Undertaking A Skills Audit

Every leader is different, and every leader will be informed by the different experiences they have accumulated to date. There are, however, certain qualities and attributes that leaders tend to share in common.

Great leaders demonstrate self-awareness. They tend to have the maturity to have looked themselves in the mirror and identified aspects of their character that they may need to develop if they are to grow as leaders.

Having identified their strengths and weaknesses and pinpointing areas for improvement, they will have an idea of what they know and — equally important — what they don’t know. As Donald Rumsfeld famously put it:

Recently, a colleague of mine named Mariko Sugita needed to hire a designer for a website she was creating. She’s an urbanist, and not particularly involved in the digital design field, so she asked the closest designer who happened to be on hand (me), “what kind of designers should I be looking for?”

I thought for a moment and realized that I had several possible answers, none of which quite summed up the full scope of roles that are present in our field today and what each designer’s assumed title really says about their abilities.

That started me thinking about what exactly the spectrum of digital design roles really looks like here in Common Era 2018. I started sketching out my ideas. When Mariko saw my notes for this article, she said, “yes, that’s exactly what I wanted to know beforehand!” I hope that this overview can be just as useful for you, too. Let’s begin!

The web is constantly evolving and improving over time and there is already so much to learn and much more as time goes by.

For any newcomers, this is pretty scary, and it becomes quickly overwhelming.

I started as a working student in a web agency 2 years ago with no concrete experience and not a clue how real web development was done. My first day, I was excited to discover new things but mostly afraid by the daunting task ahead of me.

The worst part (or best, depending on whether you are a half-full or half-empty glass kind of person) is that the more you discover about the various aspects of web development, the more you realize how little you actually know.

When it comes to which programming languages are in demand by employers, JavaScript, Java, Python, C++, and C—in that order—came out on top in a recent developer survey. Developers, however, want to learn languages like Python, Go, and Kotlin.

A survey of developers by technical recruiter HackerRank, conducted in October, found no gap between languages employers want and what developers actually know, with JavaScript barely edging out Java. But as far as which languages developers prefer, Python is the language developers most want to learn—and many already know it, HackerRank found.

HackerRank also queried about which languages developers were planning to learn next. The top languages developers said they will learn were—in order—Go, Python, Scala, Kotlin, and

I tried to illustrate some of the issues I remember, from wrong font sizes to spacing to alignment. There was a lot more issues, but you get the point. To the developer this was fine because he was more concerned about the functionality and JS behind this and visually he believed it was “close enough”. Unfortunately, for this client (and any client IMO) would equally care for the aesthetics. This individual was extremely talented in JS builds and development but visuals and CSS weren’t his strength. On the flip side, I also worked with individuals who are truly amazing CSS developers but aren’t heavily invested in deep JS work.

Voice-based interfaces are becoming commonplace. Voice assistants such as Siri and Cortana have been around for a few years, but this past holiday season, voice-driven devices from Amazon and Google made their way into millions of homes.

Recent analysis from VoiceLabs estimates that 24.5 million voice-driven devices will be shipped this year, almost four times as many as last year. As experience designers, we now have the opportunity to design voice experiences and interfaces!

A new interface does not mean that we have to disregard everything we have successfully applied to previous interfaces; we will need to adapt our process for the nuances of voice-driven interfaces, including conversational interactions and the lack of a screen. We will look at how a typical genie in a bottle works, discuss

Finding an awesome developer requires that you are clear on what you’re looking for. Do you want a full-stack or a front end / back end person? Do you need specific skills like knowledge of AI, blockchain, or big data?

Unless you have a specific reason, don’t hire technology-specific. Instead, hire based on fundamental knowledge.

Over the years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of developers. One of my biggest learnings is that there can be no assumptions. I’ve interviewed people with a Masters in Computer Science who had trouble writing a for-loop that iterated through an array.

So the first rule is to hire people who (preferably) have fundamental knowledge, coding experience, and a willingness to constantly learn new languages and skills.

This post assumes that you at least have some working knowledge of Angular reactive forms.

Let’s say this is our structure:

We need to transform this to an Angular form. Our goal is to render a list of skills with a checkbox that will be un/checked based on the selected key from each skill.

Let’s create the form:

Our form is just a group with one key — skills.

The buildSkills() method is responsible for —

Let’s stop for a second and recognize the final structure without the form builder.

Now we can write the HTML.

The code is straightforward. We are just looping over the skills controls and binding each skill to a checkbox.

This is Part 2 of a series of articles for programmers looking to upgrade their skills. Part 1 took us through the very beginning stages where we set out to find the most efficient way to go from zero to an employable developer. Today, we are going to take things a whole lot further.

This article is for all the developers, coders, programmers out there who are looking to make a jump in their career after having had a few years in the industry (or you may be just starting out but would like to see the sort of path you have to go on). This article is for those with a simple desire: You want to be considered a