You've got a lot of answers here, and quite a few of them overlap what I'd suggest. You're not going to be able to pursue them all. Personally, I tend to learn

You've got a lot of answers here, and quite a few of them overlap what I'd suggest. You're not going to be able to pursue them all. Personally, I tend to learn things that are relevant to my job as I'm doing it. Aside from technical things, that also means learning the domain you are working in if it's sufficiently interesting. For example, I worked in healthcare for a while, so I learned to read the HL7 protocol and the most important parts of the NHS data dictionary. Then I worked for an environmental charity, so I learned about thermodynamics and government policy making. If you learn the domain, then you will make more good decisions when you design your program. You will also be in a better position to be trusted to make those decisions yourself. For technical stuff, I like to spend more time and go deeper on things that I think are fundamental, things that I think will be useful in the future, and things that I have fun with. I don't like to spend time on things that I find yucky, that I intend to avoid using again, or that I think are based on unsound fundamentals. Sometimes I make wrong decisions in either direction. Either spending too much time learning something esoteric irrelevant in the long term, or spinning my wheels because I've skimmed over something without understanding it properly. I don't know a way to avoid this. A few specific things I think are good quick wins for a starting software engineer: * Version control. * Known what a dictionary/hashmap is for and how to use it. * Set logic (intersection, union, difference, xor), and how to do it in your favourite programming language. * Automation (bash or Powershell + make + SSH). * SQL + indexes (common in lots of computer programs, and SQLite fits nicely into the automation chain above). * Regex, how to use it in your text editor / IDE of choice, and how to use it on the command line. https://www.regular-expressions.info/