Software Career Progression Study
Every career path looks different, and mine is certainly not representative.
I worked at Kuehne+Nagel in Luxembourg after high school, then later as a student assistant at the University of Trier and as a working student at JAM Software GmbH. Besides Trier, I studied at Saarland University then moved to Sweden for a semester abroad at Linnaeus University. Then back to the University of Trier for my master’s degree and PhD. After graduation, I moved to Australia to join the University of Adelaide. The pandemic forced me to leave academia. I enjoyed working in the software industry for 3.5 years at QAware GmbH and SAP. Then, at the end of 2023, I moved back to academia and joined University of Bayreuth. Each of these transitions had its reasons, and there were always many factors to consider.
Interestingly, little is known about typical career paths in the software industry. Therefore, Miikka Kuutila and Paul Ralph initiated a longitudinal study, the “Software Career Progression Study”, that aims to investigate software professionals’ perceptions of work and how they change over time. The study tries to find out why some software professionals change jobs every few years, while others are happy to stay in theirs for a long time. The goal (and challenge) is to follow a panel of professionals along their career paths over several years.
I’m part of the team of researchers who provided feedback on the questionnaire and helped to translate it to different languages. You can find a link to the English and German versions below:
English
German
More information and additional languages
If you join this study, we as organizers will share what we learn with you and, when we hit our recruiting goal, we’ll donate $2000 to charities selected by participants. Anyone aged 18-65 who works in software development (e.g., as a software engineering, business analyst, or manager) can participate in the study.
I would really appreciate if as many of you as possible could participate! Feel free to further distribute a link to this post or the study website.
