I'll be honest, I'm only here because I lack skills to get something better. For a while I was very comfortable here and I didn’t think much about slowly becoming less and less marketable.
How to make up for lack of skills in the shortest possible time? Anyone to share their experience?
Leetcode!
I wish these colleges would stop telling their students that once they graduate they have "skills". This is completely untrue and it seems the original poster might also still be clinging to this belief.
"Skills" come from being productive and from experience, not from some classroom.
I am not referring to only this poster, 95% (or more) of the grads hired since 1995 walk in on their first day thinking they actually know the job because of their experience as a college student. Then when they discover they really have no clue they start to blame their lack of "skills" on everything except the fact that they have not accepted the fact that they have not developed the knowledge of their job and have not mastered their job.
They mistakenly believe they were "qualified" for their job but now they discover that they are not performing well, and actually do not know their job but must spend several years learning it and mastering it they want to say that they are falling behind and becoming less marketable when in actuality the true fact is that more and more people have stopped listening to your stories about the glorious ability as a student and are now realizing your production and understanding of the business, as an employee, is just is not measuring up and it will take years for you to learn and master your job.
I hate to burst your bubble but "skills" are actual performance, production and mastery of a job, not taking some courses.
This is probably the biggest downfall of most american business today.
Don’t lose sleep over it; stay healthy.
What is your current role? If it is in IT, then you need to decide what type of role you want to pursue in other companies. Do a heckuva lot of research on 1. The technologies and roles they have. 2. And probably more importantly - their interview process including coding and system design rounds - coding if you are a developer, but System Design rounds are prevalent in many non-developer roles. As an aside, UDEMY has very cheap courses on cloud, dev languages and everything. They run sales almost weekly. Not all courses are great, but some are and even if you don't work all the way through them the content in them can be valuable and if you get them on sale, it is cheaper than buying a book.
Look for an industry certification you can self study for that interests you or that you have some understanding of. Check for the requirements other than taking a test. For some, you must attend very expensive classes and/or get recommendations from people in the field.
T is a good place to sleep. If you slept too long and are no longer marketable a contract job will get you moving again quickly.
You dont even have to quit your sleepy job at T.
I read each comment on this post and still have no idea what the bleep I read. Have we all lost our minds? Am I the only one left in the world with a little tiny piece of common sense?
lol this sums up att perfectly.
I bet you are skillful enough to vote on the holiday ornament in June though.
How old are you?
What are your career goals? What field are you most interested in pursuing?
What the first responder said. Move into software delivery as an Agile Coach, Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer, etc and you are golden. The training is easily attainable. The pay for these positions is ludicrously high. Think back 15 years when we dove head first into six sigma without a second thought. Same thing here. Adopt and adapt or die.
Take any of the Agile Project Management courses. They’re all different but exactly the same and exactly what everyone wants. “Deliver small batches of awesome.” You’ll be serving customer first, moving faster, acting boldly and racking up the wins. Head home at the end of the day with a sense of accomplishment. Whatever people ask you to do, do the most important part of it right away. Then tell them the rest is on the way… but forget about it… you gave them the most important part of the fix… an MVP (minimally viable product). You’re Agile! #hatersgonnahate
May be T is the best fit for you.
Keep learning your project related stuff. Grass is always greener on the other side.
Only learn skills that are directly related to work you want to do.. the IT landscape is littered with useless , languages, frameworks , tech that has fallen out of favor. Before you invest time and effort align your new skills to end goal
You could man up and do what you need to.
At some age, learning for learning’s sake fails and you have to have a project to work on to understand a new technology. Learn continuously by reading but it won’t stick. So try to match everything you learn with some small hands on work. Get a private cloud account and start experimenting. Decide to learn the purpose of some industry buzzword at the rate of one a week. Infrastructure as code today. Web front end framework names the next. New programming languages and their special purposes the third. A vendor product data sheet after that. Listen to younger coworkers. They often know much more than you realize and a little humility helps. Start a “tech notes” notebook and meticulously track things you try. It won’t be easy but there is joy in learning at any age. Don’t listen to Naysayers even the ones in your head. Take breaks. Go for walks. Don’t log onto this site 😀
Keep learning
Diversify income streams