What if the most important skill for building a long-term career in engineering isn’t a skill at all?
When Jean Chung, senior software engineer at Ribbon, transitioned from a career in criminal justice reform to working in tech, she found that embracing a learner’s mindset helped catapult her career.
“To me, being skilled at learning is about much more than how easily you pick up new technologies,” Chung said. “It starts with getting to know yourself and understanding how you learn best.”
Abhijit Ghosh, a software engineer manager at Northwestern Mutual, agreed. “One of the most important skills is being a lifelong learner,” he said.
The industry’s fast-paced change means concrete skills are constantly becoming outdated. As engineers encounter new languages, new challenges and new innovations, a love of learning is the best preparation for success in any engineering role.
By reflecting on your own strengths, as Chung recommended, professionals are able to develop aptitude for ongoing workplace development. “Being a quick study doesn’t mean you’re the smartest person in the room. It’s that you’ve learned how to learn,” Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, wrote in Harvard Business Review.
Built In NYC spoke with Chung, Ghosh and three other engineering experts about how they approach continuous learning and growth in their professional lives.
Northwestern Mutual provides a broad range of financial planning, investment and insurance services to clients nationwide.
What is the single most important skill for an engineer to have to ensure long-term success?
I often tell my team that a successful engineer needs to embody three things: the passion to learn new things, the patience to fail and the resilience to try again. But I continue to point back to passion for learning as the most important.
Being someone who wants to learn from others and grow your skill set will help you tremendously in the long run. For example, I ask foundational questions on every project I’m involved in: Why are we doing this? What are we doing? How are we doing it? I want to make sure that we’re solving for the right problem and considering things like what the goals are, how the data is constructed, how the system is architected and the impact to the end user. I’ve found that by continuing to learn and ask the right questions, I’m able to set myself and my team up for success.
Being someone who wants to learn from others and grow your skill set will help you tremendously in the long run.”
What previous work or educational experiences did the most to set you up for your engineering career?
I went to school for industrial engineering and management. I’m 12 years into my career. While my schooling helped prepare me for my first job, I found the most applicable training is real-world experience and on-the-job learning.
I began my career in test engineering, where I was able to experience a variety of testing methods and clearly understand documentation and process. Then, I transitioned into software engineering, where my skill set was easily transferable. At the core, I found success by asking questions to understand the problem or business requirements and collaborating with my team to deliver a solution that ultimately meets our customers’ needs.
What skills are you still looking to further develop to advance your career?
I feel lucky that Northwestern Mutual gives employees opportunities to continue their education. Our technology platforms are constantly evolving, and there’s no shortage of courses to grow your own skill set. From a technological perspective, I’m taking courses to refresh my skills specific to machine learning and artificial intelligence.
As a manager, I’m also focused on my development as a people leader. I want to make sure I best support my team of engineers, so I’m constantly learning from our technology industry. By attending sponsored Northwestern Mutual educational events or attending courses outside of Northwestern Mutual, I’m focused on developing my leadership skills to provide my team with the support they need to succeed in the long run.
Ribbon is a proptech company supporting both real estate agents and homebuyers.
What is the single most important skill for an engineer to have to ensure long-term success?
I think one of the most important skills an engineer can cultivate is the ability to learn. Do you do better when you’re reading books or documentation, listening to a subject matter expert or pairing with a teammate hands-on? How are you seeking out those opportunities?
I’ve noticed that highly skilled learners consistently do two things in particular. First, they ask for help when they need it. It’s considerably more effective to ask for help and utilize the resources available to you than to bang your head against the wall and insist on grokking it out by yourself. It’s especially important for more senior engineers to model this behavior to create a culture in which less experienced engineers feel comfortable asking questions. Second, great learners practice a learning mindset. They approach new ideas with curiosity and treat the possibility that they might be wrong as an opportunity to learn something new, regardless of seniority or tenure.
I think one of the most important skills an engineer can cultivate is the ability to learn.”
What previous work or educational experiences did the most to set you up for your engineering career?
Before I became a software engineer, I worked in criminal justice reform. The organization I worked for conducted research and synthesized their findings to advocate for evidence-based approaches to crime and ending mass incarceration, and their target audiences included journalists, policymakers and the general public. I learned so many invaluable lessons during my time there, including how to look at a complicated system and identify critical levers of change, that a problem of any size can be broken down into smaller, achievable wins, how to communicate complex ideas in simple terms and the importance of tailoring your message to your audience.
What skills are you still looking to further develop to advance your career?
As I work on leveling up as an individual contributor beyond senior engineer, I’ve been realizing that over time this means I will likely be writing less code and focusing more on higher-level systems. It’ll take some time to adjust to that change, and I’m working on becoming more comfortable with owning my impact outside of the commits I push.
Prescriptive Data is an AI smart buildings company focused on reducing energy consumption.
What is the single most important skill for an engineer to have to ensure long-term success?
The most important thing I see in successful software engineers is passion. I’m talking about being driven, feeling like you are meant to do this and not something else. I often ask engineers why they chose this career over other things and those who are successful always answer with passion in their voice that it’s what they love to do. When engineers feel innately driven to do the work, there is high productivity, high desire to keep up with evolving technologies, little need for supervision and high desire for continuous improvement. When I interview engineers, one of my goals in the first few minutes is to gauge their passion. If I don’t see it, it is unlikely things will move forward. Whenever I have dealt with performance problems on a team, it always seems related to a loss of drive. The best engineers I have worked with are those that have a high level of passion for the work.
What previous work or educational experiences did the most to set you up for your engineering career?
A successful engineering career is all about continuous education. I think it’s important to start with some kind of formalized training, but I have found that it often doesn’t matter whether it starts with a Computer Science degree, a bootcamp, or even being self-taught through books and e-learning. The key is continuous education. There are always new languages, frameworks and tools to learn that are relevant and applicable to the job you are currently doing, or to the direction your team is heading. Having a desire to continuously learn sets you up for success in this career.
A successful engineering career is all about continuous education.”
What skills are you still looking to further develop to advance your career?
My main focus right now is in building high-performing teams. I have been working on this for a long time, but there is still a lot to learn. I want to be a more effective leader, mentor and communicator, and I want to become a more knowledgeable technologist.
PointsBet is an Australian-founded sports betting company.
What is the single most important skill for an engineer to have to ensure long-term success?
In my opinion, a deep passion and thirst for knowledge is the single most important skill for an engineer to have to ensure long-term success. There’s an element of needing to practice what you learn too, of course, but you can’t practice what you don’t know. We’re lucky to be able to stand on the shoulders of giants. Taking advantage of the extensive ideas, literature and standards established for computer science and software engineering is absolutely critical to staying relevant, even as technologies rapidly progress. It’s important to keep up with the evolving tech landscape, but the fundamentals never change.
A deep passion and thirst for knowledge is the single most important skill for an engineer.”
What previous work or educational experiences did the most to set you up for your engineering career?
A background in computational physics was certainly the driving factor for my success in software engineering. The concepts behind building physics simulations translate directly into modeling business domains. There is some behavior that needs to be replicated in code, thereby creating a software model of the real thing. From there, getting an extensive amount of hands-on cloud experience in Amazon Web Services and Azure, building a variety of full-stack apps and studying distributed, domain-driven and event-sourced systems paved the way for my prior experience with modeling to really pay off.
What skills are you still looking to further develop to advance your career?
The landscape of software engineering is so vast that it’s hard to narrow down what to study next! Many fields in math are ripe with concepts that map well to modeling, clean coding and even broader architecture principles, so I’m always adding more of those to my study backlog. From a more concrete perspective, keeping up with the most popular application frameworks, cloud services and languages is always a great investment and crucial for staying relevant. Finally, it’s important not to neglect the soft skills; things like understanding what makes a business tick or diving deeper into process frameworks like Scrum have their own important places in becoming a well-rounded engineer.
Landis supports renters on their paths to homeownership.
What is the single most important skill for an engineer to have to ensure long-term success?
One of the most exciting parts of software engineering is that it brings new challenges every day. Technology rapidly evolves, and with it engineers need to constantly grow. The need for engineers to learn new things at a rapid pace means the best engineers have passion, drive and an overall ability to “just figure things out.” This is the trait that I have seen time and again that separates mediocre engineers from great ones. From a practical standpoint the best software developers focus on concepts rather than accumulating knowledge.
Engineers need to constantly grow.”
What previous work or educational experiences did the most to set you up for your engineering career?
I have grown the most from working on projects and building applications end-to-end myself.
While an educational background in programming can teach you about algorithms and fundamental concepts, it doesn’t replace time spent on a keyboard. In the same vein, I find that enterprise experience provides scaffolding and crutches that remove you from the guts of software development. In this type of environment, you’ll do mostly bug fixing and optimizing someone else’s framework.
In order to build an app from scratch you need to understand infrastructure, be able to independently problem-solve, run a project and think like a user. These skills increase your fundamental understanding of how software is built and instill a deeper sense of ownership over everything you touch. One of the awesome things at Landis has been focusing on end to end ownership of features. This allows developers to get a similar experience to building something yourself while having a strong collaborative community to rely on.
What skills are you still looking to further develop to advance your career?
There are a couple of major emerging trends within technology that are becoming more established and mature that I am following. The ones that are most applicable to my career are machine learning (ML) and big data. I have a lot of experience as a consumer of ML models but not much hands-on experience creating them. While the terms are overhyped and overused, being able to create and understand ML models will be an important tool in a software engineer’s tool belt. As a trend, it seems the two fields are merging and it’s a large topic with many different concepts to learn.
