Technical leaders care about building amazing products and the best technical capabilities in their teams. Everything they do is focused on improving the user experience and bringing competitive advantage for their organization. Learn the skills and competencies you need to build a technical career path for yourself that starts with building technical expertise and grows into developing technical leadership.
With any medium you are working in, technical skills obviously help, but your mind is what you really need to expand. That is how you create work. That's the role of the artist - to change the way you view things.
- Petra Collins
It plays a major role in today’s businesses and building great software requires making decisions from the beginning to the end. The first responsibility of a technical leader is to define the technical strategy and decide on the technical direction the company should take. Technical leadership requires technical excellence, the business and technological context, and the ability to balance between speed, quality, and resource constraints.
Technical Leaders are those who excel and distinguish them as the most skilled and demanded professional who always acts with a high degree of professionalism. They are dedicated learners who are always committed to personal and professional development along-with pursuing a path of lifelong learning. They possess strategic thinking skills with the ability to link technology with business processes to provide quality advice for effective business solutions.
A strong leader must understand the technical details of the overall project and constantly guide the team to stay focused on the overall vision that the organization is trying to achieve. A technical leader must also have the skills to build a strong technical team, assign them meaningful work, and also track and understand the details of the work the team is doing.
Technical leadership requires technical skills as well as functional business process knowledge to gain a complete understanding of ever-changing business dynamics. They need to gain business know-how and enable their technical or functional abilities to work more efficiently and effectively while performing their role, which is to increase productivity, drive operational excellence, and ensure quality, providing better solutions to complex business problems and drive cost reduction in their respective areas.
If you are working in a modern End-to-End integrated IT-enabled enterprise, you need to gain a relevant skill-set, explore techno-functional opportunities, and showcase your expertise and experience more confidently. You should be able to anticipate and address the changing needs of clients, employers, customers, and markets well than any other professional that does not have technical expertise. You should gain substantial knowledge of the industry's most widely used enterprise resource planning tools and important related fields like SOX requirements, Six Sigma, Risks Controls and Governance, Audit of Systems, and can demonstrate this ability to integrate into the business decision process.
You should try to seek formal education to the foundation of key terms and all the key processes applicable to your domain, which will help you in a long way to understanding the business terminology and business needs. This when combined with your technical knowledge will help you in providing effective and efficient business solutions that will help you put your career on a fast track.
As the number of companies is opting for automated systems to track their business operations, more and more change initiatives are undertaken by corporates. This has created an ever-increasing demand for Technical, Functional, and Techno-functional resources. There is no specialized community or portal available in the market that can assure employers and clients about the capability of these highly paid resources. The pool of credentialed talent is not keeping pace with the demand and there is no formal certification process to ensure the techno-functional they employ have the necessary skills and expertise to understand the business requirements and translate the IT Systems operating in complex business models to make then effective for business objectives.
Most of the people working on complex projects have gained their knowledge by virtue of their experience rather than going through professionally recognized formal training on how to best execute their responsibilities. There are a huge scarcity and demand for skilled techno-functional managers is at a critically urgent level. Effective technical leadership skills enable you to stand out from the crowd and demonstrate your techno-functional skills with required business, domain, and leadership skills.
Given below are the key responsibilities that a technical leader is expected to perform in his role:
Technofunc resources aim at bridging the gap between technical and functional expertise and have invested a lot of effort into creating tutorials on various business processes and industry knowledge. Our curriculum is designed to equip a person to leverage technology as well as learn critical business application processes along-with system integrity and security, systems audit, project management, and other key methods widely used today that helps in the integration of business processes and practices in tune with the requirements that are driven both by business, globalization and legislature. We help you gain expertise in both technical and functional skills, which when applied collectively comprise of professional competence and excellence.
Given below are the different technofunc resources to start building your technical leadership skills:
Even in such technical lines as engineering, about 15% of one's financial success is due one's technical knowledge and about 85% is due to skill in human engineering, to personality and the ability to lead people.
- Dale Carnegie
Reasons behind Wastage of Time
Under-utilization of time may be due to the faulty system or faults of manager/officer/leader or due to lack of planning. There could be many factors driving the procrastination behavior like system issues, personal work habits, and lack of delegation, personality traits, and bad working habits of the leader, failure to tackle interpersonal conflicts, obstacles, and lack of far-sightedness.
Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. The best time management techniques improve the ways you work. Time management refers to managing time effectively so that the right time is allocated to the right activity. Learn more about the five steps for effective time management viz. study, identify, analyze, decide, and implement.
Team Development by Building Trust
As your team begins to work together, you need to establish a way each team member can exchange ideas and build mutual trust. Successful groups are built on trust and collaboration. A free exchange of ideas, in an open environment, will allow your team to get to know each other and enable you to check on how they work together. Learn some tips to help build team trust and establish personal bonds.
Building Your Domain Knowledge
Domain knowledge from a career management perspective encompasses the understanding of industry dynamics and business processes of the target operational area. Domain expert exhibits clear knowledge in the respective industry and understands the industry concepts in general. It is always recommended to best highlight your exposure of domain in your resume or cover letter. TechnoFunc provides you with the best tutorials to gain domain knowledge in a large number of industries and business areas.
Stress is an essential part of our life. No one can live without stress. Stress can be beneficial as well as harmful. Stress as a positive influence adds excitement and hope while as a negative influence it can result in destructive feelings, anger, and depression. Although the general orientation to stress is to consider unfavorable outcomes, yet one must have observed that stress experiences may also facilitate the development of effective and varied coping behavior, increased personal resources, and lead to a sense of competence in development. Stress at a moderate level is not only inevitable but may be useful for physical and mental well-being.
Discover Your Career Direction
The process of finding career direction begins with specific career exploration and identification of a career that could be passionate about, a career that allows you to make the optimum use of your talents. After identification of the career, you need to acquire skills and tools, and education that can help you get entry into your dream career. Learn the important tips that you cannot afford to miss.
At different points in your professional career, it is helpful to identify your core values. Values are the qualities considered to be the most important guiding principles that determine the priorities in your life and greatly influence your career choices. Your career brings happiness when it is in agreement with the beliefs you have about what is important and meaningful to you. Awareness of your values will help you develop a clearer sense of what's most important to you in life.
Robert Katz identified three leadership skills called - technical skills, human skills, and conceptual skills as the basic personal skills essential for leadership. Leaders must possess these three skills that assist them in optimizing a leader's performance. Technical skills are related to the field, human skills are related to communicating with people and conceptual skills related to setting the vision.
Improving Skills & Competencies
Whenever you are looking for a job or having your yearend discussion with your manager, two terms generally referred to be “Skills” and “competencies”. Today success in a career is an outcome of having essential competencies and building required skills. Skills could be a major distinguishing factor for you to move up on the career ladder and jump from one role to another. Leadership skills when combined with relevant domain and functional expertise can transform your entire career growth and help you have a fulfilling career.
How often do you have a plan for how you are going to spend your day but you aren't able to complete the tasks on your plan because of unimportant tasks, interruptions, or your own procrastination? Wouldn't it be great to be able to manage your schedule and your time while avoiding, or at least controlling, these time stealers? Learn the strategies to manage your schedule while still handling interruptions and demands on your time.
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