3 Mistakes I Made Early in My Career
You can avoid these mistakes to further your career.
We all make mistakes at some point of time in our careers. While some are small ones and some cannot be undone in long run.
I have made plenty in my career which started in 2015 and since then I have been making mistakes continuously. Now without wasting anymore of your time I will share my mistakes and how you can avoid them.
1. Sitting idle for more than sufficient time
When there is a major product release you put a lot of efforts. You work days and late nights. But once it is over you want to spend few days(maybe less than a few days) doing nothing and relax. This is one type of idle time then there is a type when you are not assigned to a project or a project got completed and new one is yet to start, so what do you do? You sit idle.
I used my idle time for quite long time. As long as a whole year I sat idle. Now, you may say how can I get paid for just sitting idle. I was lucky(or unlucky) that our client didn’t have much work for us so I would complete my daily tasks within 2–3 hours(sometimes not even that much) and then just spend time rest of the day playing Table Tennis or going Tea breaks.
Of course in first few months I worked hard and learnt the system and once I was efficient I would just do the work at last hour. Worst of all, this was starting of my career and I chose to sit idle instead of learning new things.
So my advice for you is, do not sit idle and ask your managers for more work or other areas where you can contribute.
2. Not learning enough
While I did work hard at the starting and trying to learn all things I had to do in the excitement of the new job, once I learnt them I just stopped learning new things. I wouldn’t do any other work beyond my daily tasks.
Not learning more about my domain or technology in general was another mistake I made early in my career which left me behind with my colleagues.
Whatever you are working on currently, if you are starting you career just now, read and learn more about your domain, the technology you are working on daily. Along with that make sure you keep up with the technology which is happening around the world. Because you never know, what things you doing right now someone might replace you with a bot.
3. Not negotiating salary
Once I realized above mistakes, I always thought that my employer was very generous to keep me even when I was not working hard enough. So when I took lessons from above mistakes, I did change my overall attitude towards my work I can say I really did good compared to my peers in the same projects.
I was working on multiple projects, some of them I was working alone taking full responsibility from communicating to clients, designing, executing plans.
I knew I was doing good and turning around my past mistakes but that was not reflecting on my salary. For all years, I never even said a number when they asked me if I have any expectations about my salary raise. Whatever they gave me, I took, owing to my feelings about my lack of hard work earlier.
My third mistake, not knowing my worth in the project and in the organization.
Now I am not saying I am a completely different man. While I do watch Netflix, play games and use Social media but I also avoid repeating all above and other mistakes I made in my career.
