Staying attractive throughout your career
Christophe HébertNovember 21, 2022Staying attractive throughout your career is particularly important in tech. Feel like your career lacks attractiveness and want to change that? In this article, you'll learn how to close that dynamism gap at low cost. The advice we share takes very little effort and will put your career in a whole new light. The hardest part is getting started!
Everything you need to do to have a dynamic career
The essentials
- A career assessment is necessary when you feel you've gained skills but they aren't certified and therefore not recognized at their true value.
- Whatever your status, listening to the market is crucial if you want to stay in the race and be recognized for what you bring to the company.
- Training is a very effective way to make your career attractive. It rapidly grows your skills and sets you apart from others.
Define your strengths and areas for improvement
To make your career attractive, especially in tech, it's important to do introspective work, both personally and professionally.
This will let you know what your strengths are and what needs reinforcing. It can be technical skills (or academic) or interpersonal and personal skills. For instance, time management, how you accept feedback, your ability to delegate certain tasks to your team…
What matters in this self-work is being able to identify both what you excel at and what's worth improving. That will help a lot, especially in interviews.
In the tech sector in particular, it's very important to ask yourself this question regularly to stay competitive in a fast-evolving market. Whether you're specialized in a tech sub-domain or a generalist, you must continuously train.
Stay constantly informed of new developments in the tech sector by following blogs like HackerNews, Techcrunch or Recode.
When you're looking for a new job, the employer might also ask you this question in an interview. That helps them know whether the role suits you and whether you'll easily fit in with the team.
Doing a career assessment
Also called a skills assessment, a career assessment lets you take stock of the path traveled since leaving school. Between earning your last diploma and the person you are today, the gap is wide!
You can now use software that didn't exist when you were studying, the mistakes you've made have allowed you to figure out the right approach in similar situations… The skills gained through your professional experience have a lot of value!
You've held several roles or fulfilled different missions during your years in the world of work. It's time to make that count! Through the skills assessment, you'll get this expertise recognized and make your profile more attractive. It's a real asset when you have to sell yourself to a potential employer.
In tech jobs for example, you might evolve increasingly toward management roles. The skills assessment helps you highlight your soft skills to make them count in interviews.
How does a career assessment work? It's generally made up of three main parts.
A career assessment, a key step in staying attractive throughout your career
- First, a preliminary interview takes place with a coach to define your goals and expectations for this assessment.
- Then comes the time to draw up the inventory of skills acquired.
- Finally, the debrief by the coach. Of course, this assessment belongs entirely to you and remains confidential. You're the only one who can choose to share it.
Important info to remember as well, the skills assessment is eligible for the personal training account.
Listen to the market
Listening to the market doesn't mean actively browsing job ads as if you were searching for a new job. That would waste time for little gain… We instead suggest an active monitoring activity to do even when you're employed.
Should I leave my job? Move up internally? Knowing your value on the job market can help you renegotiate your contract because you know what you're worth.
Your employer will know that to keep you, they should make sure your contract and benefits match your skills. This is even more critical in tech, where good profiles are particularly sought after. Demand is so high that employers fight to hire the best.
If you work in tech, you should be receiving offers from recruiters very regularly. Even if you don't necessarily want to change roles today, stay alert to the benefits and compensation offered, to leverage them with your employer.
Listening to the market also lets you prepare for your annual review with your manager. You'll then both be able to dig deeper into the analysis of your career evolution prospects by starting an informed discussion of your prior reflections.
Finally, if you want to change roles, don't hesitate to contact a recruiting firm specialized in tech that will listen to your career wishes and help you find projects aligned with your needs.
At Bluecoders for example, you can both get supported by a coach specialized in tech roles and find job offers matching your profile. Our coaches know what they're talking about and are used to working with tech profiles — they can therefore advise you in the best possible way.
Train
Have you identified your areas for improvement, and has this careful introspection made you realize you wanted to evolve your career?
All that's left is to take the plunge and start training that will let you reach your goal.
Training can serve several goals, including bringing some dynamism back to your career, finding meaning again in what you do, and avoiding boredom. We recommend you train again and again to never let yourself fall behind the news.
The job market and the tech market are constantly evolving. If only to avoid being left behind, it's important to train regularly and stay competitive.
Early in your career, missions are mainly operational, but that quickly evolves toward missions that draw more on your soft skills. These skills can be acquired through training.
The most sought-after trainings by companies will be back-end and front-end web development, but also pure programming with languages like Java or Python. To finish, anything related to Big Data jobs is particularly valued.
Training also has benefits you might not think of at first: it lets you meet other employees like you and grow your network.
Joining a training is very simple — with your training account, you can register for any kind of training (short or long).
The training account fills up automatically each year thanks to time worked. You can also choose to start with a short training and decide to continue it.
If your training account isn't enough, it's also possible to have your training funded by your employer or by Pôle Emploi (the French unemployment agency).
Official trainings aren't the only ones worth it! Self-directed trainings are equally valuable since they bring you skills you can easily put to work (and even get recognized through a skills assessment later).
If you don't know where to find easily accessible trainings, here are a few ideas to get you started:
- https://formation.datascientest.com/
- https://www.my-mooc.com/fr/categorie/data-science
- https://www.wildcodeschool.com/
And of course, the one we no longer need to mention, the most-used site for tech training: https://openclassrooms.com
Stay up to date with tech news
The world of work moves fast, and so do the tools used: new software keeps appearing. Today's worker has to be reactive.
This is even more true for tech workers and developers in particular, since new software releases are frequent.
By keeping up with tech news and being able to work on recent and powerful software, you have significant added value on the job market.
The tech market is a market that moves extremely fast, faster than any other market. It's also the most saturated market, meaning a good tech is a precious asset. To grow your value on the market in the snap of a finger, staying up to date on news is essential.
How to stay up to date on tech news? Here are some sites that let you quickly keep up with the latest releases in tech:
You can also stay up to date with tech news by staying in touch with recruiters. They know better than anyone how the market is evolving in terms of salaries and most-sought specializations.
The tech recruiter, a person who knows the market and is used to looking for specific profiles like yours, is the best person to give you the keys to find your place on the tech market.
Project yourself long term
A person with an attractive career is a person who knows where they're going. That's why the following question is frequently asked in interviews: "where do you see yourself in five years?"
With this question, the employer can check that you have a vision compatible with the company's. At Bluecoders, that's one of our priorities! Your profile must match the role's expectations, but you must also be able to project yourself into the company, and its culture must align with your vision.
Likewise, it's important for you to discuss the company's culture to verify that it aligns with your values and aspirations.
Note that a hire is expensive. That's why the employer wants to make sure they're right to hire you, because you're going to stay.
A new employee needs to be trained — that costs the company money and time. The effort must be worth it.
Within their company, the employer wants to see you grow and develop your talents over the long term to make you an autonomous element who will want to stay in the company.
In the long run, you can also turn to a consultancy that knows how to advise you to give your career the color you want. The firm will look for roles aligned with the person you are and the projects you have.
Find what differentiates you from the competition
Why you and not someone else? Some of you may have already had to face this question without quite knowing what to answer. It's legitimate for a company to want to make sure that you're the candidate who makes the difference!
Once again, lean on your strengths to show how you're the best at what you do and why they need you.
If you're specialized in a domain, that also plays in your favor. The point is to find what makes you unique on the job market.
You're lucky to be in a shortage market where there are more job openings than candidates. Job offers bloom every day on the internet because demand is strong, companies are looking for profiles like yours! Seize this opportunity and stand out from the other candidates.
The turning point of your career is within reach.
Whatever your status, whether you're a developer or you exercise another tech profession, it's important to stay informed about job market news. It evolves quickly and you wouldn't want to find yourself sidelined when it's easily avoidable.