How to stay current as an IT professional

The IT field changes extremely fast, with many new technologies and products seemingly appearing over night. However, IT professionals can still stay current in their field with just a relatively small investment of time. The key to this is good planning and solid knowledge of the four main ways to staying current: continuous education, reading IT publications, being an active member of user communities and participating in professional gatherings.

Planning to stay current

Staying current in the IT profession is a goal that each professional has to set for himself. The first step to reach this goal is to make a plan and allocate time and resources for this on a regular basis. Without such a plan, staying current can easily become the task that never gets done, as there will always be other tasks that are seemingly more urgent.

Continuous education

Continuous education is the best way to stay current as it offers the means to obtain new knowledge and to have, at the same time, the certification for it. There are many varieties of continuous education, including online degrees or courses, computer-based training, certification exams and workshops. There are both paid and free opportunities. Typical providers are universities and colleges, but also professional organizations and various websites provide educational opportunities. Catalogs such as EdComp allow you to search for training resources.

Reading IT publications

Devoting regular, small amounts of time to read IT publications in your field helps you to stay current with a wide variety of news. Such publications include industry publications, science and research journals and magazines, trade magazines, and newsletters. One way to find those of interest to you is to use online catalogs of publications such as ITPRC.com or TradePub.com.

Being an active member of user communities

One of the main challenges in staying current is filtering the large amounts of text that appear daily on the Internet to quickly find the new, informative and overall good-quality articles. User communities such as Reddit, Digg™ and DZone provide useful filtering, as they rank new content according to members' votes. Searching for key terms in your field can lead you quickly to useful and already filtered articles. Actively participating by commenting, voting and adding links can yield further benefits as these are forms of networking and can allow further discussing or clarifying of new ideas in the field.

Participating in professional gatherings

Professional gatherings expose participants to the newest developments in a field. Participating in trade shows, workshops, seminars, conferences and other professional gatherings is a way of combining networking with staying current. As the experience can be very intensive and time consuming, as well as expensive, it is usually good to plan in advance and carefully choose only a few distinct gatherings to go to each year. Alternating between gatherings that are mainly industry or research oriented ensures that you stay current with short-term and long-term developments as well. If the budget permits, attending some of the mixed gatherings, such as SPLASH (previously known as OOPSLA) can also be a very useful way to stay current as an IT professional.

Conclusions

Staying current as an IT professional requires good planning and a moderate but regular investment of time and resources. The best way to stay current is a mix of continuous education, reading of IT publications, taking advantage of online user communities and actively participating in professional gatherings.