Whenever I sit in an interview board, one of the most common questions I have heard is “What do you consider your greatest strength or asset?” and almost everybody has answered “Knowledge”. Just last week I was mentoring few interns in my office and I asked them to write what they expected to gather during their internship period and, yes, you guessed it, all of them said that they want to gather knowledge of specific technologies such as JAVA, .NET etc…
So, is it true? is knowledge our greatest strength as IT professionals? In my view this is far from true when it comes to an IT Professional. IT is one of the most volatile disciplines (if not the most) in the world, technologies changes over night, inventions are made hourly (not yearly) and what you know will become obsolete in a blink of an eye. Hence, if what I know will become useless in a matter of months then how can what I know be my greatest strength? The truth is what I know is ALWAYS less than what I don’t know or what I SHOULD know.
What should be my greatest strength then? What should an intern gather during their intern ship in a professional corporate environment? The answer is “learning to survive”; every IT guy must know how to survive in this industry. What do I mean by that? Being an IT guy is just like being Tarzan in the jungle, environment always changes and will always challenge your existence, knowing how to adapt to these changes quickly and addressing the problem at hand is the key to success in this field (that’s how Tarzan survive ). I believe in order to be successful in this industry you must have 3 things. If interns learn to master these 3 things during their internship period I think they will do grate as IT professionals once they graduate. The key 3 qualities are as follows
1. Self Confidence
2. Interest
3. Drive or Will to succeed
If you posses these 3 qualities you can learn any technology, adapt to any environment and handle any challenge this industry can through at you.
Self Confidence is all about BELIEVE you can (not knowing you can). Whenever you are faced with a problem or a challenge, first you should have the “can do” attitude. It will only come if you believe you can. This is the first step to overcome any challenge.
In anything you do, if you want to succeed you must have an interest to do it. Without interest you can’t keep the momentum going. However, we all have our different interests but in my experience if you keep on working on even something you don’t like, you’ll start developing an interest towards it.
Drive or will to succeed is very important because you are bound to fail initially, you must have the drive or will to try and try again.
So, in essence I believe what every one of us should be after is not knowledge but we should learn how to survive in the industry and we should build confidence, interest and drive within us and make them our greatest asset and strength.
