How to Fast Track Your Career Growth in Tech?

Tips to Turbocharge Your Career Growth in Tech

As big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) pervade our lives, they are also rapidly transforming work and business operations across industry sectors. To ride the wave of this transformation, tech professionals should equip themselves with new skills to differentiate themselves and grow their careers in the emerging digital innovation economy.

PAVITRA KRISHNASWAMY

Honouree, SG100WIT List 2021 Senior Scientist & Deputy Head, Healthcare and MedTech Division, Institute for Infocomm Research

EMBRACE INTERDISCIPLINARITY

Companies are increasingly seeking to use data to fuel better decisions, products, and insights for their customers. Delivering deep value in these endeavours often requires infocomm and tech professionals to go beyond applying analytical techniques on the data, and bring on board key data, domain, or problem knowledge. In other words, professionals who have relevant technical expertise, and gut-level intuition for dynamics governing data, context of the domain or problem and/or needs of the customer are higher valued. Becoming conversant with relevant industry and application domains, key horizontal and vertical problem-solving strategies, and how to interface these effectively is increasingly critical.

Cultivating this ability to think across and between disciplines has been immensely rewarding in my own experience – interfacing MedTech and AI. Often, in our projects, interpreting data requires deep understanding of the domain within which the data arises; and designing the most optimal AI strategy also requires insights into real clinical needs and a holistic appreciation of features that will drive value in care delivery.

These same skills are equally useful in other branches of tech. Therefore, if you are looking to differentiate yourself as a tech professional – embracing interdisciplinarity is a must. Identify one strategic area that is outside your core discipline. This could be an adjoining technical area (such as systems, DevOps, distinct machine learning approaches, etc.), application domain (usually the domain of the end-user or primary stakeholder impacted by your work), or business activity interfacing with your scope (like product engineering, operations, etc.). Assess the specific value-add that upskilling yourself in this strategic area could provide and find ways to develop yourself in this area through on-the-job learning or formal courses.

By doing so, you will be able to better relate your work to the bottom line, and even get fresh inspirations that can shape your core outputs in fundamentally novel directions.

DEEPEN COMPUTATIONAL THINKING SKILLS

Technology professionals who rise to leadership roles tend to be adept at intuitively leveraging computational thinking to address different problems. The truth is that today’s tech professionals are working on increasingly complex systems for a variety of high stakes consequential applications (e.g., algorithmic trading, healthcare, autonomous driving, government functions). These tasks are often complex – entailing several moving parts, many immense uncertainties, and different levels of solvability at different timescales. Tackling these challenges requires problem solving skills that go beyond those typically used to address more structured bite-sized development tasks.

Generally, for complex tasks with few established precedents, the ability to intuitively deploy computational thinking for problem solving can be a deciding factor that impacts the eventual outcome. From my experience in research and emerging application domains such as digital health, I can attest first-hand to the value of computational thinking. Identifying on-the-job or self-learning opportunities to enhance your computational thinking skills is essential for enabling your growth into key strategic decisionmaking roles. It is evident – if your aspiration is to define yourself as a leader and strategic problem solver, deepening your computational thinking skills is an advantage you need. Learn to be comfortable with decomposing complex multifaceted problems into their component parts. For each part, consider comparable patterns of related problems that have been solved, abstract it to the simplest but most critical piece, and come up with steps to address it. In parallel, accumulate experience in projects that demand integrating solutions across work components, and get familiar with how to assess iterations required on the component level. Develop people and project management skills to help you cycle through this problem-solving process while keeping strategic priorities and focus on refining and defining specific parts.

There is no doubt that the tips above are gender neutral. But women tech professionals may just have a slight edge over our male counterparts. Women often have to play many different roles as mother, daughter, wife, caregiver and professional. The demands of these varied roles hone their abilities to embrace different points of view and serve as effective bridges between disciplines. In addition, engaging in complex everyday tasks ranging from designing recipes to childrearing and running households calls for women to proactively apply intuitive computational thinking approaches.

Hence, my recommendation for girls and ladies who are keen to make forays into the worlds of tech and AI is to use the interdisciplinary slant to your benefit. But don’t stop at that, find ways to also leverage your computational thinking skills in your professional life. Before long, you will see yourself thriving on unexpected growth paths.