In today's episode, we talk about the 5th step in the Developer Career Roadmap - cross training.
In today's episode, we talk about the 5th step in the Developer Career Roadmap - cross training.
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Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Team. My name is Jonathan Cottrell and in today's episode we're talking about the Developer Career Roadmap. Step number five, cross-training. The Developer Career Roadmap is built for developers to understand a way of shaping their careers. This is intended to give you kind of some long-term advice as well as some short-term actionable advice. Of course we've said this before but this is primarily aimed at developers who are pretty early in their careers but particularly for today's episode this advice really goes for all developers at all stages of your careers and you may find yourself in a stage along this path regardless of how long you've been a developer. So make sure that you're listening out for things that apply to you specifically no matter what your title, what your position, how far into your development career you actually are. Now a quick kind of side note about today's episode. I really struggled with where to put this step because cross-training is something that really can begin or could have began well before your development career. This could be step negative 20. You may have actually ended up in a career where you've been a developer for a long time but you've been a developer for a long time and you've been a developer for a long time. So this is a really good way to start to see how cross-training can really help you develop your career. So this idea of cross-training as we expound on this idea hopefully you will see how this applies really in multiple areas multiple stages of your career but I decided to situate this basically during your internship. This step that is once again ongoing very similar to the learning cycle because cross-training is a form of learning just a slightly different form from what we talked about previously. But what I want you to understand here is that cross-training is really only effective for your career if you think about it in terms of your career. In other words you shouldn't make this your top priority. Cross-training shouldn't be the thing that you go and do every single day when you go into your internship because that would ultimately not be valuable. You wouldn't be accomplishing the goals of your internship if this was the only thing that you were doing. So the idea here is balance. You need to understand the balance of how much you should incorporate this into your learning process and into your day-to-day activities. If you're not familiar with the term cross-training cross-training is an athletic training practice and effectively what you do when you're cross training is you work to balance out. We've already said the word balance a few times maybe you can see that coming through as a theme of today's episode but you work to balance out muscles that you aren't otherwise working on. You work to balance out your muscles that you aren't otherwise working on. working out in your primary exercise. So for example, if you're a power lifter, you may have two or three exercises that you actually perform at your power lifting meets, but really you need to balance out the rest of your body. You have stabilizing muscles, for example, that need to be worked out in order to keep you safe. Now, of course, I'm not a fitness expert, so we aren't going to talk about fitness much more here, but understand kind of the etymology of that word of cross-training. As it comes into your career, the idea is balance and exercising those muscles that don't otherwise get exercised. For example, some of the muscles that don't get exercised often for some developers may be public speaking or perhaps creative vision. These are things that sometimes developers don't really exercise, and ultimately, if those skills begin to atrophy, we may experience some negative effects. So if you're a power lifter, you may want to do some cross-training. So that's the ultimate goal of cross-training, but the interesting thing about cross-training and why I think it's so important for your developer career is that as you begin to develop these external, these secondary things, they end up supporting your primary skill sets, right? If you develop these secondary skill sets, they end up making you better at your primary skill sets. And we'll talk more about that in depth as we go through today's episode. We have two primary areas of cross-training that you can engage in, and we're actually going to take two episodes to go through these two areas. We've got a lot of ground to cover on this particular topic, and really, one episode wouldn't do it justice. So I wanted to go ahead and split it up into two separate episodes. And the way that we've structured this list, it really starts from the most applicable or the most similar to your primary skill set, and then we're going to go through the rest of the episode. So let's get started. And then we go progressively further and further away from your primary skill set. So as you can imagine, we're going to start with something very similar to what you already know how to do and move further and further away to things that are seemingly completely irrelevant to your career. All right, so we're going to start with the first place, the first category of cross-training that you can do, and that is cross-training in the workplace. Once you have a solid set of skills as a developer, and what that means is once you have a grasp on how to use a programming language to solve problems, there are many avenues where cross-training in the workplace may be relevant. We'll start with perhaps the most obvious example, learning new programming languages. Learning new programming languages. Once you have a solid grasp on the primary functions and the design and the principles and even the kind of guiding ideology of a given language that you're using, you will probably find it incredibly valuable. I say probably because not everybody is in the same bucket, but you will very likely find it to be incredibly valuable to extend your skill set to new languages and new paradigms. By viewing this as cross-training, you're not simply learning a new language because it may be valuable to you down the road or something like that, but rather you're using this as a way to learn new programming languages. So let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. Let's get started. working on top of. And of course, you can extrapolate that to the new languages that you learn, learning those underlying systems, how they work, and how they're different from the ones that you already know. And then third, of course, learning what the other people that you work with, learning a little bit about their workflow, their tool set, their ideologies, the different thought processes they have to go through, the problems that they are solving. These three areas will greatly increase your awareness as a developer. They're going to greatly increase your ability to collaborate with other developers and other non-developers. Once again, remember, cross-training is about building balance. If you are unbalanced in the workplace, in other words, if all you can do is one thing in the workplace, then your value is limited. And in fact, your value may go completely out the window if that one thing is no longer necessary. But think about the flexibility and the value you can generate if you have multiple languages under your belt. Or perhaps if you understand enough about the design process that if necessary, you could shift to a more design-centric role in the company that you're working for. The amount of safety, the amount of value that you will have if you start cross-training in the workplace will greatly increase. This is why this is a step in the developer career road method. I hope you'll consider it as early as your internship. But once again, remember, this is about balance, not about following a prescribed method. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. We will pick back up with the rest of step five in the next episode of Developer Tea. That will be on Wednesday. Thank you so much for listening. Make sure you subscribe if you don't want to miss out on future episodes. And until next time, enjoy your tea. Thank you.