 Thank you for coming. Today I'm going to be talking about CI, but not continuous integration, but continuous improvement, and how you can use these techniques to help your career. The first few words about me. So my name is Clément Verna. I'm a senior software engineer, and I'm working for the CPE team, so the community platform in engineering, and we are managing and dealing with the infrastructure and the services for the Fedora and the Central West Communities. I'm very passionate about agile and cautious improvement, so that's the reason why I'm here today. I'm sure you've recognized my French accent, but I'm currently based in Poland, so not very far from here. So why is it important to try to get better and try to develop your career? So the World Economic Forum is running a survey every couple of years, and in 2018 they did a survey with companies across different industries, and they look at what the future is for those companies, what they are looking at in terms of skills, in terms of how technology will impact their industry. And pretty much the world is changing fast. We know that because in technology there is a new technology, pretty much everything is new things to learn. And across all different industries, it's expected that by 2022, another age of 42% of the required skills will be different in the workforce. So people doing that job will have to learn new skills and be able to master new ways of working. So usually when we talk about career and development, we've got those questions, what you're going to be in five years, what you're going to be in 10 years. I don't know for you, but for me it's always been like, I kind of enjoy doing this, I like that, but it's very difficult to know what you're going to be doing in five years. It's quite a struggle. In fact for me, when I started my career, I think in my first five years, I worked in four different jobs, four different projects. After a year or so in one job, in one project I was getting bored and didn't really know if there was any future for me, so I was just changing and trying to see something else from software development, testing, kind of integration work. So what is the right path? How can you know? How can you try to find out? I think from my experience there is no right path, but it's good to try to understand what you like and try to get some insight into what you would like to do in the future. So I'm pretty sure we all got this, on this time of the year, actually, personal development discussions and trying to come up with a plan. Most of the time it's like, I'll try to find one or two trainings for this year or try to go at one or two conferences, and that's all. There is no real effort during the year. It's kind of, we're trying to think about it at the beginning of the year when the year finishes and say, oh yeah, so what did I do last year for my personal development? We'll see how we can try to make this maybe a bit more continuous and not just one off every year. So just a quick definition of continuous improvement. So this comes from the world of production and mostly from the Toyota Production System. And it's an effort to reduce waste in the production line, your factory line to work as efficiently as possible. So you can apply it to processes, to products, but it can also be applied to a person and to yourself. It's very often associated to Kaizen, so it's a Japanese word. Kaizen is changed and Zen is good. So if you want to look a bit more about that. And it's based on those three main concepts, that is feedback, efficiency and evolution. So the efficiency, as I said, you try to reduce waste to be as efficient as possible. You try to get feedback very often as you can, so you can try to improve in smaller interactive cycles. So what does it mean for you, for your career? So it's pretty much trying to spot those small opportunities to learn something new or to get better at something that you already do. Trying to build up on this small iteration and getting feedbacks, so the same concept, trying to not wait one year, but maybe have a look at it every quarter or even more often. And have this kind of retrospective and analysis and try to understand so I try to learn these two languages. Was it good for me? Did I enjoy it? Is it useful? So for people that are into the software development world, it's very... what I just thought about, it's very related to scrum, short interactive cycles, retrospective feedback. So this is not really something new. It's just something that you apply to yourself instead of your product. So knowing this, I think the main question and the main thing that you should start thinking about is who you are, what you enjoy, and what you want to do. So after that, we have quite a good template and a framework for that. That is called OPT. So for organization, P for passions and T for talents. And it looks at what are your passions, your talents, and how you can use those to the benefit of the organization. And really what you want to have is to try to find a sweet spot where your job is the combination of your passion and talents at the benefit of the organization and it gives a lot of value to your organization. So it doesn't take long. It takes five minutes. You put on a piece of paper maybe one or two passions, what you really, really like to do. The talents are a bit more... it's ready to find out, if you think a little bit more about it, you try to see what kind of feedback you get if people tell you that you're quite good at this or something like that. It must be that you are talented in that. So this gives you already a very good foundation for trying to build up your career and trying to go in the direction that you will enjoy. No matter what the job will be, it's a combination of the things that you are passionate about and talented about. It will probably be very good for you. Once you have this, you can go a little bit further and there is this overall tool an overall framework called SWAT. It's the same maybe it takes instead of five minutes, it takes 10, 15 minutes and it looks at what are your strengths, your weaknesses and opportunities and effects. And I think this is good because it tells you that you don't have to be perfect. You will be stronger in some areas, but you will be also weaker in others. And maybe it doesn't make sense for you to try to improve in your weaknesses. If, for example, you are very strong, very technical and very good at programming and you have a bit more struggle with giving a presentation or a thing like that, it might not be you carry a path to go and present the presentation to customers or do presentations to conferences or things like that, you will be more comfortable and better into a very technical kind of path. So that gives you kind of that makes you kind of think about yourself what you really enjoy and try to now hold down the scope of possibilities and what you want to do better. Once you have this, you have to realize that maybe your worst enemy is yourself and I'm sure everyone's got this little voice in their head saying ah, I'm not a very good swimmer I can't do music I'm not good at math This little voice it's what we want to try to to fight because it's what is usually stopping you from doing new things and it's what is stopping you from improving or trying to evolve to different different career paths. For that there is a very good framework that's called the circle of success and I really like it because it's very simple. It starts from stating that every people have an unlimited potential. So pretty much we can do whatever we want. If we committed, motivated and we decide to do something we can achieve it. This potential will result in some actions that we take. So we have unlimited potential we can do an unlimited set of actions. These actions will result in some experiences either positive or negative and those results will influence our and how we think about ourselves. So a nice example is tomorrow I decide that I want to be able to run a marathon. I never run in my life but that's my goal and that's the way I want to that's a goal and development action that I want to take. I know that I've got the potential to do it because many people are doing it. One possible action that I can take is go to the shop to buy some trainers and go and try to run 42 and so kilometers. Most likely the result of this action will be a terrible experience. I will be out of shape my legs will hurt the last thing I will want to do is to try again and I will have influenced my belief that running is not for me and I should definitely do something else. If I take this problem in another way and instead of trying to run directly those 42 kilometers but I go and say actually I'm not in a very good shape I might start with 15 minutes today. I'll go run 15 minutes. One of the chances that I will have a nice experience I'll try to go and run 15 minutes when it's a Sunday day outside and I will enjoy myself. I might do that for a week then after a week I'll say ok so now I'm pretty good at 15 minutes I'll do 20, 25 minutes and so on maybe after a month, two months, three months of yourself you will be able to run maybe two, three hours. It's really this way of trying to find these small actions that will result in a success that will give you that will impact your belief and will kind of start to make you feel good and make you think that you can do it. So really action is the key but then we always have this little voice that's oh yeah but this is not quite right at this time it's raining outside or maybe I should wait a little bit more about this or that so it's good to try to have this section environment where whatever action you take obviously you want to try to have this success but sometimes you will fail or something will happen I think what you want to try to have it's an environment where failure will not have a big impact and you will be able to fail safe pretty much so if you fail at something and it doesn't cause any troubles or anything you will be able to retrace it and say oh okay so I tried I tried to learn swimming and I went to to the Baltic sea for example I never swam before of my life that maybe not very safe environment if you go to a swimming pool where there is like lifeguard or anything that's a bit safer and if you're not very comfortable you will have people that will be helping you and you will be learning improving so success is good but there's also the possibility to try to find some actions that will put you on the edge and you're not definitely sure about success and you can find some kind of success in the one another problem we often like is to be a bit comfortable we have this nice comfort zone we are very good at what we do and what's outside of this box it's often a bit scary an opportunity to grow and to become better at things is to try to to get out of this box and I quite like this if I feel uncomfortable I think I'm doing the right thing so all this is really about something that's called the growth mindset and always trying to look for opportunities to learn new challenges opportunities to do something new and it is to put in contrast with the fixed mindset we don't really want to talk about so all this is great all these are great tools to put in place but in the end really your careers and I think I don't know it's something that we hear a lot it's you own your career so it's really up to you to start and as I said there are things that really takes 5-10 minutes to do so it is your career it is your your future pretty much and you have to remember that it's a journey and that you might try to you might set yourself a goal that you will never reach but the end destination is not the most important it's the path and the journey because you will learn things about yourself you will learn new things and maybe between point A and B you will realize that you don't really want to go to B but you want to go to C so it's always the journey and the path that is more important than the destination if you still don't really know what to do and how to improve you can look at a lot of ladders usually every company they have those kind of ladders who go from associate or junior to engineer to senior to principal so you can look at those job descriptions what is expected from those job descriptions and try to assess yourself against it senior engineer is expected to do that how I am rating myself against those criteria another good things to do is kind of the training need analysis so I want to become a great principal software engineer what are the trainings that I need what is expected from the front one thing in technology we get is to try to develop non-technical skills and from the same report it's expected by 2022 that where like more traditional skills like creativity critical thinking negotiation problem solving will kind of retain their importance in the industry all the human kind of soft skills emotional intelligence leadership social influence all those type of skills will increase in them and will be much more important into finding a job or like evolving into your current job and a great way to also find new ways of growing a new way of thinking is to do some networking and to talk with people that are not necessarily in your area of expertise or work so for example committees of practice are great for that because you can exchange with a subject with different people but meetups conferences anywhere just try to get a bit of diversity into your your thinking curiosity obviously curiosity is great be curious about anything and everything and another quite useful tool to be to find a mentor or be a mentor also because most of the time the relation is benefit for both sides and also some coaching into some maybe more specific so that's the overall summary like a few techniques and tools that you can start to use to try to continuously improve your career we have maybe a few minutes for a minute or two, maybe one or two questions yeah yeah so this is excellent to have a question about the career path that you talked about earlier right so as senior engineer or senior consultant when you leave on your career at some point you're in a position where you want to go down to the major path or the legal path so oftentimes people are a little bit hesitated moving to the manager path meaning that you would give up all your holding expertise and so so have you experienced all that so the question is quite often someone that works in technical area there is one point in the career where you have to decide either you stay in technical or you go into the management I think a good answer is to go back to these questions and talents and try to see if in your passions you have like 3-4 things that are really technical I think you should stay into this technical path if you like a bit more passionate about people management helping others then management may be a good opportunity so I think we have a tough time so thank you very much