Having a business mindset
Most software quality engineers starting out in their careers make a few huge mistakes. The biggest of those mistakes, by far, is not treating their career as a business. Don’t be fooled; when you set out into the world to write code for a living, you’re no different than the blacksmith of old times setting up shop in a medieval town. Times may have changed, and most of us work for a company, but our skills and our trade belong to us and we can always choose to set up shop somewhere else.
This kind of mindset is crucial to managing your career, because when you start to think of yourself as a business, you start to make good business decisions. When you’re used to getting a regular paycheck that isn’t really dependent on your performance, it can be easy to develop a mindset that you’re just an employee of a company. While it’s true that you may be an employee of a particular company at any given time in your career, it’s important to not let that particular role define you and your career.
It’s better to think of an employer as a customer for your business of developing software. Sure, you might only have a single customer, and all of your revenue may be coming from that single customer, but viewing the relationship this way moves you from a position of powerlessness and dependency to one of autonomy and self-direction. (In fact, many “real” companies have one big client that makes up a majority of their revenue.)
How to think like a business
Now, just thinking of yourself as a business doesn’t really do you much good. You have to understand what it is to think in this fashion if you want to get any benefit from it. Let’s talk about how to think about yourself as a business and what exactly that means.
We can start off by thinking about what makes up a business. Most businesses need a few things to be successful. First, you need to have a product or a service. A business without something to offer doesn’t have a way to make money, because they have nothing to sell. What do you have to sell? What is your product or service?
Just thinking about what you offer as a business in this way has a profound impact on how you view your career. Businesses are constantly revising their products and improving them. You should too. The service you provide as a software quality engineer has a tangible value, and it’s your job to communicate not only what that value is, but what makes it different than the offerings of thousands of other software quality engineers out there.
That brings us to marketing. It’s important to at least realize that having a product or service by itself is not enough. You’ve actually got to be able to let potential customers know about that product or service if you want to make any money. Companies all over the world realize this key truth about business and that’s why they spend so much money and effort on marketing. As a software quality engineer offering your service, you also have to be concerned with marketing. The better you market your offerings, the higher price you’ll be able to charge for your services and the more customers you’ll potentially be able to attract.
You can imagine that most software quality engineers starting out don’t think about their careers in this way. Instead of starting out with a bang, they enter the scene with a barely audible pop. So don’t do what they do.
Instead, do the following:
Also think about how best to spread the word about your service and find your customers. Most software quality engineers create a resume and blast it out to companies and recruiters. But, when you think about your career as a business, do you really think that is the best and only way to prospect potential clients? Of course not. Most successful companies figure out how to get customers to come to them to buy their products or services; they don’t go out chasing customers one by one.
Even without getting into the specifics, the point is to think outside of the box and start thinking like a business. What is the best way you can attract customers and how can you tell them about the service you have to offer? If you can answer this simple question, you’ll start off your career with a bang.
Taking Action
Think about a business that has a product or service they offer. How do they differentiate and advertise that product or service?
If you had to describe the specific service you can provide a perspective employer or client in a single sentence, what would it be?
How does treating your career like a business affect the way you
- Do your work
- Handle finances
- Look for a job or new clients