Here you are at a new place of work. You might have some confidence in your ability in your role, but not in this new context. And now you don't feel like you can contribute at all. A sense of dread and insignificance fills you. Anxiety is on the rise.

Thinking back the best way of handling Impostor syndrome during the years for me has been three-folded:

Learning by doing, Having someone to support me and Start by deliverying small tasks.

Career change as an impostor symptom trigger

I changed careers back in 2012 and went head-first into tech and cloud. Going from municipality-type of project-work to delivery-type it-work was a big change and I was sweating every day when I came into the office the first week. Lucky as I was I had a great mentor that threw me head first into simple problem solving tasks that gave me bite-sized tasks to deliver. For each new task I got to re-use what I’ve used in previous task and when I got stuck I got some insight from how my mentor would solve the problem. They were not the best teacher but I at least got some kind of insight into what they wanted me to do.

Critically I was allowed to fail. Failure was part of the process. Sure I screwed up things in production at times but it was not my fault that I accidentally got access to things that I shouldn’t have access to. And my mentor took that responsibility when I failed. They made sure that I learned from my mistakes but never blamed me for my mistakes - only validated that I would not repeat the same mistake.

Self-evaluation as a treatment

In the IT world there are a couple of ways to prove your worth. You can have Years of experience and be Well known, you can have education and a CV to prove your work, you can have Public work and you can do Certifications. Certifications are usually the low hanging fruit for new IT professionals as you do not need experience nor done any type of work before becoming certified. In reality you only need to be good at taking certifications by studying and memorizing and those that are good at taking certifications are at times not good at delivering what they are certified for.

My mentor did push me to take certification quite early. I did the beta-certification for the AWS professional levels for example and was constantly pushed to try to take more. They were aware of my lack of experience but knew that if I managed to take one or two then I could prove to not only myself but also future employees that I had some worth even lacking that experience.

This was for me one of the most effective ways of treating Impostor syndrome. It’s a simple pass-or-fail scenario where I could re-evaluate where I was and study up. The stakes were also very low while the rewards were high.

Remember: Overcoming impostor syndrome is a continuous process. It takes time - expect at least a year until you feel somewhat comfortable.

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