Tech Professional Growth Review
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Thoughts
Over the past year or so, I buried myself in career development books written by other fellow software engineers who are ahead in the career journey than me. There are plenty of takeaways from these books; Apprenticeship Patterns taught me to see developing software as a long journey of craftsmanship; the Coding Career Handbook illuminated the transition from a newbie to a senior developer, and so on. The quest for precious snippets of advice never ends. Recently, I stumbled upon Rands’ blog. After reading a few articles, wow, I am hooked.
"You are you for, like, forever." - Rands
His article, Your Professional Growth Questionnaire, left an impression on me. I did it for the first time, and I realised I didn’t have the answer to all the questions. These questions are thought-provoking; it helps to structure the thought process when you ponder about your career on a random train trip home. More importantly, unlike the typical performance self-review that we have to submit to HR at the end of the financial year, the questionnaire is truly about you. Our career is more than just this financial year, this job or this company. This is similar to drawing your own map.
In order for me to review this questionnaire periodically, I knew I needed a system in place. I immediately got to work and created this Notion template.
The template is meant to be straightforward and fuss-free. The user can:
- Add a new review at a click of a button
- Set a reminder for the next review
- View past reviews to follow the evolution of their views and thought process
In addition, I added an extra section for me to add at least three actionable items after the review to get things going. For example, some of my actionable items include building breakable toys.
Feel free to duplicate this template and start doing your self-driven reviews! I hope someone will find this template as applicable as I did. I would love to hear any feedback to improve this template too.
Special thanks to Rands and Rands Leadership Slack for providing such thoughtful questions.