The 3 most important aspects in the career growth of a developer are:

1. Developing your skills 💻
2. Establishing online presence 🌐
3. Networking 💬

Let's pick them up individually and learn what they mean & how we can build some easy-to-follow habits around them to stay on top of things.

1. Developing your skills 💻

The first step in your dev career is to start learning & developing your skills. There are many ways you can do this, try what works best for you! This involves building projects, practicing Leetcode, contributing to open source, etc. At the end of the day, everything comes down to finding what you're good at and focusing more on it.

Suggested Habits:

1. Build one small project every month
2. Solve at least 3 Leetcode problems every week
3. Solve one good first issue every week

2. Establishing online presence 🌐

Having an online presence on platforms like Twitter & LinkedIn is very vital for your career. You need to get noticed to attract opportunities. Good thing about these platforms is that it's easy to grow here despite of having a small following initially. However, you still need to give it some time by showing up on regular basis. I recommend devoting at least 30 minutes every day to building your online presence.

Suggested Habits:

1. Post at least once a day on Twitter
2. Post at least once a week on LinkedIn
3. Engage with the other like-minded people for 15 mins per day

3. Networking 💬

You might be wondering what's the difference between building online presence vs networking? 🤔 Well, networking is all about directly engaging with people you're interested in through DMs, etc. Days of randomly applying to hundreds of jobs and hoping to get selected in at least one are over now. Traditional hiring system is slowly fading away, this is the time you need to show how innovative and creative you are to directly attract recruiters to yourself. Networking plays a key role here to help you connect with potential employers and remain in their vision. This is also great for getting referrals and off campus opportunities.

Suggested Habits:

1. Reach out to companies & startups and appreciate them that you like their products & how enthusiast you are about the work they are doing.
2. DM to one of the persons you admire & ask for advice meanwhile showing your passion.

That's it for today!

This write up was inspired by Ken Rogers' article on "How to Use Small and Sustainable Habits to Get Your First Dev Job".

📖 Read here: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-use-small-sustainable-habits-to-get-your-first-dev-job/

Support

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you learnt something new today. Please leave a like, a lovely comment or feedback & also consider following me as I regularly post useful & informative articles to help you become a better programmer.

If you like my work, please consider Buying me a Coffee so that I can bring more projects, more articles for you.

Connect with me

If you have any questions or doubts feel free to contact me on Twitter, LinkedIn & GitHub. Or you can also post a comment/discussion here & I will try my best to help you :D!