Deciding how to progress your career and find work you find interesting/challenging.

When you start a new role, many challenges are placed on you. Once you have been in a role for a while, you may feel like you aren’t learning as much, your career isn’t progressing, and you wonder what job you might move to next.

Having been in that situation many times, my suggestion is that rather than waiting to be given challenges or the next role, you take the opportunity to challenge yourself to grow in your current role. This doesn’t mean accepting a role with too little growth, but rather see if there are opportunities to grow while you have some capacity, if you drive them. 

For example, imagine the roles you would wish to have, how much of that could you be doing now without being asked, possibly in your own time? I am not suggesting doing more unpaid work, rather extending the work you have to benefit your career.


Ways to extend your current role to help you grow

  • Teach others. Often, you don’t really understand something until you have had to explain it to someone else.

  • Understand the people using your work. Broaden your understanding of the people or systems using what you are producing.

  • How can what you're doing be more efficient, high-quality, more valuable to the end users, and easier to maintain?

  • Take responsibility for a larger part of an outcome. Instead of only producing a piece of work, help define what success means, consider alternatives, check whether it works in practice and learn from what happens afterwards.


Say you are working heavily with AI. Explore all the ways it currently fails, rather than sticking to what it does safely. Anything AI does easily now will be increasingly automated, and there probably isn’t a future in that. Instead, focus on what AI can’t do and where you add value. That is likely to be in demand.


Consider two approaches to using AI to write for illustration: 2,000 words of content on a subject (or 200 lines of code @ ~10 words per line). 

  1. You could prompt it for an answer of about 2,500 words and then edit out anything incorrect or clearly fluff. That’s sticking to the good-enough output where AI does most of the thinking.

  2. You could use multiple prompts to get AI to write 10,000 and one or more AIs to review and improve that output. Next, you write about 1,000 words on what you believe the AI missed, that wasn’t obvious, or that it got wrong. After that, you review the AI content for the 1,000-word most compelling content to retain.


You now understand something well enough to decide which 2,000 words are worth someone else reading. For an informed audience, what AI can easily produce, you might assume they already know and doesn’t need to be said. I.e., mostly it’s telling you what NOT to write.


Here is a document I wrote on things to consider when using AI more effectively, with the goal of gaining a greater understanding of the problem you are trying to solve, rather than just delivering the first things that are ok. https://github.com/OpenHFT/Open-Understanding


Hopefully, by doing this, you will be better placed to describe what you want from your next role and show what you can contribute.

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