How to make 2025 into the most successful year of your software career
A 4-step guide for software engineers and engineering managers to achieve professional success in 2025
Happy 2025!
If you’re like most software engineers on the planet, you’re hoping that 2025 will be the year you finally accomplish in your career what you’ve been hoping to check off your list for a while. You're hungry for this to be the year you finally achieve … uhh … hold on a sec, what exactly do you want to achieve this year?
Here's a powerful question to ask yourself before going any further: can you actually achieve a professional goal if you are struggling to define what it is?
You can’t, at the very least, not as effectively as you otherwise can if you are concise and clear on what your goal and overall vision are.
If you don’t currently have a clear career goal for the next 6-12 months, no need to panic - your success this year is not yet lost.
Map Your 2025 Career Vision to Success
I’d like to invite you to schedule a complimentary coaching session with me. In our session, we'll map out your 2025 software career vision and the most effective ways to spend your time and efforts growing.
After this session, you’ll have a clear understanding of:
What you hope to achieve by July (first half of the year) and by December (second half)
Why this vision is important to you (critical to understand clearly)
How to create a growth plan with effective actions and new routines for achieving your vision this year
How to Create Your Career Vision
Picture yourself as a mid-level software engineer working at a small tech company. You like the mission of the company and are motivated to remain there even after being there for 3 years. However, you feel bored and ready for something more challenging in your daily work. You get little glimpses into what senior engineers get to do, but you’re unsure if you’re ready to be a senior engineer. And you don’t want a promotion for the raise and title change alone. You remember that you decided to be a software developer for reasons that are still important to you today, but you feel out of alignment with them.
So with this in mind, we’ll discuss the following four areas:
Align your core motivations into a career vision
We'll walk through the primary reasons that you originally became a software engineer and align them with present values and goals. These are the core areas you will focus your growth on to align with your vision.
Example core motivations:
I like solving challenging problems and I was really good at it in school
Creating new software is thrilling for me
I became an engineer to find an exciting and well-paying career
Describe your current gaps
I’ll ask you to describe the gaps between your core motivations and your current daily reality at work. What is missing that you thought you’d be doing by now? What have you seen other engineers doing or leading that you’d like to grow into being responsible for?
Example gaps:
I like being given a challenging problem to solve, but I only tend to be assigned boring software maintenance and bug fixing tasks
I've always wanted to work on creating new software features that excite me. I thought I'd be designing and architecting new software features and systems by now and I don't understand why I'm not being assigned this kind of work already
I thought I'd be working to create specific kinds of software systems like games and am at a gaming company, but I'm stuck as a software engineer in test instead of creating gaming features
Describe what success looks like
This is a key step. Your vision of success must contain goals that are specific and achievable, but also big enough to stretch you to be motivated to grow into achieving it.
Characteristics of well-defined goals:
Aim for 1-2 goals to focus on at one time
They should be achievable in the next 6-12 months
They inspire and motivate you to dedicate serious time to achieving them
They take your current level of career experience into account and build on it
Example visions:
In the next 3 months, I'd like to understand from my manager what I need to improve on so I can start to be given senior level development tasks
In the next 6 months, I want to be responsible for designing and leading implementation of 2 new product features, one small in size and one medium
By the next performance review cycle (12 months), I want to understand where to focus on improving to be considered for a promotion to senior engineer
Create a growth plan to reach success
Lastly, we'll create an effective growth plan that you can pursue yourself or continue pursuing through further coaching sessions and effective exercises.
Example growth plan:
In order to be responsible for leading 2 new product features, I need to improve in the following ways:
My ability to clarify and understand product feature requirements from my team's stakeholder
Break requirements up into logical units of work
Identify both minor and major limitations of an existing codebase and how to work around them
Know when to reach out for help to other engineers and ask effective questions
Keep your manager and stakeholder well-informed of your progress and challenges
Your growth plan will also include effective exercises that enable you to successfully reach your goal(s).
It’s Your Turn to Succeed
With a career vision and a growth plan clearly mapped out, you're ready to get to work making 2025 be the most successful year of your career in precisely the ways that matter most to you.
How do you want to succeed most in your software career this year? Let me know by replying and consider booking a free coaching session with me.
Founder & Head Coach @ Refactor Group