Gone are the days when employers would hire an employee with just some certifications. It is a completely different story in this generation. The school you attended, the degree you’ve earned, your level of education, all of these do not matter anymore - things have really changed. Employers need your skills and not your degree.
Going to school is not just enough, acquiring of knowledge is not enough also. In school, you would be taught the fundamental knowledge you will need to build your skills, nobody will teach you how to build a skill. Don’t be surprised that knowledge of yours might get obsolete and outdate in the next few years – meaning you can be out of a field you look to be a top star today. Your ability to use the acquired knowledge and the ability to update your knowledge so it doesn’t get obsolete will help you build your skill sets.
How do you build your skills set and be the hotcake in your field? I have listed six easy steps to help you build your skills set and stay on track. Let’s get started.
1. Discover your Passion
Passion is very essential to the human race, one without passion is like a dummy. The greatest gift you can have is the ability to discover your passion on time and sticking to that passion.
It may be very difficult to discover your passion because it is so easy to misunderstand other things you like (your hubbies) to passion. Passion is not some things you need to do to survive or some things you need to do at a certain time – passion is one thing you’d always want to do, like an addiction.
Your passion might be web development, android app development, football, tailoring etc. Remember, it can only be one!
2. Stick to your discovered passion (a particular section of it)
Switching among multiple fields will really not help you develop or build your skills at all. You’d keep getting fatigue and would have just wasted a lot of time and energy at the end of the day.
Your chosen passion might be so broad that you will have to be specific about what you really want to learn, you may want to be specific between frontend development and backend development if you have chosen web development. Some fields can be subdivided into several divisions, and each division have its own branches.
If you choose to learn backend development, you should be specific of the programming language you want to learn, don’t mix them up!
3. Don’t force it, learn slowly
Though, the internet is full of unlimited resources and information (just like this one you’re reading) about your chosen passion. If you try to access all these resources, you’d find yourself swimming in this pool of resources and still gaining nothing at all from this unlimited resources.
You may want to learn modern web development by learning a framework like react, that’s cool right! But, how well have you mastered JavaScript? How well do you understand DOM? You just have to learn one step at a time!
4. Be imaginative and curious
A great way to learn real fast is to be imaginative and curious. A series of “what if ...?” will help you learn new things and discover some hidden knowledge about your field. Try something new, see what others are not seeing. Implement new ideas, bring your ideas into life and you will see how much you’d have learnt at the end of the day.
5. Share what you’ve learnt
Create microblog accounts like Medium where you can write about your experience (failure and success) and let others learn more through you. By sharing what you’ve learnt, you expose yourself and your art to the world. You tend to meet more developers or people in your field and then join the community.
Sharing your work (the result of your imagination and curiosity) will help you meet potential clients later and you may even meet mentors who would want to help you later in building your skills.
The positive feedbacks you get from sharing your work will surely drive and motivate you to do more. Negative feedbacks will help you realise where you’ve made mistakes and help you become better than who you are before sharing.
6. Earn as you learn
The more you learn, the more you will need money to continue learning. At this point, you need to have mastered your skill to some extent (if you have followed the five steps above, I believe you’d be able to earn as much as possible). Learn how to turn your passion, now skills, into money.
Create an online presence and meet more people in your field (step 5). Sell your works on commercial platforms like Envato, Themeforest etc. Another way to earn is to teach what you’ve learnt and get paid on eLearning platforms like Teachable, Udemy, Pluralsight etc.
I hope you will take these steps and let’s walk to the top together. More posts coming, you would not want to miss any.
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