Jordan Hudgens: This is something specifically, Stephanie, that you help the students build here at Bottega. This is what helps them to build their own system for approaching how they get a job.

Stephanie Conley: Exactly. The biggest part of creating a career plan is researching the market. There are hundreds of different jobs within software development, and they're all development. Determining where you want to go in your career is important.

You have to have a trajectory. If you're hitchhiking and you hop in a car and they ask where you want to go, and you say "I don't know, just wherever you take me", then you're not going to be happy with the results.

What I suggest is doing as much research on the industry as possible. List your top three goals, like where do you want to be in five years, and you can start small.

You can do your career plan for the next three years, the next five years, or ten years. It doesn't have to be all at once.

Jordan: When you say where you want to be in three or five years, are you mainly talking about the type of job that you want to have in three to five years? What goes into that goal?

Stephanie: Definitely the type of job that you want to have. When you're planning out your career path, it doesn't have to be overwhelming. You don't have to plan out your entire career for the rest of your life. I suggest starting with a three-year plan.

Say, in three years you want to be a project manager. What is the first job that's going to get you in the door to becoming a project manager? A lot of the time, it's the job of a business analyst who works directly with the project manager.

Also, with your research you'll find that you'll need your SCRUM certification, you'll need your Agile certification and your PMP, so you can plan out when to get these certifications and it's smoother.

Jordan: It makes sense. One of the nice things in our current world is that we have the ability to go and view all of those kinds of things.

If in three to five years you want to be a React developer that builds specific types of applications, you can actually go online on and use tools, such as LinkedIn, and go and find the developers who are where you want to be.

Whether it's a React developer, or a product manager, or whatever that job is, you can go and you can see all of their credentials. You can see what people say about them. In some cases, depending on how much they publish, you can even see some of their thought processes.

I would definitely recommend that you go online and find the kinds of things that can help you. Now you don't want to just copy and paste to exactly what they did. Go and do it yourself because everyone's different.

Everyone learns differently, so the process is going to be unique to you, but it might be able to give a good outline of how to approach it.

Stephanie: Right. This is my first goal. By backtracking and looking at another developer or project manager, UI/UX, you can follow it back. Trace it back and see where you need to start.

Jordan: Absolutely.

Stephanie: A lot of times they're happy to give advice, too.

Jordan: Yes. You can meet a lot of these developers at local meetups, and different kinds of conferences and places like that. You may never realize that you may get a job from that. You may meet someone who really likes you and they may recommend you for a position. Anytime you can go interact with other members of the community. It's always good to be able to grow your network.

Stephanie: Exactly.