Five ways to boost your IT career in 2025
Happy New Year! I hope you had an amazing break and you are feeling refreshed to continue building your career. Even if you aren’t fully satisfied with your career and want to change, 2025 will be the year to do it.
In today’s letter, I will give you some tips on how to boost your IT career. These five simple principles worked like magic for myself and my mentees.
But before we go into the details, I have an announcement to make. My upcoming book, .NET Aspire Made Easy, is almost completed. It now contains 13 chapters out of 15. Its digital copy is available in early access and, while it’s not 100% completed, it’s being sold for half the price.
If you are new to .NET Aspire, this is a framework in the .NET ecosystem that allows you to develop distributed cloud-native applications effortlessly. You have a single process and a single debugger. There’s also almost nothing to set up besides the standard .NET SDK. No other framework comes even close to how easy it is to build distributed software with.
Anyway, back to the career-boosting tips. And the first principle that I want to talk about is the fact that your career is in your hands.
1. Don’t ask anyone’s permission to upskill
Recently, there have been many conversations happening on social media about Elon Musk’s intention to expand the US H-1B visa program, citing the idea that there aren’t enough people in the US qualified to do in-demand tech jobs.
One of the common responses to this news was a complaint that tech billionaires like Elon Musk should be teaching local people the required skills instead of hiring migrants to replace them. There were even memes and cartoons made to convey this message.
While I can certainly sympathize with this position, this is exactly the wrong attitude to have if you want to have a well-paying and fulfilling career. This idea implies that you should depend on some third party, like a tech billionaire, to build the in-demand skills. But you don’t.
You don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to upskill. And you have more than enough resources that will help you with that.
You see, the in-demand tech skills don’t require any secret knowledge that you can’t obtain from the web and books. All you have to do is grab that knowledge and practice with it to turn it into marketable skills.
You don’t have to stick with the same tech stack your current employer uses. You don’t have to fit yourself into a very specific niche, such as a front-end developer. The world is your oyster and you are free to choose and build your skill stack.
2. Pay attention to skill shortages in the market
Another common misconception is that the IT market is dead. While the mass layoffs slowed down from 262,000 in 2023 to 150,000 in 2024, the numbers were still significant. Also, there were still significantly more long-term unemployed IT professionals compared to the pre-Covid times.
However, the important thing to remember is that not all IT professions are made equal. While many software engineers were struggling to find jobs, many IT firms were struggling to fill the vacancies.
How can these two things be happening at the same time? Well, the answer is simple. While the market was saturated with specific types of tech skills, there was (and still is) a huge shortage of other skills.
Based on my observations, the most over-saturated areas were related to the skills that most online coding schools focus on, such as JavaScript and Python. The biggest skill shortages were in the areas of DevOps, cloud-native application development, and data science.
The easiest way to find out which skill stacks are in demand is to keep looking at the vacancies. Don’t just grab the easy stack that everyone is gravitating towards. The easy way is easy for a reason. Your best strategy would be to choose something that is both in demand and that’s relatively hard to learn.
3. Make yourself visible
When the market is saturated with highly skilled professionals, maintaining your public visibility is no longer optional. After all, it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do if nobody knows about your skills.
So how exactly do you make yourself visible? Some things may work better than others, but I can certainly share what worked well for me.
Let’s start with the basics. LinkedIn is still a major platform that connects professionals with the recruiters. Therefore, what you can do is be active on the platforms. Post regularly and make sure you showcase your technical knowledge in your post. Also, make sure your skills and experience are listed on your profile.
But this is just the beginning. If you want to really stand out, start writing a blog. Or even better, start writing technical books. With platforms like LeanPub and Amazon KDP, publishing your book is way easier than you think.
Not to mention that getting into a habit of writing a technical blog and becoming an author of a technical book has way more benefits than just making yourself visible. Firstly, explaining things to others is one of the most effective ways of learning things. Therefore, your technical writing will make you much better at the technologies you write about.
Secondly, your writing may unlock some additional lucrative opportunities for you. For example, since becoming a book author, I have been regularly receiving propositions from various online schools to create content for them.
4. Be proactive
This principle is closely aligned with all the principles we discussed so far. In fact, you can’t really practice the other principles unless you do so proactively.
Successful people aren’t the ones who wait for others to tell them what to do. They are the people who do things when they see that things need to get done.
This is especially easiest to practice at work. If you’ve been with your employer long enough, you probably have a good idea of what kind of things are priority. So, here’s your opportunity to shine by picking them up before being told to do it.
If you work in a non-toxic environment, your bosses will notice your enthusiasm.
5. Work on your soft skills
Finally, remember that there’s more to the IT career than hard tech skills. This is especially important if you already have at least a few years of experience under your belt. The more experience you have - the greater the relative importance of the soft skills.
Even when you work with computers, you will still have to work with people. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to make sure that you know how to collaborate with others well.
There’s only one problem with developing soft skills compared to the process of developing hard tech skills. With hard tech skills, you always know exactly what your skill gaps are and what you need to work with to close these gaps. Soft skills, on the other hand, are a bit more messy.
However, the good news is that there is an amazing book written by Eran Boudjnah that will teach you how to do it. It’s called There’s No I in IT and, as the name suggests, it was written specifically for IT professionals.
Bonus: five articles to kickstart the year
Before we go, I would like to share some useful articles from my archive. Here’s the list of five articles I would recommend the most:
Bonus number two: five great people to follow
Before you go, I would like to introduce you to five great creators in the software engineering space. Following these people will give you many useful insights.
- is one of the most popular bloggers in the IT space. He primarily talks about the trends in the IT industry and regularly invites interesting guests to talk about various aspects of the industry.
- is one of the best writers in the engineering leadership space. If you aspire to grow as a leader in IT, then you will definitely find his content useful.
- is a former data engineer who worked for multiple big tech companies, including Airbnb and Netflix. He provides a great wealth of data engineering content, as well as providing many useful insights on building your personal brand.
- is an engineering coach who posts a lot of useful content on test-driven development and hexagonal architecture. Both are very in-demand technical skills that, for the foreseeable future, will stay in-demand and will not be replaced by the AI. Moeover, she explains the technical topics in a very straightforward manner.
- will probably don’t need an introduction. This is the famous software engineer who pretty much invented the modern test-driven development. He may not have been the first engineer to come up with the concept, but he was the one who refined it and made it popular.
That’s all for now. Next time, we will discuss the strategy of getting into big tech if this is what you aspire to achieve in your career.
Useful article for helping engineers get ahead in their careers!
I appreciate the mention, thanks for compiling this list.
Great advice on boosting ones career Fiodar. Also appreciate the mention, thank you!