Making your decision

After completing self assessments of your current situation and goals you should have a fairly good idea of what you’re looking to achieve with your new career.

The next step is to look into the various roles that are available at startups and tech companies. As you go through them, ask yourself whether each role:

• Sparks an interest in you
• Is realistically achievable (if you hate mathematics and don’t have a STEM degree then data science probably isn’t going to be the field for you)
• Lines up with your personal career goals

We have guides that cover popular tech roles in detail, explaining the type of work they do, the personalities they are suited to and so on, so I won’t go through them all again here.

If you are interested in non-technical roles then make sure to explore the less well-known options.

Most of you probably know that technolimaogy companies have engineering, marketing and customer support positions, but there are also roles across departments like operations (ops), business development (BizDev), corporate strategy (CorpStrat), corporate development (CorpDev) and Business Operations (BizOps). Many of these roles are highly compensated, and particularly well-suited to people with previous experience in sectors like law, consulting or finance.

After researching the roles you should be able to come up with a shortlist of those that interest you.

Take some time to study each of these roles in even more detail. Look on Youtube and see if you can find any “ day in the life ” type videos – can you see yourself doing the work for the next few years?

Check communities like Reddit or Twitter to see if people are discussing any consistent issues or complaints with the role that you may not have considered. Take note of anything useful you find.

Keep narrowing down your shortlist, and when you’re ready, choose the path you intend to embark on.