How do you get started?
It’s the time of year where college graduates are starting to look for jobs. I get a fair number of requests for advice on how to best interview, polish one’s resume, etc. How does one get started in this career?
It seems like this is just a problem for new graduates, but it’s not: everyone has the problem of “how do I get started on the next phase?” Do you want to manage? Well, how does that start? Who do you have to ask permission from? How about a particular kind of problem you want to work on? Change fields or focus areas? Get yourself into a better network? Add responsibilities and grow in your role? These are all variants of “how do I get started?”
This is a kind of passive mindset - waiting for permission, or for someone to open the gate. I’m guilty of it too, even at this stage of my career - I find myself waiting to be asked to take on more responsibility or to connect with folks.
But the reality is - you get started, by starting. There’s luck, and connections, involved, of course but people who really want to do something, like coding, find a way to do it. I got hired as a programmer not because I had polished my resume but because I was obsessively writing code. As I’ve grown a leader, sometimes my management team asks me to take on something new, but more often, I spot a problem and just work on it without being asked. The entirety of my current role is me being interested in finding out what can be built using AI as a foundation in an application - just because it seems interesting to me.
That’s not all you need to be successful, obviously. But waiting for permission, or asking someone to open a gate for you, is usually less effective than just finding a way to engage in what you’re interested in, directly. Often in teams and larger organizations, folks are happy to have you volunteer to take something on, particularly if you are willing to take the bad with the good and really help out. It’s a very good way to open the door.