While gainfully employed, one often grows greatly through their work. In the best situations, one’s daily work challenges them to use and grow the skills they currently have and gain new skills while producing great results. But this should always be just one part of how a person grows.
Anyone who has been in a job transition knows the urgency to grow through other avenues at that time. Without the ability to point to currently used skills or results gained from them in a work setting to show recent growth while in an interview, one must highlight what they are doing to grow outside of there. Many of these also apply at all times, and they give us multiple ways to grow.
Here are the four best ways I have found to continue your professional growth outside of what you may do in a work setting:
Take a course. The great thing about this is that university courses are now far from the only option for this, especially since their offerings might not help a lot of professionals (as is true for me). There is training offered by companies and consultants who are specialists in a given subject area or by organizations like local IEEE chapters. Then there are the shiny new options today that were not there many years ago: online learning centers. From Udemy to Coursera to Udacity to The Great Courses and more, there are a number of additional options for finding courses you can take to keep growing. Udemy is my personal favorite, as I have completed over a half dozen courses there and have a few more presently in the queue. For certain subject areas, some of these may prove better than others.
Attend a conference. With many conferences now having virtual options or being entirely virtual, it is now possible to attend ones that may have been out of reach before due to travel and other costs. In-person is still ideal, but you can still attend educational sessions on many subjects and connect with others in your field to keep growing. Additionally, most of the time the sessions are available well after the event, so you can watch them at a more convenient time than the days the conference is being held. As examples, earlier this year I attended the Embedded Online Conference, will check out some sessions from Startup Boston Week this week, and take in a couple of days of sessions at the combined Embedded Linux Conference and Open Source Summit next week.
Become part of a lunch & learn at your office, or lead one. When you and perhaps a few colleagues want to learn a subject that is well-covered in a book, why not get a few of you together on a regular basis and go over the material? There is more to it than I can touch on here, and it doesn’t have to be done in an office setting, but this can be a great option for learning. This can also help you better connect with colleagues you may not know very well at first, and in the event you lead one, helps develop leadership skills as well. It also brings us to the last option, which is…
Read a book. Whether you have a few colleagues readily available or not, self-learning via books is always an option. It can also set you apart if you are in software like I am – legendary embedded systems engineer Jack Ganssle shared a while back that the average software engineer consumes one technical book per year, a startling number. While expecting that number to be in double digits might be a bit much, only consuming one per year seems quite low. Reading multiple books at different paces is fine, too – after all, in school you have to handle multiple subjects at each time.
Growth naturally comes from our everyday work, but we should never use that avenue alone. Is there another way to grow that you use besides these?