The Tech Career Playbook

Optimize Your Assets: Use Your Utter Potential
This chapter is about how you can use your time and focus skillfully and efficiently. This is really about craftsmanship and mastering good processes and tools for your own daily work. You have to be able and show, that you can get your sh*t together and work organized and efficiently like a professional.

Major skills covered in this chapter:

• Time & Prio Management
• Handling Criticism & Stress
• Decision Making
• Critical Thinking

Take Responsibility: Become The Go-To Expert In Your Field
This chapter deals with the important IT processes in the business and covers the flanking processes along the entire software development life cycle. A go-to-expert must be able to understand them, explain them clearly and apply them. You will learn how to become such an expert.

Major skills covered in this chapter:

• Communication To Non-Tech People
• Software Dev. Lifecycle
• Analytical Thinking
• Strategic Thinking

Bridge The Tech Language Gap: Be A Compelling Communicator
This chapter is about the different types of communication at work. We pay particular attention to practical helpers for everyday working life when communicating with the team, but especially when communicating with other departments, different hierarchical levels, customers and non-technicians.

Major skills covered in this chapter:

• Spoken Communication
• Written Communication
• Nonverbal Communication
• Communication with other departments (Sales, Marketing, Supervisor, Management,...)

Join Forces: Work Well With And Empower Others
This chapter offers useful information and hacks on dealing with teams and working across team boundaries with other departments, as well as tips and tricks on how you can contribute to more effective and enjoyable teamwork. We put emphasis on how good teamwork can boost your own career.

Major skills covered in this chapter:

• Conflict & Feedback
• Teaching & Mentoring
• Team Work
• Cultural Awareness

Foster The Right Mindset: Build A Winner Mentality
This chapter illustrates how powerful the right mindset is and how you can influence it easily. We will take a closer look at the topic of &dealing with criticism& and show you how you can make the best of it yourself. Further topics are for example making yourself heard, self-marketing and career best-practice.

Major skills covered in this chapter:

• Professional Responsibility
• Leadership
• Work Ethics & Attitude
• Networking

See The Big Picture: Understand The Business Side Of Tech
This chapter is dedicated to the business side of the IT industry, in particular what IT means in the overall context of a corporate identity: value propositions, business models, journey mappings and pitches. Special attention is also paid to the human side and behaviors of customers and stakeholders

Major skills covered in this chapter:

• Big Picture
• Customer Focus
• Corporate Awareness

Know What You Want: Pursue A Career Vision
This chapter is about the requirements of the different career paths and an honest review of our industry. We provide tools to help you find your way and define your vision and goals. We discuss how you can keep up with the fast pacing industry and how to be adaptable and open to change.

Major skills covered in this chapter:

• Clear Vision
• Long-Term Thinking

Utter Personas are typical people you meet in tech teams and around them. They show recurring behavior patterns, challenges, and tensions that developers deal with in real work. This helps learners understand difficult interactions faster and respond in a smarter, more effective way. The result is more practical people skills, better communication, and fewer avoidable conflicts.