- Adi Osmani is a senior engineer at Google who shared his best career tips after working at the company for 12 years.
- He values lifelong learning, collaboration, communication and strategic thinking.
- Osmani has gained 175,000 followers on LinkedIn by sharing career and technology tips.
Addy Osmani, a senior engineer at Google, recently celebrated his 12th anniversary working at the search giant and used the occasion to share his best career tips in a blog post.
The first thing Osmani learned was to embrace lifelong learning and not pretend to know all the answers. He does this by writing about new things he learns in order to identify gaps in his understanding.
This approach seems to be working: By writing and posting regularly online, he has gained over 175,000 followers on LinkedIn.
collaboration
Another tip is to encourage collaboration across teams and departments. Some have blamed remote work for reducing opportunities for collaboration between colleagues and stifling innovation. To engage with remote workers, career experts suggest taking small steps like holding video conferences with the camera on and remembering birthdays and celebrating promotions.
Mentoring
For Osmani, both the experience of being a mentor and being mentored were valuable. Having a mentor helps a lot in boosting one's confidence and also helps with career guidance, be it promotion, a different role, further challenges or even a change of career.
Osmani also encourages people to start by sharing the manta: “First do it, then do it right, then do it better.” Rather than staring at a blank page, he encourages people to write something down, then refine and improve it.
communication
Communication is another piece of advice he gives. Even technical people like engineers need communication skills to share their ideas, build trust, and get non-technical executives to understand their decisions, he says. One CEO previously told Business Insider that communication was the most important skill his employees lacked.
But if you struggle with conversation, Harvard researchers have a 10-second secret to improving your communication skills: Prepare three topics to talk about before a social situation to reduce the pressure.
Think strategically
Osmani warns against having tunnel vision, instead encouraging people to think strategically about the situations they are operating in – that means not being too siloed, thinking about long-term plans and making trade-offs.
It also means focusing on what you can control, rather than obsessing over the minutiae that can lead to anxiety and dissatisfaction. Job anxiety is particularly impacting Gen Z, a generation in the early stages of their careers.
“It's well-known that anxious teams are less likely to take risks, less likely to innovate, and may have less psychological safety,” Mora Aarons Mele, author of “The Anxious Achiever,” previously told BI.
happiness
Which leads to Osmani's final advice: Invest in your well-being. Anxiety in the workplace can be a major cause of burnout, which can have dire consequences. One VP of HR previously told BI that his burnout got so bad he was carried out of his office on a stretcher.
For Osmani, intentional self-care and rejuvenation are as essential to high performance at work as technical skills. Spending time in nature, meditation, therapy, and above all, learning to say “no” at work can all be ways to improve wellbeing.
