Women in Tech: Take Your Career to the Next Level with Practical Advice and Inspiring Stories

by Tarah Wheeler

If a mentoring relationship in your life isn’t working out or never got started to begin with, let it trail away and die quietly so you can focus on what does help you.

There was a pragmatic “If you want it, get out there and build it” attitude in my house, undoubtedly the greatest gift my parents ever gave me.

We look for opportunities to do something, and then we disrupt.

Learning the skills that make our work possible is slow and painstaking.

All those hours learning on my own had given me more skill than I knew.

But at the same time, there is a fire in me that I don’t think all people have. It’s a spark, an X factor.

Because the truth is that most people make the same choices, settle for the same pleasant distractions, and don’t change the world.

Developing your blog or social media presence can help;

Your second event will be your skills meetup.

Learn from them, and don’t forget to attend the after-party, where people really get to know each other. Your goal at this meetup is to learn about your colleagues, get new skills from the talks and presentations, and ultimately, to speak at that event to present your own original work.

Third, you should attend a mentorship or small group accountability event.

The best possible way to get the attention of a mentor is to ask for help or an opinion.

LinkedIn feed for positive changes in your colleagues’ and connections’

collecting the birthdays of all your Facebook friends and using something like Google Calendar to remind you to send a quick happy birthday

My son also taught me the power of knowing your limits, though it would take me years to see that.

I quickly learned that networking isn’t always about the people you purposefully seek out. It’s often about the accidental meetings that barely register at the time.

Going from an engineer to someone who can manage people and execute the company vision takes a commitment to learning to serve, learning to change, and learning to accept the role.

LEARNING TO SERVE

Develop your personality and interests outside technology.

The mistake I made was naming my salary based on the average salaries of social welfare workers, so I got that.

Having a job gives you a sense of who you are, and I was determined to be a product manager—a mini CEO.

What you may not realize is that attending networking events to get business for your company is a tax-deductible expense.

In every state in the United States, you can create your own limited liability company (LLC).

File with your department of state to get a business license number

to get an EIN (employer identification number) from the federal government at IRS.gov.

The truth is that the reason you’re forming your own company is to give yourself the ability to have a job even if no other company will hire you. There are strategies for creating your own tech consulting company, like that of paying worker’s compensation and unemployment insurance so that if you are out of work with any vendor or technical agency, you can collect unemployment from your state.

I’ll give you a single piece of advice on how to handle your finances: get a damn bookkeeper.

Now you know everything (yes, really) you need to know about starting a consulting company that lets you take on clients and write off business expenses.

Start a company with someone who you think works as hard or harder than you, whose skills complement yours, and who has excellent communication habits.

Have the audacity to become someone you would have admired at the age of ten.