Life is too short to repeat somebody else's mistakes, you should make your own!

I have been a part of software industry for about 6 years working with three highly reputed MNCs-Novell, Citrix and Amazon. During this journey as a software professional I have accomplished some distinguished feats and also have committed many silly mistakes. While having informal chats at different occasions with different people, I noticed a pattern as they revealed about the mistakes they think they did during their initial years. Its interesting that not only the mistakes made by different people working in different organizations were quite similar but also could have been avoided had someone guided or informed them.

Here you have an opportunity to know about and avoid the same mistakes as you go on to start your career-

Focusing only on the development of technical skills

Thankfully I did not commit this mistake but most of the people do and here's why - What and how you learn in campus and apply at corporate are quite different. Most of the freshers, especially those who are the only inexperienced ones in their team, find themselves in a weird situation where everyone else seems to know everything or most of the things. In order to prove to yourself or others that you are not here by chance but deserve this job, you would start focusing all you energy in learning the processes, jargons, tools, languages, or in other words- technical skills.

Later you would realize that learning and developing non-technical skills like communication, presentation etc are also equally important for you to grow. As an example, suppose you made a substantial contribution to certain project but you are unable to communicate the complexity, importance and impact of your work to your peers or seniors, it may not get recognized unless you are really lucky to have an amazing manager who would take care of doing that.

Therefore, it would be a sincere suggestion to make sure that while focusing on developing the technical skills, make a conscious effort to develop non-technical skills as well.

Keep watching for more. If you are keen on learning more about the better software development practices you can start following right from the college days, do get a copy of my first book "Hello World - Student to Software Professional" published by Partridge (A Penguin Random House Company). Now available worldwide on all the MAJOR ONLINE Stores - Amazon, Google Play, Flipkart, Barnes & Noble and many others.