Transferable skills and development

Having explored some job adverts, you will have seen that technical skills are only one part. Most development jobs will ask you for a whole range of transferable skills – these are skills which you might develop in any job, and can then transfer to a new job.

You probably have a huge range of transferable skills which you may not even think about; whether you’re great at organising events, or you know how to put together a good presentation, those are valuable skills for developers too.

In this section, you’ll learn about some of the skills you should focus on developing for a career in software. You’ll understand why these skills are important and how you can develop them further.

Teamwork

This shouldn’t be a surprise as you’ve seen that development is usually done in teams. Developers very rarely work alone, so being able to work with other people is very important – especially when you are new to programming, as you might find that you will be expected to do a lot of pair programming in order to learn a company’s style and to develop your own skills.

Developing teamwork skills means practice but this doesn’t need to be at work. You might be in a club, a sports team, a volunteering group or anything else where you work together to organise things – all of these can help you practice teamwork and will sound great to employers too.

Problem-Solving

This is another unsurprising skill; a lot of programming involves problem-solving, and the skills involved in this are often called computational thinking. Being able to break down a problem and tackle it piece by piece is what programming is all about, so by practising your programming, you will develop these skills.

If you want to improve your problem-solving skills, doing small programming challenges is very useful – there are many different websites which can help you with this, a very popular one is 
HackerRank which is also used by many employers as it has interview tasks.

Communication

As a developer, you will be working with people who might not have the same technical knowledge as you. It’s important that you can communicate with a range of people effectively. This might mean communicating by email, in a meeting, or even presenting work to a client. You need to be able to convey information effectively to different audiences.

Communication is a skill you develop by practice, especially doing presentations, which many people find challenging. Try and seek out opportunities to present to others, as it gets easier every time you do it. For example, look for opportunities to present in a small team meeting.

Resilience

This might not be mentioned in adverts, but it’s a crucial skill as a developer. Things not working is part of the development process, and being able to overcome setbacks and have another go is very important! This also includes being able to take feedback well, and using it to improve. This is especially true when you’re just starting your career as you develop your programming skills more and more.