To get started on this journey, you need to understand the importance of emotional intelligence, or EQ, how to grow beyond technical skills, how to strategically build your technical knowledge, and the importance of increasing your visibility.
In a well-known Fortune-500 company, there is an engineering team with a couple of developers who stand out for promotion. There is a developer who has the best technical skills, and a developer who has good technical skills but also is an expert communicator and team player/collaborator. Who do you think will receive a promotion? Based on the tired media trope of a solo programmer working alone in a basement eating pizza, most people would think that the developer with the best technical skills will receive the promotion. However, this is not the case. The developer with communication and collaboration skills alongside the technical skills gets the promotion. These are the skills that make up emotional intelligence.
Many academics have written on this topic with diverse ways of measuring and evaluating emotional intelligence, but to understand the point, it is enough for you to know that most employers today would prefer to hire, retain, and promote a developer who not only has the top technical skills but also a high degree of emotional intelligence. Even if that means sacrificing some level of technical ability, when given the choice, employers will more often choose the individual with better emotional intelligence. The one with the best people skills wins. Emotional intelligence requires skills that you cannot learn from reading a book alone. These are skills that require practice and human interaction. This is true in technical roles as well as non-technical roles.
The World Economic Forum is an international organization that brings together public and private organizations for cooperation purposes. The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas. The World Economic Forum recently issued The Future of Jobs Report. The report listed the following skills with growing demand through 2025 and beyond:
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Problem-solving
- Self-management
- Working with people
- Management and communication of activities
Take the time to consider and evaluate your level of emotional intelligence. Identify areas where you need to grow and look for opportunities to practice your skills. While machine learning and artificial intelligence will impact development jobs, and you must learn to work with them, the demand for development jobs will continue to grow and will remain strong even in economically uncertain times.
How do you grow beyond just technical skills to incorporate emotional intelligence? It is easy to think that as a developer, you should only be coding. It may seem to fit into your predisposed view of how you can advance your career to the next level – to focus on the technical skills that you were hired to use in accomplishing your tasks and projects.
Developers cannot expect to write code in isolation and deliver it by throwing it over the wall or putting it in a repository and closing the project. Open source and agile methodologies for software development have been just some of the factors that have changed this method of working to deliver software.
The way to grow beyond the technical and develop your emotional intelligence is to practice with others, whether virtually or in person. Look for moments to empathize, communicate, and collaborate with other people. You will see your skills develop through repetition and feedback.
How do you choose the right skills to learn? Many developers tend to want to learn the newest, coolest, or shiniest technology. Often, they will start the process of learning a newer, more innovative technological skill without considering whether it will benefit them in achieving what they really want. Before you start spending time learning a recently released technology, evaluate why you want to learn that technology or skill. Does it align with your goals to advance your career to the next level? Is it worth the time you will lose learning the skill when you could be spending that time in other areas?
It is great to learn new things, but before you add every modern technology that is popular to your list of skills to learn, think about the reason that you want to learn that technology. Is it required for a project you are working on? Or do you think it could be used in such a project? Or do you see the potential for this technology to grow and be useful to you in the future? If yes, then you should invest the time required to learn it.
Employers expect developers to be learning on the job and filling skill gaps in technical areas. The problems arise when we add every recent technology to our list of skills to learn. At that point, it can be overwhelming and can lead to procrastination and stagnation. The sheer volume of new tools, techniques, and technologies can trigger the exact opposite of what you are trying to achieve, resulting in immobility.
Time is finite. It is our most precious and valuable commodity as humans. Take the time to evaluate and consider why you want to learn a new technology before you add it to your career map. You can often gain visibility by getting involved in projects or areas that are valued by senior management. Pay attention to the projects that your line manager prioritizes. Listen to or read reports, listen to podcasts, or read articles where they discuss future directions. Communicate your interest in working in those areas. Learn new skills in those areas. Share knowledge that you have in those areas. Some excellent ways to share include social media, public speaking, user groups, and networking at industry conferences or events.
What we have learned in our own career journeys is that sharing builds communities and trust. The authors of this book share the common desire to help you advance your technical career and build your trust in us to guide you on your way to a senior developer position. Do you have a map ready with some of the areas identified where you need to grow? Take some time to think and get clarity on those items before you move on to Part 1 of the book.
