How to build credibility in the engineering industry
Skills alone are not enough, make sure to focus on the second part as well!
From Senior to Lead: Grow and thrive in the role (announcement)
I am happy to share that I will be launching an online cohort course called “From Senior to Lead: Grow and thrive in the role”. It’s going to be launched at the end of June / beginning of July.
The course will primarily be for Senior Software Engineers who wish to grow to the Lead role (Tech Lead (Staff), Team Lead, Engineering Manager).
I would be happy to welcome ambitious Software Engineers and I would be happy to welcome everyone in the lead role who wishes to thrive in the role as well!
I’ll share with you all of my experience both as an engineer who grew to the Team Lead role and beyond + as a manager who has promoted a lot of engineers to lead roles!
To help me to shape the course to be the best possible for you, I would appreciate a few minutes of your time to answer a couple of questions! Thank you 🙏
Let’s get back to this week’s thought.
Intro
We all know a certain person who seems to be resolving any problems very easily and whenever we think of them we think: “Now that’s a person who is doing very well”. Well, that’s credibility.
That person is good in their skillset, plus they have been able to inspire positive thoughts about them through the track record of successful actions.
Let’s define credibility more in detail next!
What exactly is credibility
The simplest way we can put it is that it’s a combination of your skills and how people perceive you.
You can focus on your skills, but if you neglect the second part, you won’t come across as a credible individual.
You can be the best in your craft, but it’s also important to showcase that through:
getting things done (taking ownership, responsibility and being reliable),
helping others and making others around you better,
social proof (what others are saying about you).
That’s how you come across as a very credible individual.
Good credibility is mandatory in order to grow to Lead roles
This is very important in our industry, especially for Senior+ roles. It’s especially hard to grow to leadership roles (Team Lead, Tech Lead (Staff), EM and beyond) without it. You need to make sure that you come across as a credible individual if you wish to grow to such roles.
Think of it this way: You start to become judged more by the actions of your team and less by your individual contribution. A person who is willing to promote you to the leadership role is placing a bet on you that you will make good decisions for the whole team and not only for yourself.
That’s where credibility comes into play. The person promoting wants to minimize the risk as much as possible by taking a look at past actions.
Were the projects they were leading successful? What do others say about them? Is the team going to listen to them? Are they reliable? Are they able to coach and mentor the team? Etc.
Even though I was quite indecisive about where I wished to grow in my career after the Senior role, credibility has helped me to grow to my first Team Lead role.
You can read my story on how I grew to the Team Lead role here: From IC to manager (paid article).
Others won’t listen to you if you don’t show credibility
Do you listen to the person that you know they don’t have enough credibility to talk about a certain topic? Well you should, because they may have some creative thoughts, but you won’t look at them as an expert in the field.
It’s really hard to have any kind of influence without credibility. You won’t be able to get your point across or share your ideas and execute them. People won’t be eager to listen to your thoughts or what may happen is that they won’t even include you in the decisions.
If you currently have such issues, well it’s time to re-think about how you can show yourself as a credible person and that you are a valuable person to the team. Don’t worry, I got you covered on this later on!
It’s also hard to manage up successfully without being credible in the eyes of your manager. You can read more about the importance of managing up and how to do that here: How to manage up as an engineer or a manager (paid article).
It’s becoming more and more important to build your credibility for any engineering role
Some time ago it was enough to finish a CS school or university and you could get a Software Engineering role easily without even showing a lot of your skillset. Well, these times have passed.
With the current market, the more credible you are, the faster you will be able to get a new role.
I know this may sound obvious, but I see a lot of people not acknowledging that and just sending out half-made CVs with some random words listed there and what’s worse - it’s hard to see and imagine what they can bring to the table without speaking to them first.
The best way to come across as a credible individual is with a good online presence where people can easily find your work and see what you can do + how you approach to things. This can be GitHub, a personal website, writing a blog or a newsletter, being active on LinkedIn, etc.
The current market is quite saturated, especially for jr. and mid-level roles. And the only way to stand out is to be more credible than others. You can do that with good planning and preparation to showcase your credibility.
You can read more on how to improve your chances in the current market here: Thriving in a competitive engineering market (paid article).
Let’s get into how to build credibility next.
How to build credibility
There are a LOT of things that you can do to improve your credibility. As said above there are two main parts: your skills and how people perceive you.
Build your skills
What my suggestion in the skills area is to become the go-to person (expert) in one particular field and become solid in a lot of others (develop a good understanding).
This holds true everywhere. For the management path, you become an expert in management, but you also need a good understanding of other fields. If you are an architect, you should become an expert in a certain area (BE, FE, Distributed systems architecture, etc.) and good in many others.
For Senior+ Engineers, the same. They are really good in one particular tech and have a very good rounded knowledge on so many different parts. That makes them really effective.
Improve the way people perceive you
There are a lot of things that we can put in here, but I’ll share the ones that I believe provide the biggest impact:
Be reliable
Everything that you do, you take pride in finishing with the highest quality, with good communication and on time. Do this enough times and you will develop an amazing reputation for being a reliable person who gets things done.
Admit mistakes
You admit when you make mistakes and you say if you don’t know something and you will take full ownership of learning it, that’s how you develop trust with people. People will be able to resonate a lot more with you if you don’t try to show yourself as perfect. Nobody is perfect at the end of the day. Credit to Steven Claes for this one.
Focus on predictability, stability and consistency
It’s much better if you do good work long-term than if you do short spikes of great work. Predictability is what gives value. If people know exactly what you can offer, they will much rather come to you.
Take ownership and responsibility
If you get assigned a task and it doesn’t have complete requirements, take ownership and responsibility to find out exactly what those requirements are.
Be proactive
Don’t shy away and wait for tasks to be assigned to you, but you take the initiative and find out what’s the most impactful thing to work on. That’s how you show your value.
Do exactly what you say and agree upon
And also call out when you won't be able to do something. People-pleasing leads to losing credibility because there's always more work to do than we can handle. Credit to Francisco Manuel Soto Ramírez for this one.
Focus on good communication
It’s really important to keep everyone in the loop, especially your manager and the stakeholders of the particular project. Try to put yourself in their shoes in think of ways how you can solve their problems. Being transparent and open about the progress helps a lot.
Help others
Offer help when you see someone in need and go the extra mile to make them understand it. You can also host internal learning sessions for the whole team. Go the extra step: present a topic at a meetup or conference!
Focus on building good relationships
You understand that good relationships are one of the most important things in the workplace. It makes it so easier to collaborate and work together when you have been able to do that. Good relationships serve as a foundation for everything else!
Focus on building your personal brand
No matter if you are an engineer or a manager, you should be focusing on your personal brand. It’s the first impression that people have about you. And it's very important that you leave a good one. You can read more about the importance of personal branding here: The importance of personal branding in the engineering industry (paid article).
Start writing online if you haven’t already
You can start by being a bit more active on LinkedIn and start writing 2 posts a week. That’s also how I started and then I increased the cadence after I built the consistency. You can also start writing a blog or a newsletter.
If you are thinking about starting your own newsletter, this is a good starting point: How to start, grow and monetize your engineering newsletter (paid article).
Last words
If there is one thing you should take out of this article is to do a retrospective of yourself and your actions and see where you can improve your credibility! I can find so many areas where I can improve.
Let’s end this article with the saying:
If you don’t improve you stagnate, make sure to always keep on learning and growing!
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You are more than welcome to find whatever interests you here and try it out in your particular case. Let me know how it went! Topics are normally about all things engineering related, leadership, management, developing scalable products, building teams etc.
Great post. I love the idea of writing online for connecting with others or even the occasional thumbs up from a colleague. Something often overlooked is becoming an author of internal writing.
A lot of engineers hate writing documentation, but this is a way to build credibility inside an organization. Did you build a cool feature? Contribute to the training documentation or release notes. Did you help onboard someone or take part in technical interviews? Help refine the interview and onboarding docs.
Sometimes you need to volunteer (or insist) but I've found this to be a great way to build a brand internally and grow my professional network. It can pay dividends as sometimes a personal referral from a non-engineer can help you get a foot in the door with a technical hiring manager.
Always be thinking about that next position.
I’d suggest proactively looking for feedback from others is another way to help you see your own blindspots.
Once you’ve identified these, try to work out how to improve them .