This a question that pops up in the minds of most people who take the technical route instead of the managerial route or business route after having spent some years of significance in IT. This reminds one of the snake and ladders game where you are playing your cards/dice well but are eaten up due to the monster snake on the path( existing commitments to projects or routine organisational activities). In other words you are simply not able to get time to do the things that you wanted or enrich your skills to the climb the ladder and be an architect. Always bogged down by existing tasks and they do not seem to break free instead keep adding up letting you loose grip of things. Most often we have people saying I need to get into that role because it is more challenging as opposed to what I am doing current. Grass on the other side looks green and shiny each job has its own issues and challenges. The way to work towards a career in architecture would be join linkedin groups focused towards architecture. These days there are many right from data architecture,cloud architecture,enterprise architecture,software architecture,security architecture and so on. Just as you would have made a choice of on your electives in your college stick to one and then pursue it. Drop by blogs , research papers, developers networks, communities, forums and join people who breath the same air.

There are tons of free videos on youtube on this topic and more goggling will get you better focus on what suits you and your existing skill sets. Most often get asked the question in some workshops ,by participants that “I want to be an Architect but my current job has not enough provision to extend my capabilities. Here is some quick things that you could do on that front.

Create your destiny :

Hack1 : Volunteer for activities outside of your work that get recognized as architectural in nature. Fixing analyzing issues, adding a new skill to your tech skill , participating in code reviews, design reviews and demonstrating that you just not know your pieces well but do understand the whole pieces and how they stick together.

Hack2 : Participate in showcasing your skills such as presenting or giving a tech talk at an event internal or external. Get people to listen to you using such forums.

Hack3 : Follow them on twitter , linkedin stalk them 🙂 . Read what they have to say and how they evolved from developers to their current state. Many will have a of them have funny sides and you can find yourself in those positions as well.

Hack4 : Attend boot camps, developer summits workshops which give you an outside the arena view of things in your topic of interest. Gradually incrementally add little by little to that body of knowledge.

Hack5: Think you have already become one and act like one. Fake it till you make it. You may not have genuine goodness in you but they say initially fake it till it becomes a part of your being.

To be good at something you need to follow the famous principle along with the above hacks “To master something, you need to spend 10,000 hours doing it.” Ask yourself have you put in that effort or are you expecting things too early.

It is a different story that also goes around ” I am architect but do not know what do to”. That is the topic of a separate discussion.