Recently I decided to post every day on my LinkedIn page. while doing so, I was asked some questions about my career. This gave me an idea on writing about them so that even others will get benefitted from them. Answers are quite common but sometimes to see common answers we need to search all around the Internet.
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” — Confucius
- How can you choose/create a roadmap for a career in IT Industry?
- Is it possible to start a business even while you are working?
- How can you keep learning every day when you put under pressure in your job or the business?
- How can you write the things you learned so that others like you can use the same guide?
- Why share information about what you know in the first place?
#1 How can you choose/create a roadmap for a career in IT Industry?
It’s not what you achieve, it’s what you overcome. That’s what defines your career.” — Carlton Fisk
Forming a roadmap to what you want for your career especially in IT is based on 3 things,
- How skilled you are in the things that you know.
- What is the range of technologies and tools you know or can learn in the given period?
- How much clear communication you do with the customer in your industry to make sure all the pre-requisites are collected before starting up micro projects (Chunks of tasks inside projects mostly referred to as milestones in some cases).
In this fast-growing world where the people who change the world keep on increasing every day, those above 3 points always come in the scope. Simply you can say this as, Knowledgeable, Adaptable & Communicable.
#2 Is it possible to start a business even while you are working?
“Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.” — Katherine Whitehorn
Yes, absolutely possible! To start a business, it is very important to understand the timing of the idea that you are going to implement. Don't rush, take it steady and spend at least 10-min every day planning your business for 3 years and that is almost 10,000 minutes. This will give you a kickstart about how exactly you can turn your idea into a product and product to a stream of income.
As we know, some tools are available for free to set up your business on the Internet. Start with zero and incrementally immerse yourself in the idea of starting a business. List down your ideas every day and mark the most efficient often.
Try filtering out the idea and list the pros and cons of it. Once this process is completed, plan the development of the tool if it is required. Again, planning the product development should start from zero where you learn a new approach to build the product using fewer commercials. Use your salary at least 2K per month and save it for your business.
Once product development is done, start learning about business, strategy, and finance models.
Once you have a revenue model or an idea of how to turn the product into a revenue stream, you need to figure out a way to get profits for your business.
To decide the profit margins, always remember to set very low margins at the start, not more than 200% for what you invest in your product or service. As you expand the business, try catching investors (This is where investors or equity comes in not before this stage). Getting investors will be very easy if you are making profits already. Start with Round A and offer a 10% stake to the investor not more than that - This puts you in the commanding position.
As I saw businesses, they always need a good team of people who are in there for the same goals as yours. Be very careful and specific in trusting people. Be ruthless in firing too. Always keep your loved ones with you. Consider the right reasons to persuade investors. Be the one who holds most of the company's share like 60% to 70%.
This is how to start planning and building a company while you are working. Never forget the company you work for.
#3 How can you keep learning every day when you put under pressure in your job or the business?
“The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you.”― B.B. King
Learning new technologies, culture, language or a subject is an art of living life fully. If you don't let yourself learn new things, there is no point in being existent in this world. We, humans, are blessed with infinite potential to achieve anything we want. In this new generation, access to most of the information is given to everyone via the Internet.
Follow this 10-min rule every day as long as you can. Simple learning every day and give time to know new things. Small chuck of 10-min, learn something new and make a note of it. Hardly it will take around 15 mins for you but when u look at the bigger picture say 3 years. It is almost equal to 10,000 mins.
Imagine in the last 3 years if you would have spent 10,000 mins learning something, how much you would be knowing right now. Amazing, isn't it? With that much practice with very small effort, you can land anywhere you want. If you think of the next 10 years, it is almost 45,000 mins. Imagine, where you will be after 10 years if you follow the 10-min rule.
#4 How can you write the things you learned so that others like you can use the same guide?
“Documentation is a love letter that you write to your future self “— Damian Conway
In this ever-growing fast-paced world, documentation plays an important role. Even if it is an underrated skill, as per the research, each person learning or understanding new things assigned by the company spends 30% of the time (2.5 hours/day) researching it.
Based on the statistic, a worker spends 2.5 hours per day, looking for information. Assuming now an average yearly salary of 80,000 $, the inability to find and retrieve documents costs an organization, that employs 1000 workers, $ 25 million per year.
Hence it is important to write down every research with clear documentation. To record your research there are 3 simple things u can follow:
- Always start with your favorite tool to write (Digital/Traditional)
- Take 10-Mins to 15-Mins to write every day about the research you did. (Apart from 10-min learning rule)
- Once the writing is complete, take time to review it before publishing it.
I. Always start with your favorite tool to write (Digital/Traditional)
Writing every day can be trickery. I have been there. Being consistent in life is very challenging especially in the activities that will take you higher. Writing every day will improve your ability to think and thrive in this ever-changing world. To make it easier, start with few words on a sheet of paper or even you can take notes in your favorite tool (for me it is Evernote).
Set the schedule every day to write something, anything you wish to write. It may be some messed up words or you want to write the story of that day or you want to write about the person you love (I do this frequently).
No need of publishing anything yet. Just write and write. If you don’t want to read it again or want to throw it into the dust bin, it is cool as well. Whatever it is, just write.
II. Take 10-Mins to 15-Mins to write every day about the research you did. (Apart from 10-min learning rule)
Anyone must grow in this world to have consistency. As I usually discuss the 10-Min rule of learning, there is one more rule we can follow for writing i.e. 15-min writing rule each day. Help yourself and write something to get into the picture of planning.
III. Once the writing is complete, take time to review it before publishing it.
Write what you learned today in the end and publish it on your social media or in your blogs. This practice will make you good at documenting your work where someday when others see your notes, it will help them to understand your research. Reviewing your work before publishing or proofread your notes.
#5 Why share information about what you know in the first place?
“Innovation comes only from readily and seamlessly sharing information rather than hoarding it” — Tom Peters
You might have heard about this, what you share or document your work, will lasts generations. If our ancestors hadn’t found a way to store information or the research they did in their lifetime, we never would have got a chance to land on the moon or even thinking beyond our planet where it was believed that earth is the center of the universe.
As long as we write about our research and findings, for others it will serve as a Kickstarter and not experiment from scratch. This is the major philosophy behind the improvement of technology and open source projects. In programming, nothings need to be built from scratch these days. We always have templates for everything.
So, to summarize, preserving records is very much important for humanity to move forward. We are code breakers and our potential is infinite. One day I am sure that we will reach the point where we can live anywhere we want and there will be zero poverty exists.
Follow me on LinkedIn or in Medium for further updates about my work. You can also visit my GitHub profile to see about my technical doings.
