I have started my career 3 years ago and I am very pleased with my own progress so far.
Here's the strategy I used:
Write blog posts. Either on a platform like this one or start your own blog. It's cheap and the exercise of having your own VPS, domain and a codebase to take care of over the years is quite useful. Write blog posts about the challenges that you overcome at work, about new tools that you need to figure out how to use. Spend a lot of time on this, do a thorough research on the subject you're writing about. If you write a very good blog post, you will find yourself coming back to it time and time again to remember how to do the things you need to do.
Volunteer at work to take on responsibilities that are outside your comfort zone. If you're a backend web dev, maybe volunteer to take a look at a frontend bug, or stop letting other people write your Dockerfiles or CI configuration, try to do that on your own and then ask for feedback. This works best in smaller companies.
Volunteer to help people at work with their problems. Nothing forces you to improve your knowledge like having to explain a topic to somebody else and struggling to do so (that's also why writing blog posts is important).
Have a good work relationship with a senior software developer at work and ask them questions.
And here are the things I didn't do and why:
Getting a certificate. They are only useful if you want to work for a company that is required by another company to have some number of certified workers, like being an AWS partner. Or maybe in a huge corporation that cares more about pretense than actual skills. I have heard those still exist, but never experienced it on my own.
Building a portfolio. Having some repos on Github just for the sake of having them is useless. Doing side-projects is only useful when you learn something from doing them, you don't have to finish them, you might even delete them afterwards.
PS: I would rethink mentioning your MENSA membership in a CV. I don't know if it impresses anyone, but it can definitely make a few people think you're pretentious.
Thanks, Angelika, for how much time you put into your response. I'm the lead developer in a small group at a research institute, so I don't really have any senior devs I can talk to. It makes this website (and the people like you on it) truly invaluable.
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I have started my career 3 years ago and I am very pleased with my own progress so far.
Here's the strategy I used:
Write blog posts. Either on a platform like this one or start your own blog. It's cheap and the exercise of having your own VPS, domain and a codebase to take care of over the years is quite useful. Write blog posts about the challenges that you overcome at work, about new tools that you need to figure out how to use. Spend a lot of time on this, do a thorough research on the subject you're writing about. If you write a very good blog post, you will find yourself coming back to it time and time again to remember how to do the things you need to do.
Volunteer at work to take on responsibilities that are outside your comfort zone. If you're a backend web dev, maybe volunteer to take a look at a frontend bug, or stop letting other people write your Dockerfiles or CI configuration, try to do that on your own and then ask for feedback. This works best in smaller companies.
Volunteer to help people at work with their problems. Nothing forces you to improve your knowledge like having to explain a topic to somebody else and struggling to do so (that's also why writing blog posts is important).
Have a good work relationship with a senior software developer at work and ask them questions.
And here are the things I didn't do and why:
Getting a certificate. They are only useful if you want to work for a company that is required by another company to have some number of certified workers, like being an AWS partner. Or maybe in a huge corporation that cares more about pretense than actual skills. I have heard those still exist, but never experienced it on my own.
Building a portfolio. Having some repos on Github just for the sake of having them is useless. Doing side-projects is only useful when you learn something from doing them, you don't have to finish them, you might even delete them afterwards.
PS: I would rethink mentioning your MENSA membership in a CV. I don't know if it impresses anyone, but it can definitely make a few people think you're pretentious.
Thanks, Angelika, for how much time you put into your response. I'm the lead developer in a small group at a research institute, so I don't really have any senior devs I can talk to. It makes this website (and the people like you on it) truly invaluable.