lunch, as well as do it in a group too. As you talk to other people, think about what things they mention that you could use too.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration. Also available via Kindle.