How to get ahead in IT

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Tonight I went to a .Net user group meeting on Aspect Oriented Programming, and I was a little disappointed as I looked around the room. There was one young person in the audience, and most of the others were close to my age. The younger guy introduced himself and said he was self employed, so that let me know he was motivated and wanted to improve his skills. It got me thinking about my article earlier today where I discussed working on apps because they help me increase my skills. 

Over the years I have had a number of young people ask me advice on getting ahead in there job or advice on getting a job. My first response is always to look for a user group that has talks in areas you want to either learn or improve your skills. Also explore other groups that are similar or interest you. The other thing I suggest is finding something like give camp where you donate time to work on charity projects. Basically get out and learn from the smart people in your community. 

The one thing I have noticed a lot is that I am not answering their question. I am skipping a step in my answer. The answer is improve your skills and increase your experience. Unfortunately people who ask me this question aren't looking for that answer. They are hoping that there is a shortcut to boosting their career. These are usually the same people who complain that they have to work more that 40 hours a week and that deadlines are too hard. 

I don't mean to make this sound like there is an age distinction, and that the problem is only with young people. There are a lot of programmers and sys admins out there who are my age that don't want to learn anything new, but they don't usually ask me for my advice. There is one big difference though. I got into IT before it was a hot career, before the internet was used by general users. When I started IT people were usually hidden in a basement somewhere, and most of us did this kind of work because we were geeks, and this is the kind of work we enjoy. 

With the explosion of the internet, there was a revolution of sorts where people started looking at IT jobs as a way of making big money. There were still the geeks who loved the technology and learning new ways of computing, but there were more and more people getting into the IT career who really didn't have the knack for it. These are the people who usually want a shortcut. 

If you really want to get ahead in this business, you really do need to find ways to learn from people who are smarter than you are. I have a friend of mine, who is a Java programmer, but he used to go to the Microsoft users group with me. He would say it didn't matter what they were discussing, he just like being in a room with a bunch of smart people. The people who go to user groups, do online training on their own time, and work on projects off the clock are the ones who increase their skills and become known in the community. These are the people hiring managers are going to look for when they do their hiring. 

It is kind of interesting in my case because I am working the least amount of billable hours that I have in my entire career right now, but I am putting in more time learning new things and going to IT events than I ever have. So the time and effort hasn't changed, just the distribution of my time.

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