Personal Experience: Top 5 Advice For Career Growth

I have been working remotely since December 2009 (long before the post-pandemic working from home trend). Fast forward to March 2021, and I secured my current role through remote interviews with zero in-person meetups. In this article, I will share my top five remote working tips to put your remote working career on the right track.

A bit about me

Age 21, I landed my first remote role back home in Sri Lanka 😊. My first remote project was to build a website for a reputable tourism company in the Maldives. Following this, I started working remotely as a PHP web application developer + SEO consultant for a leading indoor & outdoor blinds company in South Australia. Then, I took the difficult decision to fly away from my comfort zone to pursue my dream of gaining a master’s degree in the UK. During my master’s, I continued to work for the same South Australian company part-time from my tiny student room. After finishing my studies, I secured a role in central London as a PHP/Angular Developer. I commuted daily to central London for about five years before switching to hybrid working when I relocated to Cambridgeshire. Following the pandemic, I went fully remote.

I landed my current role as Team Lead in Services Development in March 2021, where I was hired through remote interviews. I joined the company as the Web Development Team Leader during a leadership transition, as the previous team leader was in the process of stepping down. This presented an exciting challenge to blend in with the existing team, uphold the organisation’s common values, promote industry best practices, & ensure business requirements were met while fostering respectful collaboration with stakeholders at all levels. In 2025, I got promoted to Team Lead Services Development, where I extended my leadership skills beyond the web department into wider organisation requirements. In this role, I work fully remotely and manage/interact with team members from all over the world.

I believe you enjoyed hearing a bit about how my career has shaped since 2009. The following is my top five pieces of advice to you.

Disciplining yourself

You can get easily distracted when working remotely on your own. You can get distracted for various reasons. When I was working from my room in Sri Lanka, I found working in hot/humid conditions can be quite challenging. Sometimes you will find the task at hand is not so engaging and, therefore, difficult to stay motivated. Whatever the reason may be, what I learnt is that disciplining yourself is key to becoming successful. It can simply be spreading various tasks during the day to stay motivated. For example:

• You can work on more attention-grabbing tasks in the morning hours and tasks that do not need your full attention in the evening.
• Discplining yourself to stay well clear of distractions, such as keeping your mobile phone out of sight, can be helpful to regain your focus when working.

Therefore, whatever the criteria might be, knowing that you have gone off your course and to bring you back on course, mastering discipline is key.

Hungry for knowledge

I often find that seeking knowledge and filling up your knowledge tank consistently helps your career in the long run. However, you have to be careful what you choose to fill your tank with. Knowing everything is not practical and not necessarily helpful to advance your career. Instead,

• Find what’s important to you and to your career ambitions, and keep learning it
• Within your domain, research what skills are currently in demand or trending and allocate some dedicated time regularly to learn them (I often find websites such as ExplodingTopics and Google Trends to be quite useful)
• As you learn new things, do not forget to keep a record of the high-level topics of things you learned. This is certainly going to help you in many ways in the future (e.g., when preparing for an interview 🙂)

Practicing what you learn

Knowledge that’s never used is a waste of space in your head. It’s very easy to learn and forget, especially if the demands are variable and you don’t get the chance to use what you learned as often as you like. If that’s the case, stick to a routine and keep polishing your knowledge by putting what you learned into practice, every now and then, so you don’t lose touch with it. On a completely separate topic🏏, I personally find this helpful when I am playing Cricket. Practising in nets gives me a chance to put my thoughts into shots, which undoubtedly helps me to boost my confidence as a batsman during game time. Remember the old, famous saying “Practice makes perfect”.

Building a rapport

If you want to thrive in your career, whether you are working remotely or in the office, building a good rapport with key professionals is a must. This could be with your line manager, your colleague or even a friend who happens to be a key professional in your domain. Rapport cannot be built overnight. It takes time to build a long-lasting rapport with people. My advice to you on how to build a rapport is:

• Every time you work with someone, think that you are building a strategic relationship that could lead to establishing a solid rapport one day.
• Practise active listening.
• Seek help; genuinely offer help.

Honesty & dependability

What drives one person to believe in another is the trust they have in them. What I have learned and witnessed over the years of my career is that being genuinely honest and extremely dependable helps you win the trust of your boss and colleagues. However, this can be challenging, especially when the person you want to win trust is behind a computer screen. With careful thought and consideration, this can be easily resolved. As an example, let’s assume you are trying to win your boss’s trust. For that, you can:

• Update your boss about where you are with the tasks at regular intervals. Don’t be scared to say that you are stuck or behind a task in terms of the deadline and would like some help or guidance.
• Share your honest opinion in conversations, without disrespecting others who have a different opinion from yours.
• When attending meetings, always be there 1-2 minutes before the meeting starts.

In a Nutshell

I believe you learned a bit more about me and, most importantly, the strategies I applied to overcome various challenges. Remote working is not just another way of doing work. It’s the art of getting things done efficiently while staying well clear of constant distractions and obstacles. Despite where you are on your career ladder, seeking valuable knowledge consistently is a good way to keep yourself busy, which eventually puts you on a highly rewarding career progression path.