💎 When looking ahead in your career, you probably want to acquire new technical knowledge. But what’s the best way to train for it and learn new skills? Don’t miss these tips on how to improve your tech skills!
📼 Play this video to get three top tips on how to improve your tech skills. You'll hear from Mina Zhou, Lead Application Security Engineer, and Matt Battles, Engineering Lead in the ACS division of Autodesk.
📼 Tip #1: Master the Skill (Don’t Rush Through It!). The first tip on how to improve your tech skills goes like this: when you’re learning a new skill or technology, it’s best to take the time to thoroughly master it. Make sure you truly understand a new term or concept before moving on. Avoid rushing through it. Sometimes people will focus more on the topic they are familiar with and skim through those they aren’t. Instead, keep researching and exploring the same issue until you feel like you get it. If you’ve read through the docs and are still stuck, schedule some time with a colleague or friend to discuss the problem. This will help you improve your communication skills as well, since clearly articulating an issue can be the best way to find a solution quickly and efficiently. And remember: Learning is a marathon, not a sprint.
📼 Tip #2: Learn by Doing. The second tip on how to improve your tech skills centers around this: If there’s an area of your code you are unfamiliar with, try picking up a bug in that domain. This will help you to immerse yourself in the code and give you a place to start digging, rather than trying to understand an entire domain at once. Diving in and getting to the core of an issue can be very meaningful, and solving the problem will help cement the knowledge into your mind. When you feel stuck on a project and look for solutions online, try not to copy and paste other people's work line by line without reviewing it. Make sure you understand their approaches and what they did differently to make things work. Then, implement the same idea with different methods and figure out what works best for you. With this, you are not only building one thought process per problem but actually figuring out the best solution and owning it.
Top Tips on How to Improve Your Tech Skills: Last-Minute Tip!
📼 Tip #3: Set Measurable and Useful Goals. When defining goals, focus on things you can measure and start small! Break down your long-term goal into short-term tasks with reasonable deadlines. You would not want to go too fast and burn out or set a date too far away to make you feel motivated. Really focus on the why. Think about what you want to get out of being an engineer and how you'd like your career to progress over the next two or even five years. This will help you set goals that align with your ambitions and derive lots of meaning from them. If you fail to meet a deadline, instead of blaming yourself, adjust your plan and think about what you can do better next time. And do the same thing when you meet a deadline earlier as well! Ask yourself, were you not being ambitious enough? Is it easier than you thought? Or did you find a new technique that works better for you than usual? And most importantly, when you achieve something: Celebrate!
📨 Are you interested in joining Autodesk? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
More About Autodesk
From the greenest buildings to the cleanest cars, the smartest factories to the biggest stories, amazing things are created every day with Autodesk. Over four decades, they've worked together with customers to transform how things are made and what can be made. A car's performance now inspires the method of its manufacture, a city's infrastructure helps predict the unpredictable, and the creation of ever-bigger universes shapes ever-bigger stories. Today, Autodesk solutions span countless industries empowering innovators everywhere. But they're restless to do more. They don't believe in waiting for progress; they believe in making it. By combining and recombining technologies. By blurring boundaries, reinventing rules, and merging fields. By unleashing talent and unlocking insights across industries. By helping their customers converge on solutions to the challenges we all face today. At Autodesk, they believe that when you have the right tools to work and think flexibly, you have the power to transform what needs making. The ability to design and create a better world for all.
