Career progression for those in your 20's
I recently attended a breakfast 🥞 session for people in their 20’s within fintech, run by DiversiTech Hub, focusing on career progression. In the spirit of sharing knowledge, here is a summary of the talks and key inspirations I’ve taken away from it:
Matt Cockayne, Chief Revenue Officer at Yapily, spoke about his personal career journey. Matt studied Earth Sciences and eventually made his way into fintech.
#1 key inspiration: you can apply yourself to anything, regardless of what you’ve studied. It’s all about those transferable skills!
Nadia Dashti-Edwards, Co-Founder and CEO of Harrington Starr, presented a succinct framework called “Empowered” to develop the right mindset for progression:
- Exceed expectations
- Make mistakes
- Passion
- Obsess over Emotional Intelligence
- Work hard on your can-do attitude
- Engage in a stretch mindset
- Remember the basics
- Everyday is a chance to get better
- Demonstrate your personal brand
#2 key inspiration: one core personal trait to develop is a growth/stretch mindset. This means embracing challenges, persisting despite obstacles, actively listening, learning from criticism, seeking help/advice and most importantly being inspired by the success of others.
Victor Woode, Creative Director at Athlon, shared his steps to further your design abilities:
- Start every job with high expectations no matter what the budget, timescales or client.
- Create beautiful design. Every element should work in harmony, have purpose and be effortless to use.
- Take inspiration from all manner of sources around you.
- Design should hold their own merit — visually and conceptually, plus have longevity.
- Time efficiencies are valuable. Get to know a design process that works for you.
- Focus on the details and keep an eye on the big picture.
- Take ownership and make decision to move the project forward. But share with the right people regularly to keep the work on track.
- Share your ideas — you’ll learn more and people will naturally share with you in return.
- Design with courage, continuously pushing the design. Move out of your comfort zone.
- Understand what’s literally being asked for but learn to read between the lines to know what’s best for the client
- Explore variations after doing what’s asked for.
- Everything you create is for a brand. Designs needs to be the very best of that brand. Clients need to feel secure and proud of your creations.
- Learn the tools of the trade…but work harder on your approach to problem solving.
- Think beyond the UI design. Go further to make supporting parts of you design work hard.
- Play, have fun, explore, make mistakes. Creating your own projects is a great way to learn and show your personality.
#3 key inspiration: share your ideas (point 8). Someone once told me ideas need air to breathe otherwise they will suffocate ☠️, so talk about them and get people’s opinions!
Gemma Young, Founder of DiversiTech Hub, gave us her top tips on harnessing social media:
- Comments — LinkedIn and Facebook value comments more than likes
- Reply to comments — engage and ask questions
- See more… — break paragraphs into short sentences and encourage user to click “see more…”
- Share something not to do with business at least once a week for engagement
- Insta stories — add lots and encourage activity like SWIPE UP
- Cross pollination — share social media pages to gain exposure
- Video content — 5 times more likely to start a conversation
#4 key inspiration: comment more on social media! Sharing your thoughts and opinions is how a conversation starts. Conversations can lead to great ideas and innovations 🧪
About the author
I’m Ryan, Developer Evangelist Lead at Finastra and Founder of the Tech Allies Network. My previous experience in Financial Services has been in a variety of roles including: product, strategy, technology and advisory.
I’m a techie interested in APIs, Ecosystems, Platform Thinking, Product & Human-Computer Interaction (aka most buzzwords 😂)!
