Career is a great topic for different kind of guides. Let’s be serious. I wonder how often are you thinking about it? Do you have plan for it or maybe do you have defined some milestones? And finally do you monitor your career?

This topic can be seen as trivial. I have a job which I am happy with. Moreover my position is set there and I am in my comfort zone. First problems occur in situation when you are trying to change your job. It will be more dramatic in each situation when you will be forced to do that. Unfortunately, it is quite common to meet people that are very good in topics strictly tight to their projects during recruitment meetings. Unfortunately, they forget that our reality it is moving forward. And it is moving very fast. Please just look at the last century.

It took only 58 years from first man flight to first man space flight. And we needed only next 8 years to achieve the Moon.

In compare to our whole history we can see that is a very small clip of time. And our life, and especially technological progress is going faster and faster. At the beginning of my career framework version change was something very important. And right now frequency of realising new versions of libraries is so big that you are not tracking it.

Let’s back to main topic – career. Do you have some indicator that will provide information that this is the time you should start thinking about changing your job?

In my case I am doing small retrospective each quarter during which I am answering the following questions:

  • Did I failure in any topic?
  • Did my tasks provide me any new challenges?
  • Am I able to provide list of new and important topics that I have learned during last quarter?

And the moment when I start thinking about changing job is when I answer no for any of those questions. Please remember that sometimes it is possible to change your project instead of changing job. It can help.

It is not always the most important to work with the newest framework. You should note that together with gaining experience it will be easier to switch to new framework. It will be still a new technology but in most cases this new technology will solve issues that you already knew but in a bit different way. You should remember that your value is this experience instead of deep knowledge of another language. Still you need to have possibility for gaining this experience.

An ideal situation is when you are able to work in one team with people who strive for continuous development and are not afraid of failure. Then you can easily leave your comfort zone and explore new areas.

On the other hand you will always find people that had great potential but got stuck in the same place doing the same stuff. It can be quite surprising when you will figure out how often you can meet such people during recruitment meetings. The biggest mistake of them is to miss the moment when they should decide to change their job. And later is only harder.