Career Agility – What is it and How Can it Help Your Tech Career?
With modern tech professionals constantly needing to adapt their skills and knowledge, understanding career agility is more important than ever. Check out our top tips for boosting your tech career with career agility now!
With the modern business landscape changing faster by the day, tech workers are needing to pivot, upskill and grow their knowledge at a faster rate than ever. Whether you’re a Software Engineer, Business or Data Analyst or any other tech professional, your ability to quickly learn and hit the ground running with new platforms, frameworks or technologies is increasingly becoming your most valuable asset.
According to a recent report, soft skills such as problem-solving, creativity and the ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity are missing in up to 70% of candidates. While hard skills, such as specific skill stacks are still important, the report points toward a shortage of candidates who have the flexibility to cope and adapt to new challenges as they come.
The ability to quickly acclimate to these new changes is what’s referred to as career agility.
What is Career Agility?
Career agility refers to your overall ability to adapt to meet the demands of your career. This can be both your ability to learn new skills as well as how quickly you can translate your existing skills and leverage them to solve novel problems.
For example, a Software Engineer with a high level of career agility can quickly learn new programming languages or frameworks and use them as required. They’re also flexible and able to adapt languages and frameworks they already know and use them to solve new problems.
Career agility sometimes also refers to mindset and how flexible and willing one is to take on new challenges.
How to Develop Career Agility
The good news about career agility is with the right tools and understanding, anybody can develop it and use it to get ahead in their career.
Here are our top tips for developing career agility:
Get comfortable with change
The first step towards developing career ability is to adapt your mindset to the current rate of change. In the modern technology landscape, the rate of change is increasing by the day. Before following any of the next steps, you need to get comfortable with or even learn to love change.
Tech professionals who thrive on new challenges, constant movement and enjoy learning and applying new skills have a distinct advantage over those who resist change and avoid stepping out of their comfort zones.
Upskill constantly
Gone are the days when there was a straightforward path from education to industry. While previous generations were able to neatly draw a line between education and their career, in today’s workplace that line is increasingly becoming blurred. Constantly upskilling to stay up to date with what’s current in your industry is a must. To remain agile and adaptable, tech professionals need to be constantly updating their skill sets.
According to the 2021 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, approximately 50% of professional Software Developers need to master a new framework, API or programming language every few months to keep up to date with the demands of their role. To increase career agility and always remain ahead of the curve, committing to regular learning is essential.
Prioritise career agility when choosing your next role
When applying for a new role always consider the complete package that’s on offer. While we’re in the midst of a skill shortage where tech workers can command higher salaries, in the long term, prioritising salary first isn’t always the best thing for your career.
Always consider how a new position will affect your career agility. It could easily be the case that taking a role with a lower salary but a high growth potential may be better for your career in the long run.
For example, accepting a senior position in a company with no room for personal or professional development as opposed to a mid-level role at a fast-growing start-up may make sense in the short term, but it may limit your career agility.
It’s also worth noting what other benefits are on offer. Does the company offer free training or an education allowance? If a company allows time for you to learn and develop new skills regularly, consider the value this will add to your career.
Putting your career agility first is about long-term thinking. You may need to treat some of your career moves as steppingstones to developing the skills and attributes you’ll need to get the best-paying jobs later.
Summary
The rate of change that tech professionals need to adapt to is increasing all the time and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. It’s now more important than ever to develop your career agility and to always consider it with each career move you make. This will include learning to get comfortable with the rate of change (or even learn to enjoy it), developing a habit of constant learning and assessing new job opportunities in terms of what they can add to your overall career agility.
If you want to find out more ways to develop your career agility or need some assistance in finding job roles that will boost your tech career, get in touch with the people at Hawksworth. As a leading tech recruitment agency, we specialise in helping tech professionals globally from Australia to the UK in getting the help they need.