Management 101

Training and Career Growth

As the main liaison between you and the bureaucracy of the company, your manager holds some responsibility for helping you find training and other resources for career growth. This may be helping you find a conference to attend or a class to take, helping you get a book you need, or pointing you to an expert somewhere else in the company who can help you learn something.

The role of manager as the person who provides mentoring and training is not a universal expectation. In some companies, these areas are entirely managed by a training arm that you can tap into directly. Some companies are too small to have the money to provide much training, or don’t think it’s a necessary perk to offer employees.

Whatever kind of company you work for, expect that you are responsible, for the most part, for figuring out what types of training you want. This is especially true for individual contributors looking for training in technical areas. Your manager is unlikely to just have a list of interesting conferences or training opportunities at his fingertips.

The other way your manager will contribute very directly to your career growth is via promotion and, probably, compensation. If your company has a promotion process, your manager will be involved in it in some fashion. For companies that do promotion via committee, your manager will guide you through the process of preparing your promotion packet — the set of materials that the committee will review. If your manager or the management hierarchy determines promotions directly, your direct manager will be essential in advocating for your promotion and getting it approved.

In whatever way promotions happen, your manager should have an idea of whether you are qualified to be promoted. When you are interested in being promoted, it’s very important to ask your manager for specific areas to focus on in order to get that promotion. Managers usually cannot guarantee promotions, but good managers know what the system is looking for and can help you build those achievements and skills. Again, this only goes so far. At more senior levels of work, opportunities for promotion are much more rare, and your manager may need you to find and propose the achievements that qualify you for the next level.

Ask the CTO: Big Ambitions

I’ve just started working, but I already know that my career goal is to someday become a CTO myself. What should I be doing now to make that possible?

The very first thing you need to learn is how to work. Maybe you know this already, but when I was first out of college, I didn’t really know how to do the job at all. Because the day-to-day work of tech is very different from school, there are probably a bunch of things you will learn about the process of being a working engineer. My specific advice would be to seek out a workplace where you can get mentorship and training in the aspects of doing the job (such as testing, project and product management, and collaboration) as well as learn new technical skills. You want to build a strong foundation of skills because you will need them to succeed.

I also advise you to find the best managers and mentors you can, and watch them work. Try to find people to work for who push you to succeed but also reward you for success, who inspire you to stretch yourself. Realize that stretching yourself is about more than just learning new technologies: great CTOs have strong communication skills, project management skills, and product sense, in addition to good technical sense. However, you also want to spend a lot of time writing code, and getting really good at understanding how high-quality code is written. This will probably take a few years of focus, and you can’t rush it.

In addition, I encourage you to create and build a strong network of peers. One thing that early career engineers often don’t appreciate is how their current peers will turn into their future jobs. This peer group includes everyone from your schoolmates to your teammates to the people you meet at conferences and meetups. It’s OK to be a little bit shy, but most CTOs have to learn how to socialize with all sorts of people and create strong networks across companies.

One final thing to realize is that most CTOs are the CTOs of small companies. They are often the technical cofounders of startups. If you want to go down that path, the best thing to do is to work for a company that has a track record of people who have left it to found new companies. This is where you will meet your future cofounders and discover opportunities to get into new companies early.