Peter Drucker—the founder of modern management—said in his 1999 article “Managing Oneself” that knowledge workers should plan their second career well ahead of time.
That’s admirable advice.
Except that for the rest of us, planning our first career is already a major life struggle.
And I can talk at length from my own experience. A little more than ten years ago, back when I was still a naive junior engineer, career progression was a very nebulous concept.
Now that I’m at a point where I’m managing other tech managers, I’ve gained enough perspective on the topic that I can share valuable insights that my younger self would have loved to hear and learn.
In a previous article, I covered why soft skills matter and how they can make your career stagnate if you don’t address them. I also shared what the next job roles are from the senior developer role.
I wanted to create a simple representation to enable anyone with a career in tech to grasp how career progression looks like and what it requires.
In the rest of this article, I’m presenting a skills map of career progression, starting all the way from the senior developer role. This map covers both the individual contributor and managerial career paths.
