Find a path, then focus on it

Why is it important to choose a career path this early in the process? Because picking a specific career path allows you to put your full, focused attention on it.

This focused approach prevents you from getting distracted and spending your limited time learning about topics that won’t help you move towards your career goals. Knowing a small amount about a wide range of unrelated tech subjects is less useful than building up specialized knowledge for your chosen role.

Take a moment to think about this from the perspective of a future recruiter you could be interviewing with. What will they be looking to look for in a candidate? Would they prefer to hire someone who lacks direction and says “I’ll take any job available”, or someone who has shown they have taken the initiative to focus their learning around a specific, focused career goal?

You want to put yourself in the best position for future success, and you will do that by picking, then following, a path.

But how exactly do you do that?

Choosing your Path

Deciding on a future tech career is a personal decision, based on your interests, skills, experience, education, and life goals. You can help the process by taking some time to go through self-evaluation and goal setting exercises, which will help map out your preferences. You can then refer to this information when it’s time to make your decision.

Self-evaluation

Here are some self-evaluation questions to ask yourself:

• What are my strengths and weaknesses?
  • Do you have strict attention to detail? Can you work independently for extended periods of time or do you need direction?
• What skills do I already possess?
  • Are you a whiz at manipulating data in Excel or Tableau? Great working with clients or managing projects?
• What relevant experience do I have?
  • How can your professional experience be useful in a tech career? For example, if you have experience dealing with clients then this could help in customer success roles, or if you’ve worked as a strategy consultant you’d be well suited for corporate strategy roles
• What is my educational background?
  • Do you have a degree or other education that could be relevant to any tech roles? Example: a degree in finance will be helpful if you want to work in corporate development
• What are my key personality traits?
  • Are you an outgoing people-person or do you prefer to work solo? Do you like working with data? Are you organized and detail-oriented? Do you enjoy leading or working within a team?
• Can I leverage any existing networks?
  • Do you have any connections (in “real life” or on places like LinkedIn or Twitter) who could potentially help you with your career change?

Remember – the self evaluation process is designed to give you a picture of your current situation to help with the career choice process. But your current situation doesn’t have to determine your future. With time and effort you can build up skills in any areas that are currently lacking.

Your career goals

After looking at your current situation it’s time to define the goals that you hope to achieve from changing careers to tech.

What are your goals for:

• The job
  • Are you happy to continue in a relatively similar role to what you’re doing now (for eg. from consulting to corporate strategy), or are you looking to change over to a completely new field (from consulting to UX design)?
• Work environment
  • Would you rather work at a high-growth early-stage startup or a more established company? High-growth often comes with an expectation of longer working hours. And some roles may only be available in larger companies (BizDev, CorpDev, BizOps etc). If you have trouble answering this question then check out my guide that outlines startup company stages.
  • Would you prefer to work in a smaller company with less financial resources but more career flexibility/freedom, or an established company with well-defined career paths and market-leading salaries?
  • Would you prefer a career where the day-to-day work is more social or solitary?
• Specialist or Generalist
  • Would you prefer to have a well-defined role, or be a generalist who gets to “do a bit of everything”?
• Money
  • Do you have firm requirements for how much you’ll need to earn? Can you afford to take a lower paying role to gain experience? Are you interested in maximizing your income or taking the gamble of a lower salary with more equity/stock options?
• Work/Life balance
  • Are you happy to travel for work? Do you thrive in high speed, high stress environments? Is it important for you to be home every evening to have dinner with your family?
• Career progression
  • Do you need a well mapped structure of career progression? Are you aiming to reach management/Director/VP/Executive level positions within a certain timeframe?
• Prestige / status
  • Is it important for you to work for a “brand” – a company that people have heard of? Do you want to work in a “cool” role?
• Motivation to learn
  • Are you keen to continually work to increase your knowledge? Would you prefer a role that requires less ongoing training and self-directed education?

If you find you have career goals that don’t quite match up with your current situation then that’s fine. It just means that there are areas you’ll need to work on to build up the necessary knowledge and/or experience.