Secret ingredient for quick career growth — Meetup | My life lessons

Meetup as networking channel used by like-minded people to share knowledge

Holistic growth happens through deep knowledge sharing & that when you’re open to learning new things, the lessons become useful in unexpected ways.

A decade back, learning new skills by employees happened via in-house training conducted by the companies where they work. I was also thinking that is the only way other than self-learning.

I got to know about meetups few years back, and saw that you can not only learn new concepts, but also collaborate with different people from different companies.

Meetups are simply events where members and organizers get to discuss, and practice activities related to their common interests.

Coming to my story, few years ago, I was struggling to “learn new things quickly”, which is an essential need in the IT industry. Usual options like online courses, self-learning, didn’t work out well for me. Like Po in the ‘Kung Fu Panda’ movie, I realized that I need a different way of learning/up-skilling.

At the same time frame, I attended my first meetup that was an ice-breaker and showed me about how tech meet-ups are happening. I got connected with Karthikeyan who was hosting tech events in the meetup group called Microsoft Chennai Azure Group along with Ilyas.

I got a great opportunity via Karthikeyan to host a workshop about Big Data at Microsoft’s Global Azure Bootcamp 2018 event. That talk+workshop I conducted, made me clear that meetup is another great platform for learning and sharing things apart from networking.

“Yes, it will be nerve wrecking to meet new people, but only when you push yourself and continue will you see tangible results”

My enthusiasm extended to the outside world for networking. Even though I knew communication wasn’t my strongest suit, I kept at it and loved hosting and speaking at tech sessions in collaboration with Meetup groups where I share and gain knowledge.

“I realised that people who possess any skill or talent find more meaning in sharing that with others”.

Not just knowing latest tech, I can guarantee that — deep understanding of concepts is definitely possible via attending meetups.

With that greatest lesson I learnt in my life, my idea is to derive happiness from encouraging and helping others do what I did. If any of you are looking to learn and network, you can always reach out to me — https://www.linkedin.com/in/dinesh-kumar-prabakaran/