How does a CS undergrad improve career prospects in the future?

Ever since I began my professional life (Novell IDC, Bangalore), I have pondered over this question and am still in the process of building even a fairly basic answer. I am in no way fully qualified to answer this in a comprehensive manner. However, having completed 6 months, there are a few things I can share: During college, I am sure you must have developed an interest in some topic apart from the usual subjects, and would have done something in that direction. Don't leave that. Continue your work in it. It will help you learn new things and skills in an unbounded way, since you are doing it for yourself. Whenever you get lost or have doubts, ask someone who may know them or just go to stackoverflow. More importantly, search, discuss and read whatever you find. Make notes of the important stuff. Will be very useful in the future and will make you adept at coming up with solutions and places to search for them quickly. Once you start working, you will come to know what you will be working on - the technology, the languages, the scope etc. From one of the technologies/frameworks/languages being used in your proect, pick up something you don't know and something you know will be useful to you in your work (best to discuss this with your manager). Learn that in a set time frame, and choose a new topic again. It will improve your knowledge and skills in your domain, which is obviously very important. https://www.coursera.org/ - so many courses and subjects to choose from being taught by some of the best scholars in their fields. Just pick up something you find interesting/know will be useful. Several certification courses are provided to professionals for improving skills in a specific topic. Your manager should be able to give you more details on it, but check what might be useful to you. Taking up and learning through such courses can be of great help for increasing your knowledge. Learn the languages used most commonly for writing the core of majority software(if you have not done so already) - C, C++, Java, C# (I'm not including web development languages, since my expertise in that field is low). Of course you will not use all at the same time, but knowing atleast 2-3 will make it easier to learn the others if you have to. It will also help you solve problems quickly. (This is not a very useful point since I'm sure you would know this. Just mentioned it though). Try to keep an ongoing learning of how computers work - the OS, Internet etc. These are very broad fields, and you can be sure you always have something to learn. Broadening your knowledge in these will help you at the most unexpected moments, and also improves your ability to understand applications and software in a way that I cannot really explain. Regarding coding, it all depends on your work profile. However, as long as you are a developer, you will do some coding for sure. How much, depends on the project your are working on, how critical it is and how your manager assigns you work. Rest assured, coding is important as long as you are a developer and please, please don't lose touch with it. Do something to code everyday, if only to make sure you don't forget the basics. I have done negligible algorithmic coding (competitive programming for me is algorithmic coding), since I was never really interested in it anyway. After starting work, I realised what we code is not so much of the pure algorithmic coding. Its much different, it involves taking care of several components, making sure they work together properly and that its correct. Its something you will quickly understand when you write your first pieces of code. I am not really interested in higher studies (atleast for the moment). I want to learn new technologies, concepts and become very good at whatever I learn. By virtue of that, this answer is surely incomplete but it also means I have a lot to learn, which is good!

Ask any person who is experienced for 7 years and above in the IT field. Most of them have lost touch with technology. They learn a lot in other fronts like management, analysis, responding to proposals, managing deadlines and schedules and number of other process aspects. At a point of time, everyone feels frustrated that they have lost their core strength - technology hands-on. As you progress make sure you don't make the mistake.