Finding your ideal tech career

Finding your ideal tech career

In my previous write up , I wrote about myself. This time, I want to write about you and how you can find your tech career and how you can push to start.

I will be writing about how you can find your perfect tech career with roles that require coding and others that require little to none. I am aware that fear is a great limitation as people tend to shy away from some tech roles. A colleague stated that "Although coding is the beauty of tech it shouldn’t be the entirety of it" and I totally agree with it.

To dive into it here are ways you can find the right field to get into;

  • Personal research
  • Join a tech forum or community
  • Seek professional guidance
  • Do short courses and find online materials

1. Personal research

I am a big fan of personal researching and doing your homework to know what works for you in the tech field. You can use your favorite search engine (Google, bing, safari)to find available and easy tech fields to get into. There are a million and one roles available and some are;

  • Web design
  • Network engineering
  • Ui ux designer
  • Technical writing
  • Software Development
  • Project Management

Personal researching is also understanding how to include your personal (non-tech) passion and knowledge into finding your desired tech career.

For instance; are you passionate about health? There's this really cool article i found on e-health that you should definetly check out.

Are you an artist? check out product designing and see how to put your creative mind to use.

Are you an organiser and love to manage events and projects? check out project management .

Honestly the list is endless because tech is broad. These are just some of the many ways that you can connect the dots. Find out how best you’ll fit into the tech world and what roles your inter personal skills will play in picking a tech interest.

2.Seek professional guidance.

If there’s one thing I know about the tech professionals and its community is that they are always willing help and willing to mentor upcoming tech enthusiasts. You simply have to be brave enough to ask for help and be willing to show that you're committed to learning . A simple email that states your name, what you’re looking into and why you need help is very suitable as it gives a clear indictation why you emailed the tech experts so that he/she knows what is needed of them.

e.g "Good day Sammy, my name is Tracy and i'm looking to learn about open source software, you seem pretty well learned in it. I was wondering if you could help me with some questions i have. Thank you".

See, simple, polite and straight to the point. Also, understand that not all of them will respond positively or at all but that shouldn’t stop you from continously putting yourself out there.

3. Short courses / online materials

Although people say that an educational background in coding or computer related studies is unnecessary, having the background and doing other additional courses is always beneficial because "no knowledge is ever wasted".

To find some online materials I would suggest you check udemy and coursera. There are many others, just search through your favourite search engine”

I recommend that you check out w3schools and freecodecamp to learn basic coding skills. I am an advocate for using money to gain knowlegde; if you have the money to attain a personal tutor, textbook and other materials, I suggest you totally go for it. Put all resources to use!

4. Join a tech community

There are a number of helpful communities that are tech related and solely tech based Some are https: shecodeafrica, codeclub etc.

I recommend "dev blogs" such as Hashnode and tealfeed as a community to join, In this space, developers write about their ongoing and finished projects and use the platform in educating other developers.

There are a lot to consider when picking a tech skill or moving to tech. As I stated earlier, tech is broad so my strong advice to anyone desirous of migrating to the field is simple and straighhtforward;

  • Just start: start from somewhere. You can't move if you don't start.
  • Document all the process: Write, go back and read and write again with more correct your previous errors. Rinse and repeat till you master it
  • Most importantly is to let passion be your primary drive. As much as it’s good money, it gets pretty overwhelming easily if your heart is not with it.*

I also want to put out that although tech is vast growing and all inclusive, you don’t have to get into the pressure of “learning how to code” or “You have to join tech”. Stick to your thing, everybody has different roles to play in impacting the world.

Additional reading materials

Hope you enjoyed this and you found it useful. If you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to pop me an email.