7 Must have skills to succeed as LabVIEW Developer

I had the opportunity to interview lot of candidates who wanted to start a career in LabVIEW or NI Technologies. So these are the most important 7.

1. Engineering concepts know-how: The most primary fundamental requirement is a candidate must know how engineering concepts really works. in this context, for example electric circuits signals and systems communication systems and so on. Without having solid engineering concepts even if you want to work as LabVIEW Developer, it’s not going to work.
2. Instrumentation and embedded systems: You need to understand the fundamentals of instrumentation and embedded systems. As you know NI tools and LabVIEW is basically used for the system design to develop large automated systems to acquire, monitor, control, and manage the data.
3. NI Hardwares: You need to have experience with different NI hardwares available
4. Software Engineering: Most LabVIEW users are not from software engineering background or the computer science. They are from mostly from mechatronics, electronics, electrical engineering or even pure science background like physics. Some people believe that LabVIEW does not require too much of a software engineering. For smaller projects it holds true but if you are developing very reliable large application, you need to understand software engineering concepts and the next three is the continuation of that you need to follow.
5. NI recommended guidelines and code reviews: NI recommended guidelines and code reviews are very important while writing a LabVIEW code. You are going to invest your time and energy on developing the code that can be reused again and again and benefit your entire application development experience
6. NI LabVIEW Certification: I stress very much on this. Once you understand all the previous steps, you need to have the certification from National Instruments. National Instruments has got four different certifications available to prove your expertise on using LabVIEW. It gives you pure competitive advantage in the industry and peers.
7. Community: and finally without the community and getting into the events and community and nobody will know that you have all these skills. So become part of the community. Events like NI days, NIWeek, CLD Summit, CLA Summit, and LabVIEW user group meetings will help you to meet the experts. This will provide you more exposure and help improve your LabVIEW Skills.

So, just knowing LabVIEW and writing small code I believe is not good enough you need to invest your time on building all these skills.

First three skills can be developed at work or at your university but for next seven, we at Grafitects can help you out. We provide world class trainings, code reviews, and CLD & CLA Preparations customized to meet the requirements to succeed as LabVIEW Developers. After the trainings, you will be comfortable developing medium to large scale applications.

You can learn about NI recommended guidelines, develop medium level applications and prepare for CLD Exam. Download the free chapter of CLD Manual.

We are also the coordinators for one of the largest LabVIEW community in the world, Indian LabVIEW users group (IndLUG). LabVIEW communities are great way to learn and network. If you are from India please join the group.

You can also watch the video of this post here.