As employees or entrepreneurs, the nature of the work we do is constantly changing and in the age of generative ai, the nature of work is rapidly evolving at a much faster pace.
This changes has benefited a large number of people and businesses who are now in great demand across the industry, but at the same time, a lot of people are negatively affected and a number of people are seeing their roles become diminished.
In this post, I will give some insights on how you can stay ahead, be at the top of your career and ensure the changes happening at work benefits you rather than impact you negatively.
My Background
I presently work as a scientist at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK. I built the AI model that powers Microsoft Teams Avatars for its over 300 million users.
I started my journey in tech 12 years ago just after high school, in that time, I have transitioned from web-designer, to full stack web developer, mobile app and desktop app development, building programming tools, cloud infra to data analytics in 2017.
From 2017 to now, I taught myself machine learning, started designing neural network architectures, ran an AI startup that built open source AI tools, created state of the art facial recognition tech and from there I ended up at Microsoft.
I joined Microsoft as a software engineer and today, I am a scientist, working among some of the smartest people in the world and having the privilege of shipping my invention to over 300 million people.
Yeah, its a lot of transitions, all of it as a self taught engineer and scientist with just a high school degree. But that journey has taught me a lot about maximizing changes in the world to my benefit, and I will spend the rest of this article talking through that process.
80/20 Learning Rule of Work
I like to think, the first step of staying ahead and relevant through time is life long learning even when you are working. Work can be very demanding, and a common mistake is to spend all your week, maybe even weekends trying to deliver on the next task. Even as you aim for great performance in the immediate, it is imperative to regularly devote a good amount of time to learning new things that are developing in your space.
I will suggest an 80/20 split, spending 80% of your time on immediate work and spending about 20% on learning. This will likely vary across time and the type of work you do, sometimes, you will have more time for learning, sometimes less, but it is key to include learning in your plans.
It is also important to identify what to learn, typically, your work itself might afford you the opportunity to learn new things relevant to what you are working on. However, the world is constantly changing, new tech keeps developing, you can't learn them all, but you need to identify among all the noise, what key developments will have a great impact on the world and start getting familiar with them. For me, I feel lucky that I started learning about transformers long before ChatGPT and Diffusion models existed. While I didn't have need to use them in my work at the time, I felt they were quite revolutionary and it will be bad to not understand how they work. It turned out to be even more critical than I earlier anticipated.
Understand the Fundamentals
While there are lots of different research papers being published daily, most of them are based on a few fundamental concepts, and rather than spend so much time trying to understand every new research, its is a good idea to spend more time understanding the fundamentals, an example is for the AI field which sees papers published at a pace no human can keep up with, most of the impactful work are based on the following core ideas.
Transformers
Diffusion Models
GPTs
Contrastive Learning
Variational AutoEncoders (Yes! Good old VAE ideas underpin models like SORA)
Mastering these fundamentals gives you super knowledge to easily comprehend new research works and apply them to your work, it also ensures, for the next couple of years, you are equipped with the knowledge to be relevant as the world changes.
Be Open Minded
People get emotional about technology sometimes, it is important to stay logical and be open minded about what works and what doesn't. This happened as we transition from classical machine learning to deep learning, lots of people were invested in having claimed deep learning can never work and therefore, they were quite emotional about that being suddenly untrue, the same is happening with generative ai again. New disruptive technologies will come around from time to time.
Staying open minded, understanding tech itself is neutral, it is what we do with it that matters. Being willing to accept you are wrong about your predictions of the future and willing to quickly adapt to learn new transformative technologies are very important habits.
Plan Ahead
One question I like asking myself is, "What am I going to be working on in 2 years time?", I try to get a estimate of that and start learning ahead the technologies I will need to do the work. Work can change quite fast when you are working in a big company, sometimes, I find myself working on something new and having to rapidly learn new things, however, it always helps to plan ahead and learn things that might be related to what you are likely to work on in the future, so you have a good foundation to build upon.
Trust in Yourself
You are an amazing person and can do anything you want to do. It can take time, but you should trust yourself, trust your dreams, trust your ability, trust yourself to change, to get better, to evolve.
Even when you do everything right, you need to understand, everything isn't in your control and no matter what happens, what's going to keep you ahead is how much you have invested in yourself. So, take some time to build yourself up in knowledge, confidence and aspirations of who you want to be.
Thanks for reading this and I wish you the most amazing career ahead.