Upskilling
on the Job
Once you’ve landed a job it’s important to keep refreshing your skills as digital technology is constantly changing. Here are some ways you can upskill and reskill to keep current and progress your career:
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Talk to your manager about putting together a career development plan. In this plan you can map out the areas or roles you want to move into, the skills you will need, and the on the job experience and training you will need to get there.
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Get yourself a mentor or career coach. This could be someone you work with or someone from another organisation. If you need help finding a mentor there are some programmes out there, including the IT Professionals NZ Mentoring Programme, TechWomen Mentoring Circles, and the Canterbury Tech Mentoring Programme.
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Do short courses online to hone your skills or explore a new area. A wide range of providers offer these, including: Free Code Camp, Udacity, Harvard Business School, Stanford University, Udemy, Coursera, General Assembly, ITProTV, Pluralsight, and Skills Campus. You can also do vendor specific training and certification through the vendor (e.g. AWS, Google, or Microsoft) or a local training provider.
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Do some self-directed learning using online reference libraries, video channels, websites and apps, or through a hobby project.
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Enrol to do a paper or papers offered as part of a tertiary qualification offered by a university, polytech or private training establishment. You could study for the whole qualification part time or full time (if you wanted to reskill into a new area and were able to take a break from full time work).
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Do an accelerated training course to move into a new area quickly.
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As a certified IT professional you can have your existing skills and competencies certified, and set targets for development. In New Zealand, IT Professionals offers industry-wide professional certification through the Certified Technologist (CTech) and Chartered IT Professional NZ (CITPNZ) certification, both based on international standards and closely linked to similar initiatives in Australia, the US, the UK, Europe, part of Asia and elsewhere.