Tech work can be safely reproducible, or dangerously repetitive depending on your personality and where you are in your career. It’s as easy to land in a cushy position as it is to find yourself pigeonholed if you don’t expand your skill set. The pigeonholes are a lot more common though. It’s also easy to be made redundant if the primary technology (or technologies) you support fall to the wayside.
Technology moves rapidly and for every technology which has lasted decades, there are dozens which didn’t. Let’s learn how to stay ahead of the curve and how to stay educated in IT. Some of these will seem obvious, but I’m looking to add angles which most people don’t often consider.
Technology has multiple facets and multiple facets are required for mastery. Theory works until it hits the real world, applications require understanding to go further, etc. You need a mix of theory, application, knowledge, and understanding.
The best way to learn is hands on with a good teacher or mentor, but you don’t always have access to the technology or a teacher. Sometimes you have to learn on your own, other times you need to improvise with the equipment. It can get costly to ride the wave of technology, but it can pay dividends if you have the right motivation. If you’re proactive, you can come out ahead in terms of your investment and your career.
Motivation
I love learning for the sake of learning. Languages have always interested me as much as how they intersect with coding. Learning stuff you like is a lot different than learning for a job though.
Having the motivation to continually improve is never a negative on your resume with any smart employer. You may genuinely just do it as a job, but it is important to take measures to improve if you don’t want to end up in blue collar IT. It’s easy to get burned out in tech. That being said, if it’s your means to make ends meet, you need to keep persevering and improving yourself to get the next gig.
We’re going to approach this from the perspective of relative disinterest. The goal is to get better as efficiently as possible with as many tools as possible without relying on the crutch of excitement for the material. We’re going to cut out the common myths in tech. Even if you still genuinely enjoy technology, this advice can still be useful. Almost every interesting topic is going to have some boring content. If you’re tired of tech and just want to ladder hop careers, this will give you the tools to proceed.
We’ll start with the more common suggestions, but targeting angles which aren’t discussed as often, then progress through other tactics to get what you want. A lot of cutting out the middle man in life requires the ability to know what to look for and what to ask. If you play your cards right, you can get a lot, for less, and faster than others. You just need to know how to play the game and have the knowledge to progress.
Learning Automation
I’m going to start with the most contentious point. The “learn to code” movement has gone around parroting that all you need to do to succeed is just learn to code and you’ll be industry ready. Some people have the background, some have the raw talent, others get lucky, most don’t fit though. Coding isn’t learning to screw parts together, there’s a specific set of required skills.
Learning to automate is the most immediately applicable step for improving your IT career. If you sit in a call center and are measured on ticket productivity and similar, how much can you boost your metrics if you can reproducibly fix issues?
Why sit and run DISM on a computer when you can just run a script? Learning how to automate these sorts of common issues also teaches you what goes into the manual methods behind them as well. I didn’t really get how or why people told me DISM and SFC went together until I experimented with automation.
Pick a language that does what you want for what you can use now. You can always learn another language and apply the same basic skills, you can’t always make a language work. Perl may be my favorite language, but it provides no value to my current job unfortunately.
Focus on a language like Powershell for Windows, Bash and/or Perl for MacOS, Lua for places where you can ship binaries in scripts, etc. Don’t pick what’s hottest, pick what works and what provides value in your current job. You can always jump from there once you get the basics down. It’s a lot easier to justify learning on the job when it adds value.
Certifications and Vendor Training
Certificates are one of the most common ways for IT professionals to move forward. There are a plethora of relevant certificates. Certificates provide several important elements for career growth: a systematic approach to a specific technology or methodology, and proof of completion and minimum level of competence. A certificate on a resumes means proof that you’re at least smart enough to pass an arbitrary test.
I really couldn’t care less about most certificates myself, but the study materials can be useful even if you don’t plan on pursuing the certificate itself. It’s easy to get a slightly out of date certificate course and use it to get (mostly) caught up with the specific technology.
Some even include access to labs (via CD or code) as well as other training resources. I’ve bought certificate packages just for a test environment before. Don’t just look at a certificate as a test, look at what the training and materials can offer on their own.
You can do the same thing with vendor sponsored courses and materials too. If you’re already a technical professional or training, you can usually find some kind of offer from some vendors. Last year, a major firewall vendor offered to literally send me a commercial firmware (5 ports, but the expensive firmware) in exchange for watching a 1-2 hour training infomercial (with a business email).
Lots of vendors do this or offer training if you’re interested in their products. You just need to apply and be on the watch. Some will provide access to training materials which would cost a fortune otherwise, others will even provide a partial lab or preferred pricing on testing. You just need to know what to look for and who to ask.
Free Tiers
Some vendors offer an entirely free tiers in order to entice newer developers or to get people to move over. AWS has some completely free tiers for certain products, and one year trials for others. Azure has similar offerings, with some free, and others free for a year. A lot of cloud platforms offer similar to try and entice people. You don’t need to necessarily sign up to pay, but they can be useful to learn on. Every 6 figure IT job offer from recruiters in the past few months has asked for one or both of Azure and AWS.
Microsoft offers tools like Visual Studio with a similar structure. Game engines do similar where they offer the SDK and other tools for free, but you pay based on what you make with them. Unreal and Unity are the two most well known players as of writing.
Many vendors have free or introductory offers to get you in. Most of these will have at least a moderately-sized platform as well, which usually means a decently sized community. There’s competition and they want to get you using their product. Played right, this means you can get access to a real life environment for no or minimum cost, and that you can leverage the community.
I learned Azure via trial and error, and on the back of the community. Using the free tier to jump higher has resulted in more opportunities for my career. Done right, you can invest virtually nothing and get access to both the platform and training for it.
Riding the Channel
The channel is an ephemeral concept in IT. It can be distilled down to a group of vendors working for a common market together and aiming to not step on each others’ feet. Each group tries to work together for the overall development of their platform. The most important thing about finding a channel is that you can learn more about what other vendors do.
Channel resources want to bring you into their funnel by either dangling carrots, using loss leaders, or strategic placement. Most of the time, the channel can be used to get information and resources you wouldn’t normally get. You just need to ask the right people the right questions.
How do certain platforms work together? What’s hot and what’s popular? It can be hard to know, but if multiple companies are involved, why not ask each one? What are competitors and peers at your own level (and above) adopting and why? Most will be happy to try and sell you (while providing information), and most are used to technical requests.
It can take a little work, but why not reach out to a platform which builds off of what you want to learn, or ties in, and see what they can offer? I learned a lot about Windows Virtual Desktop by playing this game. Microsoft wouldn’t give me the time of day even if I were famous, but every platform building off of them was more than happy to toss information in the hopes I would buy. You just need to know what to ask and direct it to the Contact Us page. If there’s the hint of a sale, they’ll throw resources and KB’s at it making your life easier.
Going Further
Learning how to learn is its own skill. The underlying theme with these methods isn’t to tell you to go get your certificates and take a class; it’s to show you how to cut out the middle man and get more for less. You have to know about a platform to know it has a free tier. You have to know what a vendor does to be on the watch for their offers.
Each of these points is built in reverse order of direct effects on your career, but you need to know what to learn in order to learn it. Surfing the channel can get you information to make informed decisions of what to prioritize. From there, you can find vendor training and other resources. Free platforms can be the backbone or another requisite skill to the rest of what you need. You don’t learn DevOps by learning Azure, you apply the concepts using the platform.
Certifications favor application, but are usually biased in said application. Most certificates offer a specific training and specific application, but can result in paper tigers without the right trials by fire. Vendor training will have its own inherent bias as well. They’re trying to sell you on their hammer and how everything is the right nail to hit, not necessarily teach you how everything goes together.
Automation can become a bridge to development, or a way forward depending on your aptitude, aspirations, and reason for learning. I encourage every IT professional to at least learn how to automate portions of their work. With the availability of languages, frameworks, and resources, there really isn’t an excuse anymore. How far you take it is up to you.
If you apply these methods, you can keep up with technology professionally. Cut out the theory that doesn’t matter and go for the skills which get you where you need to be first. Move from there. Don’t neglect theory, but don’t neglect practice either. Done right, you can cut down the time and effort taken to stay up to date with technology.