Hello world! I’ve finally got around to writing this post after promising it in my last one about my apprenticeship experience .
As a quick introduction, my name is Aadam, and I’m currently an Infrastructure Engineer at HMRC, formerly an Apprentice DevOps Engineer - achieving a distinction at the Level 4 DevOps Engineer apprenticeship standard.
The intention of this post is to share the three main actions that have enabled me to succeed in my career so far. This post should be relevant to most engineering roles in the IT industry, and should apply to both apprentices and juniors.
Starting off in a new role can be daunting, there is so much to learn about, whether it’s technologies, the team and their products, and the organisation.
One of the best ways to start your learning of these areas is to ask your team questions. You should ask them about their products, how they work, why they were designed a certain way, and what people like and dislike about them, you should ask the team what you should learn, and so on.
Asking these questions will allow you to start building a picture of your team and its responsibilities. You will begin to learn how the different pieces of the puzzle fit together, and most importantly start to become familiar with your team, its products, technologies used, and where to find documenation for all them.
As a junior you are bound to encounter work that is challenging - this is part of the learning process - so you should discuss with your team how long you should be stuck on a problem before asking for more assistance. You should also keep your team in the loop about blockers because they may be able to help you overcome them.
With that being said, you shouldn’t give up too easily because tackling these real world problems will be many times more beneficial than being spoonfed answers. Instead of asking other engineers for the solution, ask them for tips on how to troubleshoot the problem.
Tangentially, you’ll often come across the acronym RTFM (Read The Friendly Manual), this is one of the most important skills that you can pick up as a junior. By learning how to search for, find, and effectively navigate documentation and other mediums (Google, StackOverflow, GitHub Issues etc.) you’ll be in a better position to find the answers to your own questions.
The IT industry is ever-changing, as such new technologies are always emerging and others falling behind. Having a learning plan will help you to keep on top of the technologies relevant to your role. Once you have a plan, knowing where to start can be difficult, to counter this problem I personally have a three tier learning system:
Once you have a plan and a way of prioritising it, you need to find out which learning methods work best for you. I won’t go into too much detail here as this is a matter of personal preference but I will say that the method you use will usually depend on what it is that you are learning. Some of the more popular methods include:
I have added note taking as an honourable mention because it is something that I had not implemented into my daily work until recently, which I regret not doing earlier.
Personally, I would encourage you to use a digital note taking system as it will be much easier to search through your notes as you start to build up a large knowledge base but pen and paper is fine.
I’ve recently started to settle on a note taking workflow, which I plan on writing more about once I feel that it is in a stable state.
These are the three actions that I took as an apprentice and junior engineer that enabled me to be successful, hopefully there is something that you can take away from this and implement in your work that will help you to grow.
While writing this post, it reminded my of a Reddit post that I came across some time ago, ‘What makes a “good” junior engineer? My 2c as a senior. ’. I highly suggest reading through it as it provides a longer list of tips.
Thanks for taking some time out of your day to read this post, feel free to share it with anyone that you think will benefit.
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