Professional development cannot be stressed enough.
Learning the current hot technology and IT trends just doesn’t end at college.
It continues throughout your career and life.
Communication and people skills
Leaning new hot language/ or technology
Networking and branding starts in your first job and last
your entire career. It does beat applying at job boards where your resume falls into abyss of other resumes somewhere on someone's hard drive.
I’ve been in IT over thirty three years and have a large
network in IT. Currently I completed a contract and looking for my next
opportunity and reaching out to my network letting them know I’m available. Social
media has helped. LinkedIn is good. Facebook as well. Create a blog to show examples of
your work all come into play and post at linkedin, twitter and facebook.
Communication and people skills are important today for IT
people. A few years ago programmers worked alone and pretty much heads down programming. Today that has changed. In
both waterfall and agile projects, developers have been part of the process
from the beginning thru implementation. Toastmasters is a great and affordable
club where you write and present speeches. I’ve earned my CTM and CL (Competent
Leader) designations and today feel comfortable writing and presenting my documents to senior level management, project mangers, and qa teams.
Leaning new hot language/ or technology: I’ve lumped learning
Agile, JavaScript, CSS, HTML5 into one point. Staying current in developers
language and IT processes i.e. agile for programmers and analyst keeps you what's hot game. Cheap online classes sites: udemy, cousera and udacity offer great options to take classes.
Learning never stops. Have a continuous curiosity to how things work and processes in IT. Following the 10 steps in the CIO article will keep your marketable.