This year is my second year in the industry as a software engineer. I am currently writing this as a Graduate Analyst Developer / Test Automation Engineer at FNZ. Still being in the early stages of my career, my overarching goal for this year is to align myself to the type of career that I want. When I say this, I am not refering to a role like front end, back end or mobile but a task I want to do such as building products or research or solving problems related to a certain population. I feel like once I understand those goals better, it will put me on the right track in order to craft my career in tech will help me achieve those goals.
The first year of my career has provided me with some foundational knowledge and I hope to dive into my interest areas deeper with the knowledge I have gained. I want to try things that I have yet to try in my current role. I also want to learn things that I was curious about but was not taught at university. I have been interested in understanding topics like ChatGPT and each iteration more indepth rather than just listening to what others have taught me and try to understand the concepts underlining this technology. In short, this year's goal to gain a depth in knowledge and breadth in experiences.
To achieve these goals. I want to do the following actions by the end of the year:
Each one of my goals features at least one aspect that will take me out of my comfort zone. For example, reading is not my favourite medium to consume content. It is hard for me to focus while reading because I can get distracted by my own thoughts which reduces the amount of information that I absorb. I personally like use videos for the initial understanding and use reading to find additional information. However, I believe that learning to overcome this challenge will give me a key skill in order to expand my current scope of knowledge. I want to include at least 1 academic paper because I want to eventually read more similiar types of writing in the future and they tend to be more complex and so it will challenge my researching and learning skills in order to develop a full understanding of the material.
The social component needed to attend a conference, networking event or beginning in a new team will certainly be a challenge because I doesn't really like talking to strangers. While I have made improvements in the last year, I still have a long way to go. Going to a conference will allow me to gain more perspective of other programmers and technologies which is a good learning opportunity. Whereas joining a new team will allow me to try new technologies and also test my soft skills and how well I do when starting over and asking for help.
By setting these goals and getting help from my peers, I hope this year will be a year of new experiences and growth. By writing these goals for me to reflect upon at the end of the year, I hope that it will give me some tangible results that I can work towards achieving and help me ultimately understand myself better. Hopefully, I have long career ahead of me and I hope to direct myself towards a career that I will be happy with in the long term.
