Career Aspirations Examples. Professional life, the career aspiration under the objective column is imperative in any resume. This gives the employer a quick idea about what you are seeking from the company and the job applied for. As such, it enables the employer to take the decision easily analyzing how well the applicant will suit the company and position.
As a Software Engineering Manager, I constantly ask myself about the top priorities for my role and whether my actions are aligned with the priorities. This helps keep a check on myself on a regular basis and help correct the course if I’m deviating. Here, I'm listing the top 4 priorities which I believe are most important to be successful in my role. You might approach these things in a slightly different way but I think the core goals would be same irrespective of the path. Inspired by the book - ‘Multipliers’, that I recently read, I’d encourage you to discover your ‘native genius’ and figure out how to achieve these goals through your natural strengths.
1. Successful Execution
- Top 20 Examples of Career Goal Statements to Guide you in Creating Yours To become a Lead Graphic Designer in ABC Company in the next 3 years. To achieve this, I will undertake a Bachelor’s degree in Digital Design and develop proficient skills in Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign and Acrobat.
- Goals created for a member of a software engineering team should be focused on helping the engineer advance their career and improve either their technical (i.e., software engineering.
'Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.' - Edward Berard
If you are working for a Software company, your are most likely there because you love building things and making lives of your customers better. Your primary goal is to build and deploy new features or products to your customers irrespective of whether you are an engineer, designer, product manager or an engineering manager. To achieve this goal, your top most priority should be to create a consistent loop of planning and executing within a particular time frame.
Executing it right means creating the perfect combination of people, technology and process. As a manager, your role is to ensure that your team has the right tools and resources (both people and technology) available and processes are set in place so that the team is able to make quick decisions and move forward with executing the plan like a well oiled machine.
Timely execution is also very important in order to build trust between the team and leadership. If a team is constantly delivering on what they’ve promised, the leadership will trust them to solve bigger problems next time. This will in turn provide the team with an opportunity to work on the best projects and get the best resources available.
Ensure that the team has the clear goals and priorities before they begin to execute. You should be the un-blocker and team productivity protector. A typical day for an engineer is not complete without facing an issue that they may not be directly responsible for. The build might be broken, the design might miss specifications, etc. You need to make sure that the team is not blocked for too long by these external factors. You need not be the one to fix every issue, but create a framework and provide tools through which they can figure things out themselves or help each other resolve issues.
There are many different ways to facilitate a predictable execution. One of the most common ways I’ve seen is the Agile methodology. I’m not going to go in detail about Agile here but it has worked well in my experience so far.
2. Building a Roadmap
As a manager, you are responsible for setting a vision for the team while striking a balance between long term and short term goals. Engineers are attracted to join or stay longer on teams that have an exciting roadmap of features/products.
BUT, you need not be the one directly building a roadmap. Then, how do you do it? You need to collaborate with the product manager/owner and help build the roadmap with technological considerations. Before that, you and your organization need to come up with a vision about the product and ensure that all the product and engineering teams are aligned on this vision. The vision could be as broad as ‘The app needs to have the best user experience in the industry’ or as specific as ‘The app needs to be able handle 1M Daily Active Users’. Once the vision is set, you should closely partner and facilitate discussions between designers, product managers/owners and engineers to come up with a roadmap on how to get there. A critical step here is to involve people from each of these disciplines in every stage of planning - this will align teams from the start and helps iterate faster.
The days of passing the requirements from Product -> Design -> Dev -> QE are gone. Everyone needs to work together from building the designs to implementation and collectively own the success (or failure)!
3. Coach and Hire
There are two equally important ways to grow a team. One is to hire smart engineers who fit well into the current team. The other is to coach and support the growth of your current employees in order to improve their skills and and in turn boost employee productivity.
Coach
You act as the employee’s coach. Your responsibility is to understand each individual’s career goals and passions, identify strengths and weakness areas of improvement and build a strategy for the person’s career growth. The strategy should be able to leverage their strengths and take them to the next level while also providing opportunities to work on their weaknesses . Create this constant loop of evaluate, feedback, improve, evaluate. The frequency of this loop can be as frequent as the employee wants but at least a couple times per year. In the feedback process, praising the strengths is as important as focussing on the areas to improve. There are many helpful tools out there but one I’ve found to be useful is the Situation-Behavior-Impact model.
Another key thing to remember here is that there is no one solution that fits all. You need to identify how each employee likes to receive feedback and act accordingly. Some people like to be praised in public and thrive in that kind of environment. Some individuals like to discuss in private.
Hire
This might be a cliche at this point, but it is in fact very crucial to hire the right people for your team. One question I always ask myself before hiring someone is how much impact will this person have in the long run.
Career Aspirations Examples For Senior Software Engineer Resume
But how do you define ‘right’ person? There are several things that you need to consider while hiring someone for your team. Are you looking to hire someone who is able to coach other members in the team? Do you already have a team of leaders who are excited by the opportunity to mentor new engineers and scale the team? Do you have a huge backlog and you are looking to hire someone to help deliver specific features in the near future? Are you looking for specialized skill that your current team does not have? These are just some scenarios I’ve been in. There is no one type of hiring advice that works for everyone. You as a manager need to understand your team dynamics, short and long term goals and define the ideal candidate accordingly.
Career Aspirations Examples For Senior Software Engineering
While it is important to look out in your network to find the right person, be sure to look for candidates within your organization. This of course depends on your company’s policy around changing teams internally, but if allowed, it can be a great form of hiring. This works great because they understand the product, tools and processes used within the organization and will have almost zero ramp-up time.
Hiring best talent need not always be a one way approach. The other way is to build a brand for your team so that the candidates come to you. Do your best work and make sure that it gets the right visibility, put your team in the spotlight by showcasing your work and vision at local conferences, organization wide presentations etc. As a manager, you need to help create this brand for your team and attract the best engineers.
What Are Your Career Aspirations Software Engineer
4. Culture Cultivator
Career Aspirations Examples For Senior Software Engineer Job
Another reason people stay in teams is the culture and dynamics they share with their co-workers. But what is culture? It could be as simple as the team going for a happy hour every Wednesday evening,an informal technical talk every week, lunch and learn sessions or a nerf war! These are things that will not just make work fun and provide learning opportunities but also create a sense of camaraderie and empathy among the team.
As a manager, you should strive to be a culture cultivator. A team culture is not something that can just be built by one person. Typically there will be a few individuals in each team who will be responsible in creating a team culture either voluntarily or involuntarily. You should pay close attention and should foster an environment where these individuals can strive and keep the culture going. You might be one of those individuals, but if you are not, you should facilitate these people.
In case you join a new team/company as a manager, it is very critical to get a pulse of a team, quickly become part of that culture and help take it forward instead of changing things or expecting them to do things just like your previous team. Sure, you can suggest new ideas based on your prior experiences but it is really up to the team to follow them or not.
Career Aspirations Examples For Senior Software Engineers
I’d like to conclude this by asking what am I missing here? How do these align with your priorities? Please share your thoughts. I will continue to share what I learn going forward as well. I hope this will be useful for other managers or even individual contributors who would like to challenge their managers if they are not focussing on the right things.