If you are a senior in your field, you might encounter situations where you need help figuring out where to turn to develop further.

You avoid courses because, after every kind of course, you end up with a conclusion you could have just Googled everything, or that 97% of the information was not new to you. You read a book on some topic, and you can apply around 2% of what is written. Waste of time, right?

What if you are good at what you do – at technical and non-technical parts of your job – but could use some help figuring out alternative sources to improve further?

Here are five ideas for finding additional knowledge that hits precisely where it should!

Coaching

This usually applies to soft skills. If we are talking about technical skills, a common term is mentorship. You can have a mentor for soft skills too, but the dynamic and content are somewhat different.

How does coaching work? The first step is establishing your current situation, meaning your current status, on all the soft skills you would like to address. If you don’t know what you would like to address and measure, there are groups of the most important soft skills for every job and level of job, so the coach will know.

If a coach is a psychologist, to define the current situation, he will use verified psychological tests (No, not the ones you can find online.) and conversations based on relevant questions. Then you agree on goals, timeframe, and concept of work.

Having 1-on-1 with an educated coach allows you to have a personalized plan of development which means everything you work on and invest your time in will be 100% useful for you.

Cross-Functional

Broadening your perspective about how things are done will give you more sources to solve a problem when it occurs. For example, if you are a front-end developer, broadening your knowledge about product design will help you see more possibilities as much as seeing a potential problem before it happens.

This is especially important if you are leading a comprehensive software team. For example: you are a senior back-end developer who became a team lead. Knowing the front-end, QA, product management, and architecture of a product will certainly help you to better understand how much time is needed to finish a certain task for everyone on your team and to predict potential issues.

Nobody says you should know everything at a senior level, but a better understanding of the background, timeframe, and difficulties in certain domains will empower your managerial qualities and your team will certainly see it.

We can only think about things we know, so introduce yourself to new knowledge that will bring you more creativity and adaptability in everyday tasks and leadership.

Non-Tech

Now, let’s go one step further. Studying ideas and methods from psychology, sociology, or anthropology can give senior developers new ways to understand how people behave, make decisions, and solve problems.

If you are a mentor or manager (or aiming to become one), knowledge of those fields can be especially useful for you. Eventually, you will have to give negative feedback, so make sure you do it clearly and without fear of ruining the relationship with the employee.

You will have to hire a new team member based on one live coding and one-hour conversations. How can you be sure you made the right decision about somebody’s liability or self-control? Also, you will have to fire someone from your team. How to do it respectfully and how to communicate the message to the rest of the team to keep everyone’s motivation stable?

Knowledge about human behavior can be a huge help in creating software solutions. From finding a product’s place under the sun to its design and development.

You will be able to better understand how users think and how they interact with the software.

Feedback

Getting feedback from your manager is usual, but how about getting feedback from almost everyone surrounding you? Most colleagues tend to mask feedback since they are unwilling to risk good relationships in the team, but if you are straightforward about your improvement plan, they will for sure be more courageous to point out some room for improvement.

If you, as a senior in your field, were mentoring younger colleagues, you might as well encourage them to provide feedback. Maybe you need to give clear explanations. You can also ask clients and present it as an opportunity to have even better collaboration.

Don’t forget about all the feedback you receive from your loved ones and friends outside of work. Why is this also a good source? Because, no matter how hard we try, we can never be completely different people professionally versus privately. And for sure, they will be more honest with you.

When receiving feedback, or better to say, when you ask a question, make sure you are ready for an answer. Don’t fall into the trap of anger and self-defense.

Ask, listen, say “thank you”, evaluate, and act on it if you find it meaningful.

Networking

Networking opens you to knowledge, experience, and opportunities beyond that of your company. It is not about changing your current job, but widening your professional contacts so that in the future you can reach out with specific questions and get specific answers when you need them.

Every company provides different experiences at different times, so when you encounter certain challenges, you will have a colleague from a different company on your speed dial from whom you can learn since he encountered the same challenge a month or a year ago and can be a great help in solving yours quicker and with fewer consequences.

There are official groups of professionals dedicated to mentoring others inside their domain. If you don’t have the opportunity inside your company to develop as a mentor, you can always help someone outside of it.

Because, as one smart person once said: “While we teach, we learn.”

This article was written by: Suzana Špika