It’s a holiday today, but I’m dropping this as I spent last week working on it. I wrote about having a career plan on Friday, with a few notes in there on how I was viewing my career in 2024. This post will cover a little more of my thoughts on the future (for me) and my plan.
Note: I’m mid-50s, and my career is closer to being over than beginning, so take this with a grain of salt if you’re in your 40s or younger.
Thoughts on My Career in 2024
I tried goals for a number of years, but those are hard for me to work on through a year for a few reasons. One is that my view in Dec/Jan is not always one that continues through the year, at least not with my job. Second, I start to get focused on the goals and it creates stress and pressure that I don’t need. Rather that improving in an area, I’m driven by the goal.
I don’t like that.
I also find my career is evolving more rapidly in the 2020s in the past, with each year moving me in new directions that are tangentially related, but hard for me to build goals in since both me and my employer are learning new ways to use my talents throughout the year.
I’m closer to the end of my career, with roughly 10 years—ish left. I’m also doing more work with customers as an architect and advisor rather than a marketer. I find my time is spent more with sales than marketing or engineering, and I both need new skills there, but I also have to focus my time in different areas.
Lastly, a portion of my job is still journalism, running SQL Server Central, so I need to remain aware and learning about the state of the data professional in the world.
With that in mind, I’m setting plans in motion to help me in those areas, without goals. Just a direction. I think that’s a new approach for me, where I look to find time to grow in a direction, but without the pressure of a goal. If I have to skip some sessions or alter the direction, I can do that easier by altering the direction rather than trying to abandon one goal and find a new one.
Think of this as finding a new route while on a road trip rather than being driven by the time of arrival.
The 2024 Plan
Where do I want to be in a year? Here are the things that come to mind:
- Produce a specific content on Redgate technical issues or architecture recommendations that I upload to our Seismic site.
- Learn how to use all the Flyway commands well from the CLI so I can make good recommendations for flow and using them
- Learn to use static code analysis tools and create custom rules in a pipeline
- Be comfortable enough with AI to use it every week
That might be too much, but the first 3 are really related to my job, so I’ll be getting career growth out of them and I can spend some of my time at work focusing in this direction. These are areas I’m interested in and having a direction to produce these learnings as documents shared within the company will force me to learn them a bit better.
The last one about AI is not because I think AI is great, but because I’m still unsure of how or where to use it. I have some coursework on AI from Microsoft that I’m going to go through and try to better understand what’s happening, what’s involved with training, and how I can prompt better. I think this will be a good tool at some point, if not for writing code, perhaps for other things.
That’s my plan, now, what’s yours?