From Geek to Star #37 - Four months into improving my SHINE

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🗓️ This Week – Episode 37: a retrospective on improving your SHINE

About four months ago in September 2025, I shared in a previous edition what my SHINE assessment was: it was telling me that I thought that my Hard Skills should be stronger to thrive more in the role I wanted to have: in this age of AI where tech is accelerating, I sensed indeed that if I was not a bit more hands on on what is happening, then I risked to be strongly disconnected and less relevant maybe in 5 years time even in a senior role. 

As a reminder, a SHINE assessment is relative to your specific context, role and what you want to be. In my case, I want to continue developing as a Tech senior executive in Travel and Hospitality strongly relevant across Europe and Asia Pacific and being able to be both strategic and sufficiently in the trenches.

Four months down the road, I am sharing with you what I did in that respect to see how efficient the approach is from passive exposure through videos, to social learning (1-1 conversations, panels) and experiential learning through doing and training. . 

Learning from others: experts and peers

Over the course of the four months, I’ve regularly watched videos while doing my morning exercise routine at the gym giving perspectives on how AI is impacting software engineering: the AI Engineer youtube channel, Anthropic channel, Kodecloud channel. Good for general culture, hearing what is happening in this fast moving space and for generating some thoughts on what AI can bring to Tech people. But not very sticky in terms of learning. 

At a more interactive level, I held a number of interesting discussions with other tech leaders living in Singapore on how tech is changing for them with AI, either during one to one coffee/tea catch-up or during events. As well as while moderating discussion panels in events on topics such as “The Future of Tech Jobs", in which I took the time to do one to one preparation calls. I enjoy having these one to one conversations, as each brings different information, different points of view in a specific context. I found these discussions really useful in terms of stickiness, as they come from real life experiences that I can remember much better. Being deliberate to keep in touch with people you appreciate on topics you want to develop on is something I highly recommend. 

Learning by doing (and struggling)

Nothing beats doing things yourself for sure. In my case, I wanted to improve my hard skills as a senior tech executive, meaning having a good understanding of how AI can be used rightly and with impact in software engineering. Having just launched my solopreneurship, I had two things in mind related to this aspect:

• First, looking at how to automate admin work as much as possible to reduce my personal time: when you are a solopreneur, the biggest bottleneck is yourself as you are responsible for everything: business development, work delivery, branding of your business, delivery of your commitments, admin work… 

• Second, looking at how I could build myself my digital twin to provide mentoring as it was myself, with my knowledge and my experience. 

On the first point, I chose to look for example at automating expense tracking for my solo venture: a very dull work to be done whenever I have a professional business expense to extract the info from the PDF invoice, from a screenshot, add that into a consolidated file, send the expense claim to the accountant system, archive the file. I used n8n as a workflow automation with all its integration with Google Drive, Google email, Wise currency converter… and LLM integration to be able to extract necessary information from various invoices (including screenshots of manually written invoices). A good example as I also used GenAI to help me implement the workflow and do troubleshooting.  

On the second point on building my digital twin, there has not been much progress for now. I have been so far very occupied with all the tasks that I mentioned above and also having a challenge to block long periods of time to really start firming out the design and how to approach the delivery of such a project without strong coding know-how. Just 2 hours here and there did not move the needle. I am thinking a good uninterrupted 5-days full time would be needed to give me a first start and enough momentum but I have not found yet that luxury even if I am my own boss... 

The onsite hands-on training 

I recently attended an AI-driven development training workshop intended for software engineers and it was actually a huge positive surprise. The reason why I attended was actually because the trainer was a friend of mine and he was interested in getting my feedback even if I was not a software engineer. I was a bit skeptical about attending, as I thought that I would lack the necessary hands-on skills to follow the workshop. 

But it turned out that it was almost a perfect workshop for me - of course I was not mastering the detailed syntax and was not able to review the AI code generated in detail. But experiencing for real on my laptop how AI can be used by software engineers in different situations really gave concrete substance to the knowledge I had gathered through the different means cited above. 

A super valuable training which brought me the following thought: it can be really worthwhile to attend trainings which are not necessarily targeted at your profile but related to the skill you want to develop. Typically this one day AI-driven development training for software engineers has probably been much better for me to attend and reflect on that a one-day AI for CIOs typical training. 

As a takeaway of my four months, I would rate 7 out of 10 my improvement on my hard skills. For me, improving my SHINE was less about finding the perfect method, and more about combining small, intentional actions that fit my reality, even though I would have liked to block a more significant time for my deep dive project - what I will aim at in the coming quarter..

Regularly watching specialised videos, having intentional one to one discussions, building yourself some small useful tools with AI to make your professional life easier, making time to attend a deep dive (good) training which may be addressed to different profiles than yours. These are approaches I do recommend and which can be implemented even with a busy professional career. 

🙏 I’d Love to Hear From You

What is the approach that you find most effective to improve your SHINE?

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✨ May the SHINE be with you!

From Geek to Star by Khang | The Way Forward