Things I wish I knew as a student before getting a Job

There are often many things that happen in real world and are not spoken about. Today I am going to share few things that I wish I had known while starting my career.

Let’s make a list and go one by one, the things that I learned and what they actually mean and why anyone should know them,

1. Experience
2. Expertise
3. Skills
4. Technology
5. Tools

Experience

It’s just a number like your age and not everyone who grows older becomes wiser, similarly not everyone who has more experience knows everything (remember not everyone knows everything). But why are companies behind that, well below are few obvious reasons,

1. They have worked on something real and have the ability to understand and finish tasks quickly(depends, which is analysed in interview, further explained below).
2. More the experience, more the chances that they have encountered tough/challenging situations and have solved them or know the approach.
3. They know corporate etiquettes very well(again depends on person) and have groomed their skills needed like communication, presentation etc.
4. They know how to communicate and work along in a team of various sizes and have already gone through fair share of experiential learning to tackle many situations that come their way.

All the above mentioned points might vary from person to person, some get opportunities and some don’t, some create opportunities and some just wait for one to come and knock the door, you never know how long it is going to take.

In conclusion experience is just a number.

Expertise

This is your knowledge and can be acquired in two ways, experience and theory. Now which matters most is not a question here, but the actual question in place is how are you applying that knowledge into the work you are doing and how well are you doing it.

To gain expertise there are few key things you should always keep in mind,

1. Always keep learning goals, be it monthly goals or half-yearly so on. Never stop learning.
2. If you have learned it, apply it do a POC (proof of concept).
3. Learn to question things, primarily why? when? where? as in why should we be doing it this way? when should we do it this way? and where should we do it exactly?, it’s always a good idea to understand what/why you are doing.

Skills

This is more like your ability to perform things in better ways, say most of the activity/problem solving has been happening in one way and you show up and look at the whole problem in a different perspective and go like hey! this can be done like this and it’s easier this way. Remember the tools you and the folks trying to solve the problem earlier are same but as I mentioned earlier it’s about applying the tools right way.

Technology

The more you know the history of it the better you understand it. Okay this point that I am saying is off beat not everyone is interested in history of something and everyone wants to create a future, but I suggest take a step back understand why we need this technology what problems is this solving for us. If we have a basic understanding of the purpose then the way we apply our tools changes and thats the sweet spot that we should always try to hit.

Tools

Tools exist to make life easy, say you learn/understand/apply a tool today, it not necessarily has to be the go to tool to get some help, over the time better tools keep coming but the underlying concepts would remain same. So if someone says I know so many tools it doesn’t mean they are experts in it, they just know the underlying concepts of those tools and if you are good at applying those concepts that will pretty much solve the things for you. So I suggest start off with a few tools understand the underlying concepts and then you can sail in storm.