How to keep up with technology and advance your career

In 2023, I published a blog post titled Sharing Knowledge as a Way of Life, where I suggested that knowledge sharing should become a habit because it helps raise awareness about neglected topics, build community, and enhance your professional reputation.

I agree that the technology world keeps changing every day, from new services announced, new capabilities related to AI, new cybersecurity risks, emerging technologies, etc.

The question is – how do you keep up with technology, and by doing so, advance your career, remain relevant and attractive in the tech industry?

In this post, I’ll explore this topic from a new perspective: how to stay up to date with technology in an era of rapid change.

Self-learning

In the past, to learn new technology, we used to pay money, go to a college or any training center close to our home, sit for several days in a physical class, and allow an instructor to feed us with knowledge.

Sometimes, we use it for study and at home, and take a certification exam, to test our knowledge (and perhaps to show a certificate to potential employers).

In the past couple of years (I would say, sometimes after the COVID pandemic), online courses have become very popular.

Platforms such as QA Platform (formerly Cloud Academy), Pluralsight, Udemy, or LinkedIn Learning became the main source of self-learning courses.

If your main focus is cloud computing, the hyper-scale cloud providers offer you their own platforms, such as AWS Skill Builder, Microsoft Learn, or Google Cloud Skills Boost.

The mentioned platforms offer anyone, from a newbie to a practitioner, the ability to learn at their own pace, from anywhere (home, internet café, etc.), read, listen to recorded lectures, and gain hands-on experience by practicing in test labs.

Naturally, theoretical knowledge has low value.

If you are studying, for example, new cloud technology, I recommend that you create an account in one of the cloud providers, put credit card, and gain hands-on experience by deploying services, building applications, writing some code, and sharing it in your Git repo, so anyone can learn from you.

I highly recommend that your spare time (at least one hour, but preferably more) each week to learn something new, practice, and gain hands-on experience.

Public events

I believe there is a limit to how much you could learn by yourself, and this is why I recommend taking advantage of public events such as webinars (where you can connect from anywhere), community meetups (such as meetup.com, or Eventbrite), community platforms (such as Slack or Discord), and finally industry conferences (in almost any topic you could think of).

If you are attending a conference, here are some tips I can share with you to get the most out of conferences:

• Prepare in advance – Usually, conferences have a published agenda, list of topics, tracks, and lectures. Before attending a conference, it is highly recommended to familiarize yourself with the list of lectures, select topics the closest to you, and mix them with topics you're not familiar with or have past expertise in.
• Be humble – Don't assume you already know everything. Sit at lectures, listen to the lecturer, ask questions, perhaps even take some pictures with your phone (to be able to review slides later), and allow yourself you expand your knowledge.
• Engage – Socialize with other conference attendees during the conference, both with your past colleagues who may have also come to the conference, and allow yourself to meet new people, exchange ideas, ask questions, and share knowledge.
• Visit vendor booths – Speak with salespeople (yes, I know that their job is to sell you something you don't necessarily need…), learn about their offering, ask questions, and if you're really interested, schedule a follow-up meeting.
• Gain hands-on experience – Participate in workshops (don't forget to bring a laptop…); there is no comparable to the knowledge you're gaining by actually deploying stuff, and taking part in labs, to expand your knowledge and experience.
• Share key takeaways – Whether you wrote notes during a conference, took pictures with your phone, or received written material (such as PDFs, or links to vendor sites, Git repos, etc.), take the time after the conference to write your own inputs, and share them with your colleagues.

Knowledge sharing

The most advanced way to expand your career is by sharing your knowledge and expertise, and personally, I prefer to write in English to have an audience from all around the world.

It doesn't matter which platform you choose; whatever you do will advance your career.

• Develop soft skills – The most important quality for anyone in the tech industry is to be able to communicate with others. It may be small talk with your peers in a coffee break, a conversation with a customer about an issue he's having, or the ability to explain a senior manager about technological topic, but in business terms.
• Write a blog post – This is an excellent way for anyone who has something to share and doesn't feel comfortable in front of an audience. You may share personal opinions on a topic, how-to guidelines, or even code samples. You don't even have to be an expert in a specific topic; whatever you share, people will read, and if it's valuable, people will follow your posts regularly.
• Record videos or podcasts – Both YouTube and Podcasts (such as Spotify) became very popular in the past decade. Begin small, share your insights, share your recordings over social media, and begin to attract followers around the world.
• Provide lectures – Regardless of the platform you choose, lectures are a great way to share knowledge and engage with colleagues and peers. You can choose video lectures (such as Zoom), on-site in small groups, or on the stage in front of a large audience, whatever you feel comfortable with. This is a great way to build your confidence and brand and advance your career.
• Mentorship – This is a combination of someone who has a lot of knowledge (in at least one domain) and is generous enough to expand the knowledge of others. You can do it in one-on-one meetings, or even in small groups (since large groups tend to be ineffective in my perspective). Remember to provide your mentees honest feedback, and don't forget to ask for feedback for the work you do, to learn from your mistakes.

Summary

In this blog post, I shared a lot of ways anyone in the tech industry can expand their knowledge, gain experience, build a reputation, and be able to advance his or her career to the next level.

Learning never stops. There is always the next level you can learn in any topic.

According to Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, a T-shaped person is someone who has deep expertise (the vertical bar of the T) in one specific domain, such as software development, cloud architecture, or data science, combined with broad knowledge and skills (the horizontal bar of the T) across multiple disciplines, such as communication, systems thinking, and collaboration.

To advance your career, you should always strive to build both depth and breadth in multidisciplinary domains.

About the author

Eyal Estrin is a seasoned cloud and information security architect, AWS Community Builder, and author of Cloud Security Handbook and Security for Cloud Native Applications. With over 25 years of experience in the IT industry, he brings deep expertise to his work.

Connect with Eyal on social media: https://linktr.ee/eyalestrin.

The opinions expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of his employer.