Your expertise and professionalism carry more weight than a piece of paper with a degree in this field, as they do in many others. Many Software Engineer jobs are available if you can learn what you need to bring to the table and deliver. Read on if you’re considering a career as a Software Engineer and what skills you’ll need to succeed. We’ll go over what a Software Engineer performs, what abilities are required, how to design a resume, and how to develop your software engineer portfolio.

Whether you’re re-entering the workforce or stuck in a career you dislike (administration, operations, banking, etc.), becoming a software developer is totally within your grasp as long as you’re willing to put in the hard work.

Who is a Software Engineer ?

A software engineer is someone who writes the code behind software products. Software engineering is a detailed study of engineering to the design, development and maintenance of software.

what Technical Skill Required of a software engineer

A Software Engineer’s toolbox is built on specific technical skills to create solutions and address challenges the team and the organization face. A Software Engineer needs to have or develop the following skills:

• Programming language skills: The languages the engineer knows may vary based on the type of software engineering they do. But these are central to their success. You can explore various types of programming languages in our course catalogue  https://academy.torilo.ng/courses-training-center-in-lagos .

• Source control: Source control is used to help you manage and store your code. There are tools, like Git and Github, that make it easier to manage your code.

• Database creation and management : Databases store the data that applications use to serve end-users. Knowing how to make and program databases, using languages like SQL, will help a Software Engineer produce more complete solutions.

• Operating system management and control: While many Software Engineers will never have to build an operating system, it’s good to understand how different operating systems work. This knowledge will help you design solutions that use the operating system’s resources without inadvertently introducing vulnerabilities to the application, the computer, or the network it’s connected to.

• Microsoft Excel: Excel is a useful tool for tracking how a project is progressing and creating reports that outline the success or challenges of an application. It often plays a key role in reporting results to decision-makers and other stakeholders as well.

• Text editor: While it may seem more important to understand how to write code, text editor skills shouldn’t be overlooked. With many text editors, you can use keyboard shortcuts to make the entry and editing processes faster and more accurate. There are plenty of text editors you can familiarize yourself with, such as Notepad++, Atom, Visual Code, and others.

• Basic networking: In today’s cloud-heavy business environment, networks are essential in facilitating communication between people and systems and the deployment of software solutions. Many Software Engineers will have to understand how a client-server model works, which involves a server that hosts an application, making it available for multiple computers that are connected to its network.

Soft skill a software engineer should have

Soft skills are those skills that, while not necessarily involved in coding, are still essential to the process of designing, producing, and presenting solutions. In many cases, soft skills involve interacting with others on your team or other stakeholders.

Empathy

Empathizing involves putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. It’s different from sympathy, which involves merely understanding how someone else feels. So, an empathetic person can feel the emotions of others and imagine how their challenges impact them on a personal level. With empathy, you can understand why an executive feels pressure from stockholders to get a solution ready before the next fiscal year begins. You can also understand the feelings of someone else on the team who put in a lot of time and effort — only to have their solution fail, perhaps multiple times.

Communication

Communication also plays a central role in conveying the effectiveness of your solution to managers and executives. Whether presentations or chats across a table, these discussions need to take place to make it easy for the stakeholder to understand what’s going on. And a good Software Engineer needs to be able to get their ideas across in a way that makes sense to people who don’t have a technical background.

Patience

Despite processing times that can take only nanoseconds, the overall software development life cycle is often very time-consuming. Developing the soft skill of patience will help you:

• Get along with team members. They may take an hour to do something you could do in 30 minutes, but, with patience, you can focus on the value of their solution instead of how long it took to create it.
• Avoid putting too much pressure on yourself. It’s easy to forget the value of being patient with yourself as a Software Engineer, particularly because you may have worked hard to get faster at some elements of your craft. Still, realizing that some things simply cannot be rushed can significantly benefit the end result.
• Work with slower systems. Testing and rollout can often take a long time. You may have a super-fast set up at home or may be coming from a company with a system that’s far faster than what you find in front of you. With patience, you can adjust to different operating speeds without getting frustrated.

Refine your Coding Skills

All software engineers need to be proficient in one or more of the following programming languages.

1. Python. Currently one of the most popular programming languages in the world, Python allows software engineers a common and open-source language to use for general-purpose programming. Python offers a dynamic feature set that is portable across a variety of operating systems. Python also has automatic memory management – this means that software engineers don’t have to keep manual tabs on memory management. Python is one of the most key skills for software engineers today.
2. JavaScript. Another general-purpose programming language, Java has nearly a two-decade run of being a foundational object-oriented language and one of the most important skills for software engineers to know. Java is particularly trusted by software engineers due to its strength in security. Also platform-agnostic, Java enables software engineers a reliably safe and design-friendly language that can find them jobs almost anywhere.
3. SQL. More than 30 years old now, SQL is one of the most
   widespread database languages. Software engineers typically aren’t responsible for maintaining or organizing databases, but they do need to understand how to navigate databases so that they can build programs that speak to them.
4. Ruby. Developed originally in 2011, Ruby is another object-oriented language that software engineers utilize to build web applications at a high pace. Often, Ruby is paired with the Ruby on Rails framework. Open-sourced as well, Ruby also utilizes automatic memory management (or “garbage collection”) to support multiple programming paradigms or features.

Practice With Coding Projects

If you don’t have work experience, this section is the most important part of your resume. Projects can be anything programming-related, be it a Python script, Java program, webpage, or mobile app. Don’t just list the technologies and languages you know; show how you’ve used them. Assuming you’re submitting an electronic copy of your resume, embed hyperlinks to each project within your resume. Select projects that show a variety of skills, such as using standard frameworks/libraries, understanding full-stack development, creating mobile apps, and setting up a development environment.

Many software developers use their GitHub profile as both a portfolio and a place where they practice coding projects because it shows potential hiring managers all of the open-source projects you’ve contributed to as well as projects you’ve started. Your dashboard indicates at-a-glance how often you commit code and how popular your code is. Consequently, GitHub is one of the first destinations hiring managers go to evaluate a candidate’s web presence.

Network or Find a Mentor

One of the most common ways in which software engineers learn about job opportunities is through word-of-mouth and referrals. If you’re currently enrolled in a boot camp or online course, make the most of the support network of mentors and career counsellors available to you. If you’re working for an organization, proactively reach out to software engineers and managers within the company.

Build a Portfolio

Think about the kind of position you’d like to hold within a company. Your portfolio should contain a variety of applications to let interviewers see that you can back up the skills highlighted in your resume. Expand beyond the projects you built for school or through a boot camp. Talk about how your work on different projects impacted your desire to continue pursuing software engineering. Create projects that highlight your innovation and ability to develop solutions that can benefit companies where you wish to apply.