Monday, June 28, 2010

Self Development is the differentiator

From last one month, I had been interviewing many engineers with experience levels ranging from 3 years to 8 years. These engineers are from Tier 1 service and product companies in Bangalore. I would say that its been a wonderful insight and experience for me and my thoughts are as follows.

The need of the hour today in IT industry is to deliver the requirements faster, cheaper and with good quality. This lead the industry to use multiple third party tools, libraries to speed up the life cycle of the development. While this approach has been successful in meeting the project requirements, this has also lead the engineers to lost their thinking, analytical and innovative capabilities.

There is a clear differentiation between good and average engineers in the market today and this can be found easily if you speak to them for 15 minutes.

Average engineers are good when it comes to the knowledge of current project and knows most of the work they do in the project. However, they lack the the purpose of the certain components that are used in the project. They do not know how to proceed in the absence of such components. They are fully dependent on the libraries to make their code to work. They lack lateral thinking. They know very LESS outside of their project in terms of technologies and domain.

On the other hand, Good engineers found to be knowledgeable on the current project as well as the outside of the project. They always keep a watch on what is happening in either technology or domain or both. They spend extra time in their SELF DEVELOPMENT which they do with great discipline. This will help them to place right on the top in their current work place as well as in the industry. These engineers will grow in their career faster than industry standards.

Companies will greatly benefit from the SELF DEVELOPMENT of their employees. This will help the companies to place the resources quickly while they move from one project to the other project and it will save additional dollars on competency development. In addition to that, these employees are always on the learning mode which will enable them to adopt quickly the new technologies and productive faster than the average performers.

SELF DEVELOPMENT is the WAY FORWARD.........