#CareerDevelopment #Upskilling #AIJobs
Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the constant pressure to upskill in order to advance your career? It seems like everyone nowadays is talking about the importance of learning new skills and staying ahead of the curve. As a junior software engineer with 8 months of experience, I can totally relate to the feeling of being stuck between wanting to advance in my career and not knowing where to start.
Identifying the Problem
I keep hearing everybody around me saying to upskill or be left behind. They say to learn AI. Okay. That’s easier said than done because I’m learning all these AI knowledge but I’m not being paid for it nor have the credentials to jump ship to “AI jobs”. So my question is, how exactly do you even upskill when my job is literally web dev?
Practical Solutions
1. Set clear Goals: Before diving into upskilling, identify what specific skills you need to develop to advance in your career. This could be learning a new programming language, mastering a specific technology, or gaining certifications in a particular field.
2. Utilize Online Learning Platforms: Platforms like Coursera, Udemy, and LinkedIn Learning offer a wide range of courses on AI, machine learning, and other emerging technologies. Take advantage of these resources to upskill at your own pace.
3. Seek Mentorship: Reach out to senior software engineers or professionals in your desired field for guidance and mentorship. They can provide valuable insights and help you navigate the process of upskilling effectively.
4. Apply New Skills at Work: Look for opportunities to apply the skills you’ve learned in your current role. This could involve taking on new projects, volunteering for cross-functional teams, or proposing innovative solutions to existing challenges.
Stay Motivated and Persistent
Remember, upskilling is a journey that requires dedication, perseverance, and a growth mindset. It’s normal to feel overwhelmed at times, but by staying focused on your goals and taking consistent actions towards upskilling, you’ll be well on your way to advancing your career in the tech industry.
Share your own experiences and challenges in upskilling in the comments below. Let’s support each other in our career development journey! 🚀🌟
What responsibilities do you have in your role and what technologies do you use?
They’re dumb and you should ignore them. AI is the new bootcamp scam.
Try to branch out and do some non-web dev since it pays the least. I’d say know both React and Angular and add on your choice of Python, Go aka Golang, Java or C#. Then you can apply for better paying fullstack jobs. If your company uses AWS or Azure then learn that.
You’ll always be teaching yourself on the job in SWE. Ideally it’s what you have to use on the job since no one is going to train you anyway and work experience with the technology is everything.
I say, choose to be happy.
When you are happy you will gladly learn skills that have potential to increase happiness.
When you are happy things outside of work are more enjoyable, adding to being happy.
When you are happy work is less stressful, and probably more fun.
From a company perspective:
* happy people are better to work with. Making you more valuable.
* happy people do more work, making you more valuable.
* happy people do higher quality work, making you more valuable.
Money doesn’t make you happy after a certain amount. But happiness will generally make you more money, eventually.
Now for the downvotes. 😉
You position your work in a way that you keep learning while on the job. This could mean talking to your manager about certain projects, transferring teams, or finding a new job.
Here it my interpretation of what they’re saying.
Work hard while you’re younger and blast through some ranks. Chill when you need to chill. Blast when you can. It’s a lot easier to move up quickly when you have the time to do it.
Not a strategy for everyone, but area under the curve is better the longer you can keep your foot on the gas.
That said, take care of yourself, have fun, spend moment, take breaks. Listen to what you need.
Learn in your own time.
If AI is that easy to get into, everyone would be an AI engineer.
From what I can tell there is a spectrum.
Like in the 2010s when people called themselves Data Scientists when all they do is apply linear regression on a large table, or say the work they do is Big Data then the data set fits on a thumb drive but they are using spark, so that makes them data engineers, people today could be an AI engineer by writing new GPTs (which by the way takes no coding), or someone could be really good at prompt engineering and get a lot of value out of AI. Not saying those things aren’t useful but I wouldn’t try to chase that as a software engineer.
On the other hand, there are engineers with PhDs with the math and budget to come up with new models. I really don’t think many organizations have the need nor the budget for that kind of AI training. Most companies I guess do need LLMs but they can make their own custom GPTs or whatever and call it a day.
So learning AI – yes, sure. But what does that mean? I legit don’t think I can play around with PyTorch for a weekend and be able to say that I’m an AI engineer.
How do you upskill?
Simple, work work work.
If your job allows it, learn AI on work hours.
If not, it’s gonna be your free time.
Bottom line is, don’t work for your current job, work for the job you want next.
A good rule or thumb to train for another type of job while not getting fired : spend 20% of your work hours on upskilling towards AI. It works in most jobs if you can produce quality work on the 4 other days.
Who around you is telling you to learn AI??
“Learn AI.”
Might as well go ahead and “learn medicine” while you’re at it
For me, upskilling is pretty much making yourself more desirable to companies.
AI is the new blockchain where people are applying it
or making startups that use the tech for absolutely no reason at all other than to use the buzz word to ride the hype train.
You should upskill by doing what people either are not as easily able to do or maybe even don’t want to do. Or, if you’re smart/lucky you can upskill by predicting the next big trend and getting on early.
There’s been so many trends in CS from data science to blockchain and now AI that unless you’re one of the best or early to the trend, you’re too late to the party and the fields will get oversaturated.
> How exactly do you even upskill when my job is literally web dev?
You’re going have to pretend to be a senior engineer and pitch an idea to management about integrating AI to the website and write out all of the design aspects that go into it. You may not get properly compensated but you’ll get the real world experience needed to jump ship.
As for taking your job seriously, know that a non-trivial amount of the industry is exploitative. These places will make you work more for less pay for a variety of reasons. As a junior they might be your only option or they may be hard to recognize but as you get experience and interview at more places you’ll have more choices and notice how they treat their employees.
I wouldn’t worry about AI. If you’re a web dev, learn to be a better web dev or full stack dev. Focus on skills that the no code tools can’t do yet. Use some AI tools if you can and it interests you. These skills will develop over the years so eventually you might develop specialisms in data engineering, AI, embedded systems, safety critical software, architecture, or or any number of other things
i heard welding is the next big thing
Learning skills has a compounding interest effect. You learn more now and it leads to higher paying jobs that leads to even higher paying jobs and that leads to earlier retirement, or a chill job
However, you have to balance this with not burning out. You won’t get far if you’re unpleasant to be around and hate your job
Basically, find a nice balance for you
Everyone says to upskill but nobody is saying to go abandon your current skillsets to take AI jobs. If you only have 8 month of experience you still have a decade to get better at whatever you’re currently doing.
You don’t need to get an “AI job” but you do need to learn to effectively utilize AI coding tools to be a more productive web dev.
You can only do what you understand right? Don’t pressure yourself into thinking maybe you are left out. You will eventually figure out what you want to do in life and taking steps after that realization is super important as you will work hard without stress and uncertainty.
Learn OF
Wtf is learn ai?
Do they mean, “go get a PHD in machine learning?” Because those are the people that are actually working on LLMs
You can somewhat fake it til you make it and get hired to do work above your punching level if the company has greenfield development.
I got hired at a medium sized company to work in data warehousing. I had no experience with this but didn’t say I *didn’t* have experience with it. They didn’t really know the keywords they were looking for. In that job I ended up developing a data warehouse, data lake, streaming services framework, UI management layer. I later realized most of it was probably an imperfect implementation (because I had no one guiding me and had to figure everything out on my own). However, the company didn’t have enough money to hire experts to tell me I was wrong, and the solution worked “well enough” that no one questioned it.
So you can either convince people to let you build something at your current job (sometimes called ‘resume driven development’), or you convince a company to let you build a new greenfield project when they are ignorant of the technology. You then use that experience to get the job you really want at a company that’s using the technology properly and at a bigger team.
I no longer do data warehousing though. Turns out it largely pays less than standard enterprise development.
Write a sorting algorithm with CSS and demand to be made CEO.
It’s unpopular here but when you’re new (especially if you’re new and young) you should discount work-life balance. You want to make a good first impression, leverage that into better opportunities, etc, and there is no other better time in your life than then to do it.
Just continue learning and have an attitude that in life you never stop learning. You can adapt alongside the AI revolution.
Upskilling is just getting better.
You upskill by working on the job and learning.
You upskill by improving the skills work won’t teach you in your spare time.
Once you know what type of job you want, you look at the companies offering that job / compensation. This will literally tell you what they want you to know lol.
You use that information to create a structure and a path to follow.
Being left behind just means having outdated skills. Some companies teach good skills and offer good experience, some do not.
By taking responsibility for your skillset, you’re ensuring that you’ll always have a good job.
Apart from that, get after it.
There’s some good advice here.
What I don’t see being asked is “What do you find interesting now and where would you see yourself in five years within that domain?”
It’s easy to say “upskill” when you’re in a comfortable domain working on interesting problems. But you’re just getting going, so comfortability probably isn’t there and you don’t have enough time sunk yet to really know where you’d want to be in the future.
My advice is: learn as much as you can about your current domain. Try to become somewhat of a “subject matter expert” within that domain. Try stuff out, see what you like and don’t like doing. Don’t be afraid to pick up new tasks in new areas, but don’t be prideful enough not to drop those things if they’re not for you.
You may already be at this stage, but eventually you’ll have a basic idea of what you like doing vs. what you’re good at doing vs. what you actually want to do. Sometimes those things overlap, I’m finding out within my domain that’s not always the case.
For instance I used to love what I do (AI/ML GPU Programming) but don’t really like it anymore. It’s hard to break out of this niche domain, as it’s something I’m decent at doing, and simply don’t want to do it anymore. My interests and goals have changed and I’ve since joined a university project with the aim of “upskilling” so I have something to talk about in interviews for roles I want (more software design / architecture targeting AI/ML that possibly wants to use GPUs).
TL;DR: Work with what you’ve got, Try stuff out, be on the look out for new or interesting opportunities and take a break every once in a while.