How to Go from Students to Professionals

Right now our company is going through the phase of active growth again, and we are facing the problem of hiring. This issue goes beyond the scale of a city and even a country. Only a few universities all over the world really teach students the material that will be useful to them throughout their professional careers. Most of them operate an outdated curriculum, trying to inspire students with the information that was relevant several decades ago. Such universities hesitate to change their educational process, trying to not notice the changes around themselves and in the world as a whole.

Our company applies an unusual hiring procedure, which is based on the long-term development prospects of the company. If we aimed to instantly strengthen the company and its development over the next few months, then of course we would look for established professionals, simply buying them out with big money and better working conditions. But, as I wrote in one of my articles, this way is quite fatal in the strategic outlook, because these people will not be involved in the company’s life and they cannot be expected to support the company when most needed.

We fill a lot of vacancies with students by conducting internships or student practices several times a year. We hire both young people who can already fulfill commercial tasks, and those who will be able to grow to a good specialist in half a year or so.

What needs to be done to become a professional

As our practice shows, students with no work experience who have a huge desire to start working, who want to create something with their own hands, are really able to quickly reach the level of average specialists in the city and compete with them. So, what to do if a student couldn’t get to the top five best universities in the world, but still wants to grow professionally? From my point of view, the solution is extremely simple:

1. Choose the desired goal.
2. Determine the way to achieve it. The student can determine many steps himself, but some will require outside help. For this, there are specialists and teachers respected by their pupils, and company representatives who work with students.
   
3. Exclude activities that for sure won’t lead you to success. I will explain this a few paragraphs later.
4. Every time when it is impossible to achieve the set intermediate goal, find out what went wrong, what can be changed, and how to get back to achieving this goal.

Looking  at modern specialists with less than 10 years of experience, I can note the similar tendency – having failed to achieve their goals, they simply turn off the path and choose easier ways. That’s why there are currently a lot of iOS and Android developers and website coding specialists on the market. Well, what will happen to them in 5-10 years? The chances are high that only those who possess knowledge in such fundamental sciences as mathematics, algorithmization, etc., in addition to their development skills with certain platforms, will stay afloat.

The point of learning

So what is learning and how to achieve professional might with it? I see the answer in the applicant’s ​​understanding of his goal and the subject area he is engaged in. After all, there is a reason why 20 years ago there were so many programmers with a deep knowledge of mathematics and other fundamental sciences, and now there are only experts in interface development or scripting on one limited platform.

Previously, it was difficult to achieve professional results, because old technologies required a huge amount of knowledge to create something working and useful. Now, every future professional has a choice: to study complex sciences, incomprehensible at first glance, or to choose areas where everything is clear.

This is where the true professionals are born! The ability to admit that you do not understand a particular area, and try to cope with it is the key to success. After all, most prefer a simple way – they discard what is not clear. They take heart in the fact that only idiots are currently engaged in these complex areas. Such people choose to develop interfaces, write scripts for servers, create web pages, and practice many other simple areas.

Don’t take me wrong, I am not trying to play down the importance of these activities. They are useful, necessary, and it would not be possible to create the final product without them. I just want to say that these areas constitute only a part, but not the full extent, of what a professional can do. What decision have I eventually made for myself? I realized that to grow up means to expand into the fields that are uncharted to me. Acting in familiar areas doesn’t contribute to, but is rather a mere act of operating with a familiar data.

Entertainment

Earlier I’ve promised to address the activities that are guaranteed to not lead a person to professional success. This is where I would like to appeal to students. Count how much free time you have to master the future profession. After all these years, I very much regret that I wasted some of it on entertainment, not even for my own pleasure, but just to kill some time. Now I am sorely lacking that time to fill the missing areas of my knowledge.

Let’s take computer games, for example – these magnificent, beautiful worlds, where everything is so clear, where every player feels omnipotent and is capable of something unreachable in the real world. Have you ever noticed your mood after you finish playing? Especially if you stop compulsorily, whether you need to go to the university or parents put time restrictions on the computer use. Even after having played for 10+ hours in a row, you get up from the computer without a sense of pleasure and satisfaction from life.

Computer games - beautiful worlds where everyone feels omnipotent, yet leaves with no sense of life satisfaction Click To Tweet

But these are local consequences. Global ones will rise in 5-10 years, when you realize you cannot take advantage of that time to open a book or an internet page and learn something interesting, find out something new, move one step closer to professionalism.

The strongest piece of advice I can give to students is to constantly monitor yourself for the state when you do not understand something and this makes you stop practicing in a particular area. Make an effort to clarify those concepts and topics that you don’t get. I give a one hundred percent guarantee that after everything is clarified, you will be interested in this subject again. And after a while you will feel that you have come closer to being a professional in this field. Do not follow the footsteps of those who look for easy ways out. Easy ways, as a general rule, are limited and short.