Manage your Career
Now you have the job. So how do you go about managing your Career?
Career Plan
You made a career plan so check how you are doing on your progress in your plan. Where are you currently at in your career plan? Do you need to prepare for a move to another position soon? Are you getting close to retirement?
Always gauge your progress against your career plan and current needs and adjust as needed. Your plan isn't fixed and can be modified as needed.
As you gain experience in your field you may see new opportunities, so adjust your plan to take advantage of these if you desire to. You may even see new business ventures or leadership positions that wouldn't have been obvious earlier in your career; weigh carefully if they are worth pursuing. If they are modify your career plan for your new direction.
Re-evaluate Progress
During your career you will need to Re-evaluate your progress in your career. Is your choosen career style working for you or do you need to consider a new one. As you get more experience in your career Freelance or Contracting may become better options for you if you like to work independently.
Change in your career will happen. You may start out as stay at one company, but then get burn-out, laid off, or a victim of corporate restructuring. This is a good time to re-evaluate your career and make adjustments to continue to be successful.
Burnt-out Feeling
Don't ignore the burnt-out feeling you may have in your tech job. This may be a sign it is time to look for another tech position or move laterally to a new field.
Tech can be very stressful so don't ignore signs you aren't handling it well. Try to come up with ways to cope with the stress like exercise and talking to others. But if it is constant stress that doesn't seem to go away you will need to change your job. You also may need professional help to work through the issues. Although moving to a less stressful job often fixes the issue.
Is it time for a lateral move?
You may even get the feeling that you aren't succeeding in your chosen career field. It may be time to consider a different career field. Don't be afraid of moving laterally to a new career field. Non-Technical careers are often more stable and usually have less stress. So moving may be a good thing for you.
In technical fields like software development there can be several career styles. You can stay at the same company for your whole career, move from job-to-job, do freelance work, or be a contractor / consultant.
Career Styles
Stay at One Company
Move Job-to-Job
Freelance
Contracting / Consulting
What career style you choose depends on your goals for your career. If you are looking for stability you may try staying at the same company. But this rarely works in tech due to corporate restructuring, layoffs, burn-out, and other factors. You are likely to move from job-to-job.
Stay at One Company
Staying at the first company you get hired at after college might be possible. But be prepared to move up into a team lead, project manager, or software engineering manager role. Software development jobs have a cap on how much local companies are willing to pay. So to stay at the company you have to be prepared to move up.
Since you are likely to start out at a lower salary you may have to accept that for a long while. Raises in this type of situation tend to be modest. If you want to leverage your skills and get higher wages you will need to move job-to-job.
Move Job-to-Job
Moving job-to-job helps you get higher wages. But then there is the job search time, interview time, giving two-weeks notice at your old job. Then you may have to plan for a move of location and the associated moving expenses.
Going job-to-job may be easier if you live in a large city or metro area with many tech companies. East and West coast in the United States have large cities like this. Then you may be able to live in the same location and just switch jobs multiple times as needed.
Job hunting, presenting your skills to a new employer, interviewing and being prepared for that all take effort and time. You are also likely to do this process over and over in your career.
Freelance
Freelance is booking small jobs, completing them, and then moving on to the next job.
The challenge with this option is a lot of competion on freelance sites like UpWork so bidding on and getting jobs may be difficult. UpWork also has a pay-to-work model as they require you to pay up front for tokens to bid on jobs. This is weird to me. So I personally steer clear of Freelancing, but I met one software developer it worked for.
Contracting / Consulting
Contracting is applying for contract positions, doing the work sometimes for 3, 6 months or a year. Then they sometimes have contract-to-hire. Or you just move on to finding the next contract. This can require many of the same job hunting skills as job-to-job career style. The process of doing this over and over can be time intensive.
Consulting is similar but you take many small jobs where you are the expert on a certain technology. One consultant we worked with was an expert on IBM Web Sphere Commerce and charged over $100 per hour. He would come for a week and then move on to the next job in the Western United States.
Contracting or Consulting can also take a lot of business skills as you are hunting for new work, setting up payment, and networking to find your next gig. So it isn't a good choice for everyone.
Manage your Health
Being a software developer requires a lot of sitting so it is important to get regular exercise to remain healthy. You can get up and walk around every hour for a break to help keep you focused. But most exercise will have to be done outside work. Exercising will help you burn off some stress and help your body be healthier.
You can combine the exercise into other activites like camping, hiking, walking the dogs, etc.
It is important to get at least 30 mintues of exercise each day.
Manage your Mental Health
Software engineering can be very stressful as deadlines loom, you can easily get burnt-out as this happens over and over in your job. So it is important to pay attention to your mental health, talk it over with friends and family. Being aware that it can be a problem in high-stress jobs is the first step.
Get professional help if you need it. Your health and life is far more important than a job.