(Photo Credit @madebyjens)
April 29, 2022
Job Search Strategy, Pivoting into Tech
(Photo Credit @aaronburden)
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This final post in the ‘Pivoting into Tech’ series focuses on learning. One of the hardest parts of a career change is to recognize that you will need to learn new things and that it’s going to feel uncomfortable. Today we’ll discuss how to design a self-paced learning curriculum so you will gain confidence in your tech knowledge.
Become comfortable with being uncomfortable
I have clients seeking to pivot into tech because they are bored with their current role, which can be a great motivator to jumpstart your learning process. However, while they are excited to learn more about tech, it feels a bit strange to not be the expert anymore. This is normal and totally ok!
This is the part where a lot of career changers get stuck - as they struggle with how to show prior competence and demonstrate transferable skills while also not posing as an expert in areas where they are still learning.
What helps in tech is that many companies are often looking for candidates who strike a balance between experience and potential. And in order to assess potential, interviewers often ask hypothetical or scenario-based questions that don’t have a specific answer. Instead, they are assessing your overall thought process - ie how you learn and apply those learnings!
Identify 3 skills to develop and 3 concepts to learn
As a career changer, you likely don’t know what you don’t know - so how do you figure out what skills/concepts you need to learn? There are a few ways to identify these skills.
Use what you learned from your connections to write out 3 key topics or skills you’ll need to develop or refine.
Select 3-4 job postings for roles that you are interested in and scan them to see what concepts they discuss, skills they request and/or certifications they require. You can also try using tools like JobScan to help highlight missing skills in your resume.
Again, the law of threes appears here so you don’t get overwhelmed and try to learn *everything* about tech. No one knows everything about tech (well, except maybe Peter Norvig) so don’t feel you have to become an expert overnight.
Find the resources to help you learn
There are a plethora of online courses these days that will cover tech topics like ‘What is cloud computing?’ or ‘What is cryptocurrency?’ as well as teach you how to use SQL or Tableau, often in 2-3 hour courses. And many of these resources are free or low-cost.
You can check out sites like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Udemy, and Code Academy and search for the topic or skill you need.
This is also helpful if you’re not sure what area of tech you want to focus on. Review some of these tech topics to help you figure out whether your new tech focus is climate tech or fintech (as knowing your tech niche will be important once you get to resume re-development and company selection).
Add all of this learning to your resume!
It’s important to add all of these courses, certifications, etc to your resume to visually demonstrate your growing tech domain expertise.
There are many ways to incorporate all that you have learned into your resume, depending on the format & the overall story you are trying to tell. And remember, you don’t need to be an expert to put a new skill on your resume! Work with a tech career coach to help you map this out - there’s no need to do this alone.
Likely, you’ll also end up using this information during your future interviews to demonstrate knowledge - so recognize its value in the whole tech career pivot process.
Remember, everyone who pivots into a new career needs to learn about their new target industry. Even with a strong tech job market, you need to show you know something about tech or recruiters will likely pass on your candidacy. And honestly, it’s a great sign when a candidate has invested the time and effort to show a growing area of tech domain expertise. It gives confidence that this isn’t just a passing interest, but instead a thoughtful career change.
