23 tháng 5, 2009

What does job teach us - fresh developer?

When we were in school to learn a job (university, campus, ... ), we usually study only major knowledge for our coming career. It's just main concepts which will help us to obtain missing parts that are necessary in the job but school is unable to teach us. Obviously, the educational environment is always different from real office by many factors (time is most) and everybody agrees with that cause. In school, we could hardly to get the main points of a subject or technology until we are in trouble with real issue that we have to finish within a short time. Personally, I think that's the important thing that we can't experience them at school. Another thing could be that freshers (me, also) generally need to take some time to adapt first new job and train themself to be better - because the fresher's expectation may be getting good income within 1 year (just my thought) :-). But how long the time would be depends on variety of skills they have as well as how professional working environment might be. Sadly, I needed almost one and a half year to see myself in the career, but it's better late than never. The thing that we can't learn real knowledge for job out there is right and we have to accept it. If you want to change right the time in school by your own actions, you will be ahead.

In school, we could draw a perfect picture about up coming job such as : a good mentor to support all kind of question for newbie, a handsome timeframe for assigned tasks, not have to finish 10 items in 1 hour while helping colleagues in their tasks, working with outgoing clients who will let you know any breaking change before 10 days ... However, after several days at first company, we realized what real environment is. Yes, it isn't perfect at all. And next two months, we only focused on doing what we had learned all time in school. The new things didn't appear well as we expected. By this time, we might talk ourself "Hey, why do I hold off learning new stuffs and take a rest in some weeks". Then "some weeks" passed and new urgent task came; and we have to go to new cycle and keep doing things we learned in school. So for. Finally, after your first 1 year, we got nothing from work accept some stuffs we had known already. That could be sad for those who want to earn pretty money in short time ^^.

With our fresher, the point here is how to move skills to next level in a little while. Surely we don't want to use up 3 years to end being junior guy in career. But that doesn't count the case we are in particular situation that forces we have to. Is there any tips to make it ? Yes, a ton of tips are waiting for you to read out there. I just want to list some simple one I learned and used from others, nothing new here at all (you may read somewhere). First and mostly important, pay a lot of attention to foundation skills like time management, effective communication and English (used mainly for reading and asking question ^^). Although these skills won't give us any right away improvement but we eventually achieve great betterment with those. So we should start getting to know them soon. The second item is a bit harder if we were geeky ^^. It's making friend when having chance. The new friend doesn't have to be good as yours in present but it can be someone who has same hobby or goal as you do. The reason is simple : people can't do everything by their own, they need a small help from friends. I admit that may be difficult to do, not all people can talk openly with new friend. But why don't we give it a try ? It's worth doing, I think.

I would like to know reader's view about this, please leave comment if you have any.