Career Change: Lucrative Non-Coding Jobs in Tech

[justanotherW]

I am currently looking to change careers and am likely to go back to studying coding, which I enjoy (I used to learn to various types of code some years ago but stopped due to other commitments).

However, when browsing MN I noticed several threads mentioned non-coding jobs under the broad banner of 'Tech' as being well-paid and easier to get into alternatives. I would appreciate hearing from anyone about these alternative career options and what viable career paths there are into these positions.

• Can anyone with experience/familiarity of such roles provide some ideas about how to get these non-coding positions from the perspective of a career changer?
• What sort of skillsets and experience are required or favoured?
• How can someone find about these sorts of roles and get a feel for the type of work they entail?
• Are any of these positions suited to WFH in the long-term (if not when first starting out)?

Some posts I read implied that coding is an unrequired skill for these jobs but also that many people move into these positions from a coding background. This makes me wonder whether these alternatives are actually easier to get into, or the best path is via coding.

FWIW my background is STEM PhD and my current niche career is centred around analytical ability but not in terms of numerical data or data manipulation.

Apologies if a dedicated thread has been posted before but I did not have much luck when searching.

what do you mean lucrative? What is your salary target? Here are some ideas:

1. Business analyst - BCS (British computing society) do a modular diploma that you can do while u work. Involves talking to stakeholders (internal and external) and gathering requirements for the tech teams to implement. Eg - if your tech team is developing an internal website to display information on potential clients to the sales team - the. The business analyst (BA), would talk to the sales team and ask what info is important to them which must be displayed on this website, how confidential is the info (do extra security precautions/testing need to be done)? When do they need this website by?

2. Scrum master - in a tech team this person helps make sure people don’t have blockers in their work. They help the team reflect on what they did in the last sprint (last 2 weeks) and write down action points for people to work on during the next 2 weeks. Follows Agile philosophy. This can be done without a scrum qualification (you go on an expensive course that companies would often pay for) and can be done by a coder or non-coder. If you have project or people management experience it may be relevant.

3. Product Owner/Manager - I know 2 people who moved into this - they currently earn about 100k after about 5 years (but work at start ups where they put in a lot of hours). They say it just needs logical thinking, prioritisation, negotiation. Lots of people skills. They plan a roadmap for a product (in tech this could be a feature or functionality of a website/app - eg integration of a website with 3rd party or the automated alerting functionality of an app). They represent the voice of the customer to the coders - to make sure that what is being built is what internal or external customers would want. They decide which features to prioritise. BAs could move into this role. Again people/project management skills are helpful. Domain expertise helps - eg if you have used laboratory software (during your prev career) you would know what things are annoying and can more easily put into context the requirements the BAs have gathered - for a tech team that develops lab software.

the roles are possible wfh, but they tend to be more people-focused, so I guess that long-term companies may prefer some in-person time.

Excellent answer from Namenic there.

What Namenic said. I’ve taken a career change from a management role elsewhere into a scrum master role as above (ish, local interpretation varies). I don’t think it’s incredibly interesting and product management seems more attractive from my point of view. Seen lots of civil service work from home jobs advertised in this area, and I have worked from home since I started this. DM me if interested.

A good Business Analyst is worth their weight in gold. Unfortunately really good ones are scarce.

If you are the Scrum Master all the developers will hate you😉

Haha! DH is both a scrum master and a developer. He seems to weirdly love/ be obsessed with Scrum. It’s not wildly lucrative but more lucrative than when he was just the developer without the scrum.

For the business analyst positions - just to clarify, the people I know do the exams while they are employed as business analysts - they did not need to have completed it for their first job.

Thank you everyone, especially @Namenic for your very detailed post. This is all really helpful information, especially about the qualifications.

I appreciate that 'lucrative' will vary from person to person - for me I'd hope to be on around £60k within a couple of years, towards 6 figures within 5-7 years (though am certainly willing to be told if that's unrealistic).

@Grissini50 That's interesting that your DH does both. Is that within the same team? How is his time/attention split between the two?

Grayce is a consultancy company that supplies business analysts to some big firms but gives them training as well I think. It says they have a grad programme - but you can ask whether it would be suitable for career changers: www.grayce.co.uk/development-programmes/#changeprog

I think the non coding jobs are in the Change+ stream. Otherwise - maybe look at some start-ups - especially if there are any in your science area? Many companies looking to apply AI to different fields - some more successfully than others I guess!

To earn 100k I think you would need to look at some sort of management position - probably product manager or senior project manager or Delivery manager. But you could get there by a variety of routes - do a search for the job descriptions. Eg start as BA, then move into scrum master then product owner then project manager. Or go directly to product owner in a small firm then product manager. Also consider Data Analyst and data science (if you are comfortable with what a standard deviation is, that’s probably enough to get started in at least some jobs).

Many companies are starting to want coders and non coders to work at least hybrid (this can vary from 10% in office to 50%). But at a salary of 100k, there would be more fully remote coding jobs than non-coding.

In the bit of tech I work in, all coding work is outsourced to India where their day rate is v v low. So I'm not sure if coding is particularly lucrative unless you manage to get into a niche area

The money is in the business analyst/ project manager type roles but you do have to be fairly senior and capable of managing large teams before hitting 6 figures.

He scrums for his team and a couple of others. Time split is a bone of contention as he complains about not having enough time for the scrum master part. Currently I think he’s officially allowed 10% of his time but it takes about 50% in reality. He is looking for a FT scrum role. Well, in theory. He’s not very driven so that will take about 5 years. Salary wise that would be realistic for scrum masters. Especially ones who are slightly more driven…

He was looking at one that was £80k for FT scrum master the other day which was local to us; you can earn more in the City. And they weren’t looking for years of experience. He’s on a bit less at the moment.

Also to add, he is fully remote since Covid happened. No pressure to go back in.

Ha! My lead dev says he never saw the point of a BA til he worked with me.

Devs always underestimate the value of BAs because they assume BAs just ask the users what they want and write it down.

Good BAs help the users understand and articulate what they really want, which often isn't what they thought they wanted (eg "I want this report emailed to me every morning" could turn out to be "I want an early warning when customer trends are changing"), sit down with the Developers to work out what's possible, present that back to the users in a way they'll connect with, and basically broker agreement between the users and the devs about what will get built, not just once but again and again as the project evolves. You don't have to necessarily write it all down in a Big Requirements Document ( I know the B in BRD doesn't really stand for big :)) ), but you do need a way of capturing that shared expectation that works for the team.

It's a weird job. You have to be arrogant enough to believe you can take in information about a job or a product you don't do and solve problems for people who work in/with it all the time, but humble enough to accept you are, at least at the start of a new project, wrong more often than you are right. And be able to share that wrongness in a way that makes it a helpful step towards rightness and without losing your own credibility. (IMO the root cause of analysis paralysis is BAs who are scared to be publicly wrong.)

Agile initially believed it didn't need BAs, but in reality it just subsumed what they do into the PO role.

This is all such helpful detail and advice. Thank you everyone for your replies