Jobs

Andy

Exciting News: My Insider’s Guide to Landing a Tech Job Is Now Live!

It had been a dream of mine for quite some time to work in software engineering. When I reconnect with distant family members and they ask what I’m doing now, they often aren’t surprised. Many tell me they always knew that’s where I would end up. And I agree with them—my choice of career has remained remarkably steady from my early school years all the way to university, with only one or two momentary diversions from that dream.

My family always embraced modern technology, but they weren’t particularly knowledgeable about how to actually get started in the field. These days, getting into programming, hardware, IoT, or even AI is much simpler. There are countless resources available to help you build the skills you need.

However, one hurdle often remains: how to turn those skills into the job you’re looking for.

During my career, I’ve worked as a hiring manager and interviewer at both large and small companies. I’ve helped sort through resumes during the initial application process, written interview questions, and even trained new interviewers. I’ve mentored and coached engineers from the very start of their careers all the way up to principal level, and I’ve worked directly with leaders to understand what they need from a productive team.

That’s why I’ve decided it’s time to start sharing what I’ve learned to help others—giving them the advice I wish I had.

I’m kicking this off by launching my new video course:

“From Application to Offer: The Insider’s Guide to Getting a Job in Tech”

This course distills everything I’ve learned—helping candidates, whether new or experienced, gain an edge when applying for software engineering and other tech roles.

🔹 Craft a tailored resume
🔹 Master key interview skills
🔹 Tackle design challenges with confidence
🔹 Ask the right questions in interviews

It’s been a real journey learning the skills needed for video production, from lighting and sound to editing. So I’m incredibly excited that the course is now available!

I would love for you to check it out and share any feedback.

It’s available now on Skillshare and Udemy! If you don’t have a Skillshare account yet, you can get one month of free access using my link.If you’re using Udemy, use code “ANDYCB-FEB24” for 25% off for a limited time.

I hope you find it useful!

Andy

How To Make a Long Term Career Plan That Actually Helps

A career plan: we should all have one, right? But it can be hard to know where to start, or what you should do with it once you’ve made it. This can be especially challenging when you’re just starting off in your career – you manager asks what you want from your job, and don’t really know what you want beyond ‘just progression’.

A child stand in the countryside, holding up a map.
Photo By Annie Spratt

Today, I want to tell you a little about how I manage long term career planning for myself, and how I use that to make regular evaluations of those plans and my progress towards them.

A Plan Is a Guide to The Next Step, Not a Rigid Set of Rules

It’s easy to think of a career plan as something rigid and unchanging; a plan that you must stew over and perfect every detail, and then stick to forever. This can make a career plan a very intimidating document. How do you think it all through? How do you know if you’re on track or not? What if you’ve made the wrong plan and won’t be happy!?

Instead, think of a career plan as a framework to help you process your feelings and observations in order to plan out next steps. You can then regularly use this framework to evaluate your current path and chosen destination.

Imagine, you’ve been dropped in the wilderness without knowing where you are or how to get back. Perhaps you climb to the top of a large tree nearby and look out around you. As you look to the north, you can see smoke rising in the distance, maybe it’s a camp? You decide to head towards it and find out.

A person standing in the clearing of a forrest.
Photo by Robert Bye

After walking for a couple of hours, your progress is halted by a wide, rushing river, and there’s no way you can cross it. There’s no way to continue to the north now. It’s time to revaluate your plan, heading north was a great idea in absence of more information, but now you know about the river, is heading that way, still the best path? Perhaps you can see something else from here? Perhaps north is still the best direction, but you need head a different way for a little to find a place to safely cross and head back.

That’s the thing with plans: You need them, they give you direction of purpose, but the most successful people are always considering their plans – changing and tweaking them to ensure they’re making the best choices for the current data they have. Changing a plan is not a failure, it doesn’t mean your plan wasn’t good enough. Changing plan means you are in control and evaluating input data.

Where Do You Start?

Just like with the above example, you start not with the next step right in front of you, but with the destination, and figure out next steps from there.

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