Do you also find it difficult to understand which skill areas you should focus on improving, when working as an engineer? There are so many that it is hard to find out the major ones that can help you take a big leap in your engineering career.
There could be multiple different areas of improvement be it technical and non-technical, but some major improvements can help you grow in your engineering career a lot compared to others. And that is what we are going to talk about in this blog.
In this blog I will show you how I improve myself as an engineer at startup in the most critical areas, that you should never miss if you want to grow in your career.
To understand all of the areas of improvement, I will explain how I am improving on those areas through some examples.
So, without further ado, let’s get started!
6 Areas of Improvement at Work
Even though there are many small or big things that you might have heard from your manager or seniors where you can improve, I will only specify some major ones to not get you overwhelmed. We are going to focus ourselves only on 6 major non-technical improvement areas.
Why non-technical? Because these abilities will help you be better at technical skill as well.
What are they? I have listed them down according to their importance (it is just my opinion) and where you should start from (just a suggestion, not a hard and fast rule) –
- Mindset to learn
- Adaptability
- Time Management
- Teamwork
- Communication
- Integrity
- Leadership
Some of them you might already be aware, and some might be new to you. For some of them you might think whether they are important to you or not.
I am going to explain how I am improving in each of them with examples and why I am focusing on them.
Let’s start with what I think the first and most important one, that is the mindset to learn.
What Will You Learn?
Mindset to learn for an engineer
I think this is the best skill you could have if you are working at a company or more better at a startup.
Startup provides lots of new learnings, feedbacks that can help me improve myself on a long run. If I stay with the mindset of not learning then I will never improve my mistakes and stay the same always.
I am a full stack engineer, even though from the start my focus was AI/ML/Data Science. How I am able to work as a full-stack engineer?
It is because I accept that I don’t know something (React JS, Python for Web Dev) and I need to learn it. Just taking courses were not enough, I had to talk with my seniors to get better at it and understand the way professionals write code bases.
Sometimes requirements also change, and we change the way we did things previously. What do I do in that case? Adapt!
Which brings me to the next area that I am improving.
Adapting as an engineer
Adaptability is another important skill that you should definitely improve if you are not flexible enough to new changes.
Because the software we are building is in the initial stage, it is important for me to learn new things which I am not good at, otherwise I will become obsolete and not be able to contribute much to the team.
The software we are building suddenly needed new AI capabilities and we needed another library (Langchain) to build that feature. I needed to adapt to this sudden change and follow along the official library docs to build the feature because I did not know that library. Did I learn everything about it? No. I just learnt enough to get the job done.
Because I always have limited amount of time to adapt, so I to adapt slowly with the requirements and need.
While I learn all the additional things and at the same time working on my tasks, how do I get enough time?
It brings me to the next area that I am improving, which is time management.
Managing time as an engineer
Time management is a top-rated skill in all professional in all levels. There are thousands of resources sharing how to manage your time.
Deadlines are short, requirements continuously change, new things come, and we use new tech stacks. So, managing my time with learning and applying forces me to learn managing my time in a better fashion.
Managing time is difficult for me many times because requirements change suddenly, and we have to deliver within few days or sometimes within 1 day. As a startup, it is general that the requirements suddenly change as well.
But still, I am able to manage the task within deadline because I break the task down and complete the most important parts first, then go to other tasks.
Sometimes I have to take help from my colleagues to manage and deliver within deadline, for that I need to work my team and communicate effectively to them to delegate the task, cooperate in difficult tasks and deliver things faster.
Working with teams as an engineer
In my job, teamwork is crucial for me to have. Even though the tasks are divided among team members, I need to work on others code, debug it and also add new features on top of it. So, I need to talk with my team and cooperate.
As an engineer in a startup, we are a pretty small team, so it is easy to catch up to other team members, we usually talk on call and also cooperate when working. It build friendship and companionship among us and help us work as a team.
There could be conflicts as well, but I manage them by talking and listening to my team members.
This brings the next important area to improve, that is communication!
Communicating as an engineer
Communication is the skill that I use every day – communicating my task, how much is done, why something is not done, sometimes disagreeing gracefully and telling them upfront that can’t be delivered in the given time etc. Everything needs my communication.
As I am working with a team, manager and seniors, it is necessary that I understand what they are trying to say. Sometimes it is difficult to understand what they are trying to convey, as there is a big experience gap between us, but still with question-answers we usually get clarification.
If I do not get any clarification by asking questions, I start doing something of the task, then I break the things into simple tasks and work on them. It helps me ask the right questions, that will make me build the right thing and not something useless.
When communicating with team members or managers, I need to take responsibility for what O doing and what my team is doing, that is what leadership helps me in doing.
Leading as an engineer
Leadership is not just leading my team, but also taking responsibility for all the mistakes that my team is doing.
Every requirement is something that I understand fully, whether it is some tasks given to others, I try to understand them, so that in times I can help them out.
Sometimes some my team members do mistake, but I try to work with them, and help them out and talk to the manager in case of any miscommunication or if they feel not doing it, I do that on their behalf.
Integrity of an engineer
Integrity is a personal skill, and it is not restricted to a company. It is an essential thing that many people expect for me, and it helps me build trust and good relations.
Being honest with others and specially the manager, if any task is not done, is something I am always doing. As being transparent helps the manager or leaders take better decision and guide me to deliver the tasks faster.
Conclusion
Engineers always need to improve their skills and knowledge to be relevant in their fields. It does not matter which field you are working on; it is true for all of them. Staying the same always, will make you useless in the real world.
Staying relevant in the time of AI is difficult, but improving my soft skills can gives me edge over others and makes me relevant.
I need to always improve from my mistakes and have the mindset to learn from them.
With this, I hope you got an idea about how an engineer improves in their craft and learns non-technical skills as a technical person!
Did you miss the first part of this blog? Read the first part of from here.
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