I was able to give a talk in a local University here in my country (Ecuador) about Sitecore and ended it giving some career tips to an audience of young people from senior year. Here are couple of things for those of you that are just starting in the developer career.

First, learn English if this is not your native language. This obviously goes to those of you, like me, that were born or live in a country which native language is not English. This is really important to understand. You need to know English for this career. It is just a must because every important documentation is in English.

Work on your soft skills like team work. I know that we as developers want to solve the bugs by our own first. Don´t get me wrong, it is good you have confidence in your skills to resolve things by your own. However, you need to realize that all big projects are complete in teams. Work on your skills to communicate with others.

Continuing with the previous point, try to practice explaining a relative complex topic to a non-technical person because not everyone understands technical speech. You will work with Project Managers and clients that sometimes have no idea of what you are talking about. In those cases, we need to try to find other words to explain what we are going to do in a very clear and straight forward manner.

Keep always learning. This career is all about learning. You need to love learning. There will always be a new topic to learn, new technology, framework, widget, language, etc. You will always be reading or watching videos about these things. If you don’t like the idea of be always learning, then this might not the right choose for you. Sorry.

Finally, enjoy. This career has very complex problems to solve in every project. In every stage of the project, enjoy the bugs, tasks, collaboration times, meetings and the time you work on your features.

Thank you Universidad de las Americas (UDLA) for the opportunity and the teacher Juan Jose Leon. I hope you had a great time like I did 🙂