What Would You Tell Someone Early in Their Career?

📌 TL;DR

I'm still early in my own career, and lately I've been thinking about how much advice we hear when we're starting out.

Learn this. Build that. Get certified. Network more. Specialize. Don't specialize too early. Work harder. Protect your work-life balance.

Sometimes it feels like everyone has an answer 😄

But careers are long, and I think some lessons only really make sense after you've lived through them.

That's what made me think about this community.

DEV has people at so many different stages of their careers, with completely different experiences. Some are just starting. Some have been working for a few years. Others have decades of experience. Some have changed careers entirely, managed teams, built companies, made mistakes, started over, burned out, found work they love, or discovered that what they thought they wanted wasn't actually right for them.

That's a lot of experience in one place.

So this post is a little different. I'll share some of what I'm learning while being early in my own career, but mostly, I want to listen to you.

What would you tell someone early in their career?

And there's no limit here 😄 If one thing comes to mind, share one. If you have five, ten, or a whole list of things experience has taught you, I'd genuinely love to hear them all. They don't have to be about the same topic either.

Talk about whatever you feel is worth passing on. It can be technical, personal, or somewhere in between: work, money, learning, managers, communication, confidence, health, work-life balance, mistakes, opportunities, relationships, or something completely different.

And if you're early in your career too, you're absolutely part of this conversation. Share something you've already learned, something you wish you'd known when you started, or something you're still trying to figure out.

And if you have a question, ask it. There might be someone here who's already been through exactly what you're wondering about and can share what they learned. And if it's something I happen to know or have experienced too, I'll be happy to share what I can.

My hope is that we can turn the comments into a place where people at different stages of their careers can ask questions, share experiences, and learn from each other 💙

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📚 Table of Contents

• This Post Is a Little Different
• I'm Learning That There Probably Isn't One Correct Way to Build a Career
• There's So Much About a Career That Doesn't Fit on a Resume
• Some of You Have Already Lived the Years the Rest of Us Are Just Beginning
• So... What Would You Tell Someone Early in Their Career?
• It Doesn't Have to Be Career Advice in the Traditional Sense
• Why I'm Asking the Community Instead of Writing an Advice Post
• I Have a Feeling the Best Part of This Post Might Be the Comments

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This Post Is a Little Different

I had a slightly different idea for this post.

Usually when I sit down to write something, I have a topic I want to explore, an experience I want to share, or, apparently lately, a technical report that sends me down a rabbit hole for several hours 😄

But this time, I want to write a little less and listen a little more.

I'm still early in my own career. There are things I understand much better today than I did a few years ago, but I'm also pretty sure there are things I'll look back on five or ten years from now and think, “I really wish I had understood that earlier.”

Maybe someone has already told me some of those things and I haven't had enough experience yet to understand why they matter. Or maybe they're lessons I'll only learn by going through something myself.

Either way, it made me think about something I really like about communities like DEV: we're all at completely different points in our careers.

Some people here are just figuring out what they want to do, while others have been working for years or even decades. And even within that, no two paths look exactly the same. People change fields, become managers, go back to being individual contributors, build companies, take career breaks, start over, or watch their carefully planned career go somewhere completely unexpected.

Every one of those paths comes with lessons.

And that's what made me wonder:

What could those of us who are early in our careers learn from everyone else's experiences?

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I'm Learning That There Probably Isn't One Correct Way to Build a Career

When you're early in your career, it's surprisingly easy to feel like you're doing something wrong.

You look around and someone seems to be learning faster than you, someone else just got promoted, and another person landed an opportunity you'd love to have. Some people already seem to know exactly what they want to specialize in, while others have incredible portfolios or somehow sound completely confident about where their careers are going.

And meanwhile, you might still be sitting there thinking, “I don't even know exactly what I want to be doing three years from now” 😄

I've definitely spent time worrying about things like that myself. But I'm slowly realizing that careers probably aren't as linear as they sometimes look from the outside.

People change roles, discover that something they thought they'd love isn't actually for them, or become interested in something they never planned to pursue. They take breaks, make mistakes, change their minds, and sometimes start again. An opportunity that looks perfect might teach you what you don't want, while something that feels like a complete detour might end up being useful years later in a way you couldn't possibly have predicted at the time.

I think that's part of what makes comparing career paths so difficult. We usually see where someone is now, but we don't necessarily see all the changes, uncertainty, mistakes, and unexpected turns that happened along the way.

I'm still figuring out my own path, so I'm definitely not going to tell anyone exactly how they should build theirs. But one thing I'm trying to become more comfortable with is not having the entire map yet.

Maybe knowing where I want to go next is enough for now.

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There's So Much About a Career That Doesn't Fit on a Resume

When we're starting out, a lot of our attention naturally goes toward the things we can show: the skills we're learning, projects we're building, certifications we're earning, our education, experience, and eventually the achievements we can point to.

And of course those things matter.

But the longer I think about careers, the more I wonder whether some of the lessons that shape them the most are things we'll never put on a resume.

Things like knowing when to ask for help instead of spending another five hours trying to solve something alone. Learning how to disagree with someone without turning that disagreement into a fight. Being able to say “I don't know” without immediately worrying that everyone will suddenly think you don't belong there.

Then there are decisions that don't always have an obvious right answer. How do you know whether an opportunity is genuinely good for you or just looks impressive from the outside? When should you negotiate, and when should you walk away? How do you deal with a bad manager, or eventually learn to become a good one yourself?

And some of the questions go beyond work itself. How much of your identity should your career take up? How do you stay ambitious without feeling like every free hour needs to become another opportunity to be productive? How do you take care of your health while still trying to build the future you want?

I don't think there's one course we can take that neatly teaches all of that.

A lot of it seems to come from living through things, making choices, getting some of them wrong, watching other people go through their own experiences, and slowly figuring out what matters to us along the way.

And that's exactly why I wanted to write this post.

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Some of You Have Already Lived the Years the Rest of Us Are Just Beginning

That's something I think is pretty amazing when you really stop and think about it.

Someone reading this might be preparing for their very first interview, while someone else might be three years into their career. Another person might have fifteen or twenty years of experience, and someone else might have spent decades doing one thing only to eventually decide they wanted to start over in a completely different direction.

And all of that experience means much more than knowing different technologies or having different job titles.

People have worked with managers they loved and managers who taught them exactly what they wouldn't want to do if they ever became one themselves. They've made career decisions that worked out beautifully and others they probably wouldn't make again. They've negotiated salaries, accepted opportunities, turned others down, stayed somewhere too long, left somewhere too early, found mentors, and maybe eventually became mentors for someone else.

They've also had time to discover which worries actually mattered. Some of the things that felt incredibly important at the beginning of their careers might barely matter to them now, while things they hardly thought about back then may have turned out to matter much more than they expected.

And that's the kind of knowledge I'm curious about.

I'm not looking for another perfect career roadmap or a formula that says, “Do these seven things and you'll be successful.”

I'm much more interested in what people learned from actually going through it: the good decisions, the mistakes, the unexpected turns, and the things they understand now that they couldn't have understood when they were just beginning.

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So... What Would You Tell Someone Early in Their Career?

This is the part where I hand the post over to you 😄

If you've been working for a while, I'd love for you to think back to the beginning of your career and everything you've experienced since then.

What do you know now that you wish you'd understood earlier? And what would you want someone early in their career to know?

Please don't feel like you have to choose just one thing either. You might have something to say about technical skills and something completely different to say about work-life balance. Your lessons might be about managers, communication, money, confidence, networking, changing jobs, burnout, asking for help, choosing opportunities, dealing with mistakes, knowing when to walk away, or something I haven't even thought to mention.

Maybe there's something you spent far too much time worrying about early on that you now realize wasn't nearly as important as it seemed. Or perhaps there's something you barely thought about at the beginning that you now wish you'd taken much more seriously.

And if your advice completely contradicts someone else's advice here, that's okay too. I'd actually love to see those different perspectives. What worked beautifully for one person might have been completely wrong for someone else.

You also don't need twenty years of experience to contribute. If you're early in your career too, you're just as much a part of this conversation. You might already have learned something from your first job, an opportunity you took, a mistake you made, a difficult experience, or simply something that's helped you along the way.

And if you feel like you're still figuring everything out, you don't need to have advice at all.

You can ask instead.

What do you wish you could ask someone further along in their career?

There might be someone reading this who remembers having exactly the same question and has already lived through the experience you're wondering about.

That's really what I'm hoping this discussion can become: not experienced people talking at people who are just beginning, but people at different stages of their careers learning from each other.

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It Doesn't Have to Be Career Advice in the Traditional Sense

When we hear “career advice,” it's easy for the conversation to immediately become about what skill to learn next, which certification to get, or which technology to master.

And those conversations can absolutely be useful. But I think a career is much bigger than the technical skills required to do a job.

Maybe experience taught you to protect your weekends, start saving money earlier, ask more questions, find mentors, document your work, take your health seriously, make sure you have a life outside work, or stop comparing your entire career with the small part of someone else's life you see online.

Maybe it's something completely unexpected that I haven't even thought to mention.

Actually, those unexpected answers might be the ones I'm most curious to read.

Because sometimes the advice that stays with us isn't the advice we went looking for in the first place.

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Why I'm Asking the Community Instead of Writing an Advice Post

I could have written an article called “Things You Should Know Early in Your Career.”

But that wouldn't feel quite right coming from me.

I'm early in my own career too. I have things I've learned so far and experiences that have changed how I think, but I also know there are situations I simply haven't lived through yet.

Instead of pretending otherwise, I'd rather ask people who have lived through them.

And experience doesn't only mean years worked.

Someone with twenty years of experience might share something that helps someone with two. Someone with two years might remember the uncertainty of starting out much more clearly. And someone entering the workforce today is experiencing things around AI, remote work, learning, and hiring that didn't exist in quite the same way ten or twenty years ago.

Different stages of a career teach us different things, and that's what makes this much more interesting to me than trying to write a career guide myself.

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I Have a Feeling the Best Part of This Post Might Be the Comments

And honestly, that's what I'm hoping for 😄

I've had conversations here where someone left a comment that made me look at something completely differently, introduced me to an idea I hadn't considered, or brought years of experience to something I had only recently started thinking about.

That's one of my favorite things about writing in a community like DEV. You don't just publish something and walk away. Sometimes what you write starts a conversation, and that conversation ends up teaching you just as much as the article itself.

So maybe this post can become a little collection of experiences.

Not a definitive career guide.

Not a roadmap everyone is supposed to follow.

Just people at different stages of their lives and careers sharing what they've learned along the way.

Someone might come across a comment and think, “I really needed to hear that.” Someone else might discover an idea they hadn't considered before, or read a perspective that stays with them until they encounter that situation themselves.

And I fully expect to be taking notes too 😄

So I'll leave this one with all of you:

What would you tell someone early in their career?

Share as much or as little as you'd like. If you have one lesson, I'd love to hear it. If years of experience have given you five or ten things you wish you'd known earlier, please share those too.

And if you're early in your career too, I'd love to hear from you just as much. Tell us what you've already learned, what you're struggling with, or what you wish you could ask someone who's been where you are now.

There isn't one correct way to build a career, and I don't expect there to be one correct answer here either.

In fact, I think the different answers are what could make this discussion useful.

So, what has your career taught you that you'd pass on to someone who's still near the beginning? I'd really love to hear it 💙

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Transparency note: The banner image for this article was generated using DEV Community's built-in AI image generation feature. I wrote the prompt, generated multiple variations, and selected the final image used in this post.

I also used AI to help check my grammar and make sure I was expressing my thoughts clearly. English isn't my first language, so sometimes I know what I want to say but need a little help making sure the wording comes across correctly. The ideas, experiences, and perspectives in this article are my own.