To ask your advice on moving into a tech career?

[RainbowChameleon]

I am pulling my finger out and starting to think seriously about switching roles. Am I bonkers to consider tech? Late 20s, I have no previous tech experience. Did a tiny bit of social media posting/Web design for a company I used to work at but was all very basic. I have no coding knowledge. I am competent and confident in using a computer. I have a degree and MA in social sciences. I currently work in an unrelated sector which I'm not passionate about.

Why am I attracted to it? It's something different that I would never consider but I'm being open-minded and not limiting my options. I don't particularly want to go back to uni and there seems to be lots of courses in this field that don't require uni. The earning potential and tech seems pretty future proof.

I've just been reading up on old threads, about girls code first and sky get into tech. Can anyone of you share your stories/experiences/advice? Thank you.

It might be worth trying to do it within the organisation you are currently in, or looking at non-coding roles - SM content writer?
You are unlikely to get a coding role without coding ability and experience but there are lots of roles for which you have transferable skills. Look at roles in IT and see where you might find a good match. There are roles like project management, business analysis, web design and content, UIX testing etc ...

You could look at a conversion MA. I don't rate these particularly.

I wouldn't recommend a course that costs £££ as you won't have work experience.

As you are only in your 20s, go for it.

I work in IT, moved into that field in my mid 20s. No IT experience at all.

I moved into a trainee role, it became clear quite early on I'm a shit techie, but I can talk a good game and I'm good with customers. 20 years later I'm an IT Service Delivery Manager for an IT managed service provider and I love my job.

You could either start at the entry point, on the support desk as a first line support engineer and take it from there. You could join an IT department in any sector and work out what interests you and move on within the company. Most companies will pay for training courses and always want to push their 1st line support guys into more technical roles

You can do a 12 week bootcamp and get a job as a junior developer. It's pretty straightforward and there are loads and loads of jobs. Try some free courses on CodeAcademy and FreeCodeCamp beforehand to see how you find it.

There are LOADS of Women in Technology programmes out there- particularly in banking and finance, that will provide training. Some will take people with 0 skills, some require STEM degree or some basic knowledge (stuff you can find online).

Secondly think about alternative roles in technology. You don’t actually have to be a software engineer- if you really want to learn the technical skill and go down this path, then use one of the many training programmes but if you’re not hell bent on doing the programming, there are alternatives.

I have a history degree and at 28 I am a program/project manager of an artificial intelligence project in a FinTech firm. If you had told graduate me that this is what I would be doing in 6-7 years time I would have laughed at you but I LOVE my job.

My day to day essentially involves spending time with the system users to understand their requirements of the tech, see opportunities where AI could go even further and get their opinions on these ideas. I then feedback to the technical team and we write out the technical requirements together and I organise the scheduling/timing for the builds, gain user feedback on build elements and run user testing and system releases. I also spend a lot of time in conversations about data quality, long term plans, budgets, priorities etc. Every day is different and I LOVE my job, love learning about the new technology.

As a career path, I spent 2 years arsing around not knowing what to do post uni (got a 2.2 so no grad schemes), took up contracting for other bank in a data entry role, moved to better bank in similar role for more money, ended up in operational role, got involved in some system enhancements as a user and then made the jump to join the projects team.

Promoted several times and looking for the next one. Plenty of time for learning, training, career opportunities, good company culture, decent work life balance as I am back office (except during a major release when I might work crazy hours but this is maybe once a year).

Can’t recommend it enough if you think the work is interesting (some people have told me they would die of boredom in my role!)

I work in Tech and it is full of people who have different backgrounds, have retrained etc. It's brilliant. The barriers are not that high IMO. I came in as a delivery manager, others came in as a product manager, PMO, or business analysts - background ranging from events management, education, and retail. It's all competency based so it's all about who you are rather than your background. There are lots of opportunities to retain once you are here so if I was into design or software development or testing I could have moved around. I also trained as a scrum master on the job which has been really interesting.

I say go for it and good luck to you!

Salary wise a lot of people started here in the 40s, moving up to 50-60k for more senior roles. The salary is amazing. Infosec is the highest paid area if that interests you. Scrum master around 40-50k and Agile coaches 50-60k. UX looks super exciting too. All of these are growing areas so you want to get on the train now. As I said a lot of us move around and try different things once we are in to see what feels right.

Thanks everyone. What on earth is a scrum master?!

Go for it!

DH is in tech. He's always loved IT related stuff but became a teacher for various reasons. He did a conversion masters. He's now very senior in his organisation.

You need to love problem solving and continuous learning.

DH is now massage involved in the recruitment of his team and they prefer people who enjoy coding in their spare time, or who think up tech based thought problems etc. They've had big success employing people who have done "boot camp" coding courses, 3 months or so of m-f 9-5 learning to code and he really rates them for teaching good solid foundations of coding and development.

You could look at a conversion MA. I don't rate these particularly.

Agree, but instead MSc conversions are a very good route. I've done this and several colleagues have too but they are very technical from the off. Many people had no previous technical experience on my course and there is usually an intensive coding course at the beginning that you need to pass to progress further (we did java). They take two years.

Alternatively, especially given a degree in social sciences, have you thought about being in UX and being a user researcher? There is a lot of UX around at the moment. It's interesting work and if I wasn't in the tech role I'm in now, I'd do this.

Haha definitely google a scrum master. You can learn all the basics on a three day coach but if your skillset matches it then I could be a great path for you. It's basically working full time with software development teams and coaching them to be the best they can be. Usually a non-technical role but a good scrum master can help the team push the boundaries and achieve great things.

Three day course*

@aunthe thanks for that suggestion, do you know more about what it involves?

So I went into tech but off the back of a computer science degree so knew how to code going into it.

You don't necessarily have to be a coder to get into tech. There plenty of people in Product Owner roles which means they are the ones who manage the requirements of the application and communicate this with the coders. Most POs I know have never coded in their life.

If you want to learn to code there's plenty of courses online. A classic and fairly popular programming language is Java, although it's quite an old one but theres still loads of Java jobs out there. There's also plenty of other more modern languages that have a spotlight on them atm, for example Go and Kotlin. If you want to focus on website development though you'll need to learn JavaScript and web frameworks - React is a popular one nowadays.

Every company I've ever worked at has had a scheme to get women from non tech backgrounds employed into tech in their company, although my current company has paused this because of the pandemic, but there must be others out there.

You can absolutely do it if you set your mind to it. It's normally quite a flexible, well paid career as well with loads of positions out there.

I always wonder why there aren't more women doing it, the flexibility means it would be great for having a child for example. I've worked in both high pressure tech roles in big firms to
more relaxed smaller firms (and I get so annoyed when I see DHs on here not pulling their weight because of work and they're in tech! I understand not all coding roles are flexible but by definition of the job you have a requirement to code by a deadline so typically no one gives a shit if you code it between the hours 9-5pm or 4-12am)
Good luck!

Have you considered graduate programs - I got in as a graduate for a non-technical stream and there were a few people in my scheme who were career changers (late 20’s / early 30’s).

Think in two broad streams :

• Becoming a programmer (coding). Boot camps the most efficient way (if you find a good one that works closely with employers. Be careful, there are a lot of duds that take your money). Before you do this I suggest doing some free online courses (The Odin project and the university of Helsinki are good). See if you like it. Not everyone is suited to the sort of rigid logic that it requires.

• Non-technical (program management, business analyst, product owner). If you’ve got any sort of other work or project management experience you apply for entry level roles in these. Some qualifications (like PRINCE 2) might help but this isn’t my area of expertise.

Also as PP have mentioned there are lots of programs for women. And the government gives free lessons as well.

I moved into IT many moons ago in my late 20s. Haven’t looked back apart from when there were mass redundancies in my organisation but thankfully I wasn’t one of them. I’d recommend looking into cyber security as there is a huge demand for people in that sector. You don’t have to necessarily know the intricate technical stuff but you can work in that field (Analyst, Product Owner, Project Manager, Scrum Master etc) and it helps to know the lingo. Good luck!

Also in the interests of being realistic - some things to bear in mind

1. Need for self learning Unlike accounting or medicine technology is so vast. And only as ‘future proof’ as you have time for learning.

An MSc conversion teaches you the basics of theory (with some practice). A boot camp teaches you the minimum necessary to be useful in a practical environment. But neither will complete your education. You have to spend lots of time coding, figuring out what you don’t know and then going off and learning it. Nobody will give you a syllabus and say ‘here - study this, you’re now a programmer’. If you’re not comfortable with this somewhat haphazard way of learning, or of self direction it will be very difficult. Because every thing you search leads down a rabbit hole 😂

2. Patience Learning to program takes intuition. You will be stuck a lot of times, spend hours even days trying to figure it out and then find the answer in a glorious moment that in hindsight was obvious . This is where most people fall down IMO. They don’t have the patience to keep going. Or to go through several bitty parts of a system to find a small error. Thinking through all possibilities and exploring them one by one

Reddit’s r/learnprogramming has lots of excellent advice.

Good luck and may we meet by our keyboards some day xx
*p.s I’m selfish I want more female devs so that somebody in my team appreciates my clothes UwU

@Sarjest

I moved into IT many moons ago in my late 20s. Haven’t looked back apart from when there were mass redundancies in my organisation but thankfully I wasn’t one of them. I’d recommend looking into cyber security as there is a huge demand for people in that sector. You don’t have to necessarily know the intricate technical stuff but you can work in that field (Analyst, Product Owner, Project Manager, Scrum Master etc) and it helps to know the lingo. Good luck!

That’s another point to bear in mind. Tech is cyclical. Several years ago there was a wave of offshoring and many devs were made redundant. All of that work is now coming back but with WFH who knows?

The key is to not be an individual contributor. Once you’re senior end start to design software and define technical policy is when you become the most valuable.

This is also where boot camp graduates fall down as they aren’t often taught the ‘why’, only the ‘how’. But the smart ones make up for the knowledge gaps.

Find a mentor so that you focus on learning the correct things(like how computers and programs work) and don’t be too fixated on the wrong things (like learning every framework in one programming language)

I do marketing for tech companies. It's a great environment, fast paced, innovative and amazing salary.

Which area are you thinking about? If marketing of interest I can suggest courses but you'd need to take an entry marketing role without any experience.

I did a 12 week coding boot camp when I was 27. I didn't really know much before that, just a little bit of HTML and CSS.

Got a junior developer role at a start up, and then moved to a medium-sized company 18 months later. I'll be a senior software engineer in the next year or so, if all goes well!

Nobody cares about degrees at my company. Computer Science might be useful if you're going into machine learning.

As PPs have pointed out, you don't have to be a software engineer to go into tech. You could be a data scientist, product manager, product owner, content designer, product designer, user researcher, etc.

The course was expensive, but I pretty much earned the money back within three months by sticking around to be a teaching assistant for th next cohort.

I currently earn four times the salary I was on before doing the course! The earning potential is great.

There's a good post on the Feminism: Chat board
Women returners in tech
that you might find really interesting, OP.

I moved into IT from a finance background (same company). I'm not a techy though - I am a
More functional role so work with the business to identify what they need the techs to build!

Good advice here. There are plenty of roles in IT and tech which do not require coding or a STEM degree. You do need to be familiar with the technology but you don't need to be the expert, that's a different track. Plenty of roles in IT and tech boil down to working with the technical experts to manage and improve workflow. You can learn this by experience.

ITIL is the classic service delivery framework and specifies a range of roles/areas of accountability. You can Google it and see the list.

In my place we cover all those 12-15 roles .. between 5 people. Previous employers had 1 team of 5-30 for each role!!

If you want to do something technical i would recommend going into data science rather than programming... Data science is booming and it's brand new so you can get good paying jobs with just education and no or limited experience... Programming is all getting offshored and salaries have been trending down for a while. Lots of conversion msc data science programs out there.

Other people already mentioned all the less technical roles. Project manager, business analyst, product owner, service delivery, etc.

I just like data personally better than any other technical area. It's more interesting and it's easier to learn, doesn't change as often, there is less to keep up with. It's also much closer to the business (hard to explain but working in an IT role where you are interacting with business analysts or PMs or some other translator instead of the users actually using the product is very difficult and leads to so many issues).

You can also go data visualization route. Look at Tableau. Do a course on it, self study, get their certificate (should only be like 250 USD i think), publish some dashboards on Tableau public and get a job as a Tableau developer building dashboards. Probably get 60-70k salary or 400-550 a day contract roles.