Landing Your First Job After CorrelationOne — Pt 2. Leveraging Your Past Experiences
More often than not, we had a very different life before we gained our very powerful tech skills. These are strengths to lean on when you’re ready to go out and find your new job. In this article, we’ll go over how to do this with a few examples.
Industry Targeted
Let’s say you came from a background in education before learning data and how to code. The edtech industry might be for you! Or even the traditional education company who might be hiring for a data / tech savvy role.
Whether it be hospitality, retail, banking, or fill in the blank, trying to land a role in an industry which you’ve already worked in, where you can apply your new skills, may be a hack or at least a good first step. You speak their language, you know their customers, and their culture. This is a huge advantage you’ll have over other applicants who might be interviewing for the same role.
Multi — Skilled
I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty good writer. I loved writing essays, poems, lyrics, and wondered how I could use this when I started to learn how to code. Technical Writer was my first foot in the door. Below are some examples of tech roles where you can utilized multiple skills which might be a good fit for you. Remember that with your data background, you can look industry wide, but you will have the most leverage targeting data companies in lieu of pure software companies for these roles.
Management -> Technical Product Management
Management -> Technical Project Management
Community Management-> Technical Community Manager
Account Management / Executive -> Technical Account Management
Sales -> Solutions Engineer
Sales (Spanish or Portuguese speaking) -> Solutions Engineer LATAM
Sales -> Sales Engineer
Sales (Spanish or Portuguese speaking) -> Sales Engineer LATAM
Customer Service -> Customer Success Engineer
Customer Service -> Support Engineer
Customer Service (Spanish or Portuguese speaking) -> Support Engineer LATAM
Customer Service (Spanish or Portuguese speaking) -> Customer Success Engineer LATAM
Teaching -> Developer Advocate
Writing -> Technical Writer
Design -> Data Visualization Specialist
Marketing -> Digital Marketing Analyst
Business Management -> Business Analyst
Product -> Product Data Scientist
Product -> Product Data Analyst
There are of course many more tech roles in which you may be able to apply your other skills to. If you find these roles on Linkedin or know of a role that I may have missed, please share in the comments so our community may benefit.
Multi-skilled + Industry Targeted
Using myself as an example, before tech I was a branch manager at a bank, I was also a teacher for a while, and as I said before, I also loved to write. My first full time dev role at a company encompassed all of these things. I targeted the fintech industry because I spoke their language since I worked in banking. I chose the role of Developer Advocate, because I had just became a full stack software engineer after my first bootcamp, and I had teaching and writing experience. It all came together, and I was able to connect with everyone who interviewed me from different departments, and apply all of my skills towards the main one, software development.
What about you? What industry do you feel like you can leverage? What non tech skills can you utilize to pair with your tech ones, in order to help you land your first tech role?
Keep us up to date with your progress at C1 in our slack or discourse!
