Picking the RIGHT Tech Career

Hi guys, this is FK and today we are going to be discussing something that I get, a question I get a lot from people and that is what career path should I take in tech? What tech discipline should I do? What do my skills align to the most in tech, you know, people that want to get into the tech industry. Even yesterday I was still on a 30 minute call with someone asking me that just relocated to, um, I was relocated and person was also asking me what tech skills are best aligned to what he already knows. So I'm going to be using this video to answer that question for everybody. So that every time you have to ask me that you can just go back to this video for anybody that is asking you that question. You can always refer them to this video to understand how to choose a career path in tech, what tech path is going to be best for who, um, for the person that is asking the question. And, uh, I'm going to be coming from a very different angle, um, as something different from what every other person, uh, does when they are trying to figure out which tech path to take. And I hope that that is going to help anybody that is watching this video to pick the tech path that best aligns with their strengths. So in this video, we're going to be talking about choosing a career path in tech. So first we're going to be talking about the mentality you should have when you are trying to pick a career path in tech. And this is one thing that I feel a lot of people get wrong. Uh, people just hear things like, Oh, um, web development or PHP, Java, or shall I learn Java? Shall I do UI, UX? They say UI, UX is in demand now. Oh, machine learning is really coming up now. Shall I learn that? And that's one problem that I see. That's one, um, mistake that I see that a lot of people are making. They are going from the skills to the career, um, they are trying to just pick a pick, pick a skill they've had about the skill is popular and they're using it to, uh, they're guessing whether this is going to be the best thing for them to do because you know, they keep hearing it a lot. And one strategy I'm going to be giving you guys one simple strategy for you to easily detect the area of tech that you should pick as your career path. And before I even go into that, one thing I want to tell you is that every career path in tech is lucrative. Every career path you pick, whether you're a web developer, whether you're a UX, UI, UX person, whether you're a product person, every career path has jobs. Every career path is required. Every career path is in demand. So just pick something that aligns with you because at the end of the day, at the end of the day, you need to be doing something that you're happy about. You need to do something that you really want to wake up doing every single day. So that's one thing you should first have at the back of your mind. Don't try and say, Oh yeah, I think I'll do web development because web developers are in demand. I'm going to do UI, UX because UI, UX designers are in demand. No, no. Every single tech skill is in demand. People are still hiring people writing Zcobol or something. Yeah. I think in the meteorological industry, they are hiring COBOL programmers. So that's the first thing you should understand. Every single tech skill is in demand. Now, how do you pick a tech skill? How do you pick a tech skill? Like I said, the mistake most people make is that they go from the skill, they use the skill to determine the skill they are hearing about, the skill that they are seeing, the buzzwords that are seen being thrown around. They use it to determine what they want to learn. Oh, I want to learn PHP because I'm hearing PHP everywhere. I want to learn Java because I'm learning Java everywhere. I want to learn JavaScript because I'm hearing JavaScript everywhere. No, the best way to pick a career path in tech is to pick a problem you care about solving. Yes, you pick a problem that you care about solving because that is one thing that you'll be happy waking up to do every day because you care about it. You can relate to it. You want to solve that kind of problem. You want to function in that type of space. You want to be the person that makes sure that things don't go wrong in that particular aspect of tech. And that's why you chose it, because you care about it, because you care. And once you go from that angle, when you pick your career path from the angle of something you care about, you're not going to ever want to give it up. Because like I said, you care about it. You love doing it. And the skill is just the skill when you hear things like Java, PHP, Figma, or whatever. Those are just tools that will help you achieve that thing you care about. They're just tools. They're just equipments. They're just skills that will help you to be able to function in the career path that you care about. So don't go from the skill to the career path. Go from something you care about. Use that to choose your career path. And I'm going to be using that to determine, to group people into the type of career path that I feel is best for them based on what I care about. And we're going to be starting with this. Now if you, in the world of application development, if you care about apps looking good, you want to use apps that are sleek. You want to use apps that have lovely user interfaces that are easy on the eyes, that are beautiful, that are aesthetically pleasing. You want to do UI design. Yeah. That is basically what you care about. You care about good looking apps. So be a UI designer. Because with that, you can dictate. Because you care so much about apps looking good. Why not just be that person, that lady, that guy that designs the interfaces. And every time you are doing it, every time you're doing your job, we know that you're putting extra care and you're taking into account so much details. Why? Because you care. Because you care about things looking good. There are always jokes about back-end developers trying to build user interfaces. And these jokes, they show pictures of very wonky and very sad looking user interfaces that a back-end programmer will probably build. It's all based on the fact that back-end programmers don't really care about user interfaces. So that still brings the care component in. So if you're someone that cares about things looking good, interfaces looking good, be a UI designer. Now, if you care about having a pleasing experience while using an application, then you have to become a user experience engineer. I think that's what they call them, user experience engineer. That's a UX engineer. Most of the time, they combine UI and UX because they're kind of so close because you're trying to make things look good and you also want them to be functional. So you're balancing form over function. So if you care about users being able to use applications and get things done quickly, you don't want them to want to sign up and they're going to like 15 pages to sign up. You want them to click into a text box where they want to enter a phone number and the keypad that shows up shows numbers instead of just showing alphabets. That is user experience. You want them, when they want to enter their email, the keypad is already showing .com and the add symbol, that is user experience. You are putting buttons in the right places, you are making sure that you're placing buttons in a way that their thumb that they're using to press the phone or their mouse is not just going to click any button that you don't want to click. You are adding things like confirm dialogues when they want to take a very important action that is irreversible. You care about experience. You care about providing a pleasing experience to the user. So go become a UX engineer. And if you have the muscle, if you have the strength, you can combine the two and become a UI UX engineer. You care both about the form and you care about the function. So that's the second thing we're going to talk about. First, you care about apps looking good, go and be a UI designer. You care about apps being usable and having a pleasing UX experience, UX engineer. Now if you love creating stuff, you know, you like to play God and build stuff from scratch. I'm sure you guessed. Go become a programmer. Yeah. Go become a programmer because then from the foundation, you build stuff up. You build stuff from nothing. You learn how to code and you build any type of idea you have. You build out any type of idea. You like having ideas and building them out. Go become a programmer. And a lot of times, we have the front-end, we have the back-end, that's those that are building the user interface, our front-end engineers, those that are building the logic in the back, the back-end engineers. If you care about interfaces as a programmer, go and be a front-end engineer. If you care about what the user is seeing, what the user is using, what the user is interacting with, go and be a front-end engineer. But if you are obsessed with logic, you like operations, you like things being performant, you like everything that has to do with computing and stuff like that, go and do back-end. Yeah. Go and do back-end. Database and all that. Back-end is all about logic. It's all about processing data, moving data up and down, and writing business logic that runs applications. So if that is what you are nerdy for, go be a back-end engineer. That's under programming. That's under creating. So those are the first three, UI designer, UX designer, and being a programmer. So the next area of tech that we're going to be looking at is for people that care about apps not crashing. Now, if you like your apps to always run, you don't want your bank apps to be crashing, you don't want your music app to be crashing, you hate when those kind of things happen, when things are not loading, when things are just being frustratingly slow, then you want to be a DevOps engineer, a systems engineer, or a cloud engineer. DevOps engineers are responsible for making sure that apps are delivered bug-free. Yeah. So the OCICD stuff, that's what they do. They make sure that things are well-tested, and things are well-deployed, and deployed in a way that makes sure that the users always get a version of the application that is running. They deal with all the staging environment, production environment, to make sure that things that are still being tested are in a staging environment for the testers, and users are using production-ready applications that have no bugs. So that's what DevOps people do. The systems engineers make sure that things are performant, especially when it comes to setting up infrastructure. They make sure that the right amount of infrastructure is being set up to make sure that the app is running smoothly. If you need five servers, they're the ones that are making sure that they do that calculation, all the configuration that the application needs to make sure that it's running successfully, all the load balancers, all the message queues. Yeah. Then the cloud guys, cloud, all these, a lot of, there are thin lines between all these practices. There's also cloud engineering, where if you're running your infrastructure in the cloud, you want to, or rather, you're also responsible for making sure that infrastructure is well-provisioned to make sure that apps are running successfully, and also that the deployment of applications are seamless, all the connected services are working perfectly, and everything is just in perfect harmony. If you care about apps not crashing, you want to look at DevOps, systems engineering, or cloud. Now, if you like coordinating the process of developing an application, let's say someone has an idea. Oh, let's build Uber, but for french fries. Someone has an idea, and you're like, oh yeah, we can take this idea, we can break it down, then we can go into the planning stage, then we can get this amount of developers, then we can do this, we can do that, and you are able to coordinate all the activities from ideation to planning, to development, to delivery, and once you're done, you're done with that project, you move to another thing, go become a project manager. Yeah, go become a project manager, because what we just described is a project. You are interested in making sure that resources are used efficiently, especially time. Time is managed efficiently. Money is spent without wastage, and the right amount of resources, human resources, and also resources that you need to buy, digital resources and any type of resources that need, that the project needs to be successful, are deployed without wastage, you want to be a project manager. You want to manage that project and see that that idea becomes a product. Go become a project manager. If you care about that, go become a project manager. Now, if you're someone that you like listening to the users, you know, you like feeling the pulse of the users, the users say, yeah, we want light mode and dark mode, we don't want this button here. We want it to move down. We want this button to be blue. We want this feature. We want that feature added. That is the work of a project manager, project manager, or a product manager, sorry, product manager, product owner, yeah, product, because a project manager just sees the process from ideation to delivery. Yeah. We have an idea and we deliver an app. It's the product manager that will continue to manage that product through different cycles of iteration. The users will always ask for stuff. The owners of the application would want some features in their application based on their roadmap. It is the responsibility of the product manager or product owner to make sure that the app keeps going through successful iterations based on what the users want and also what the product, the owners of the product want. And it also helps in prioritizing, okay, which feature should be deployed now, which feature should come next year, which one would be most impactful, which one would just be upselling features, you know, to just charge customers more money and stuff like that. So if you care about those things, if you care about the life, the daily running of the product, the daily development of the product and the iteration of the product from one version to another and hearing the users and making sure that their, their, their desires are fulfilled in the application, you want to be a product manager or a product owner. Now if you care about, probably you've been a user before and you've caught customer care and you've been super frustrated and you just have, you just feel, well, if I were this customer rep, this customer support, I will have done this. I will have helped the user, I will have navigated the user better through the application. I will have helped the user solve their problem. Yeah. You want to be a support engineer. Yeah. You want to be a support technician for that, for, for apps. That's also a tech role that you can be involved in companies where we have 15 to 30 support staff and there are even companies that have thousands of support staff. You want to be a support staff, helping them navigate their issues in the application. They call in, they have an issue with application, whether it's a B2C application or a B2B application and you make sure that every time the customer has an issue and they submit a ticket, you're able to help them resolve those tickets. That's another thing that you can do. If you care about making sure that during the day to day usage of the application, the customer always has someone to bank on, someone to help them through, someone that is like a, a, a, a, a guru in the product and can always help the customer to navigate any issues that they have. You want to be a support engineer. It's also a fantastic role in tech and there are also different levels. There are senior levels, there are staff levels to it. So you're not just some call person that they just, you know, disturb with and frustrate. This is actually a professional track that you can build a career on as a tech person. Being a support technician or support engineer, whichever name you call it, the main thing is that you are helping users with their problems in their day to day usage of applications. The next one we're going to be looking at now, when products you, well, a lot of us, almost every one of us, we've opened a product and you see a manual come out, you see a manual in product. Sometimes they come with a CD that's for physical products and stuff like that. And even some with digital products, they do have a documentation. If you like creating such kind of content, you want to write about the application, you want to write what it does, you want to write about its features, you want to write about how to set it up, how to use it, how to use every single feature in the application, how to get the best out of it. You might just be the perfect person to become a technical writer or a content manager. Yeah, there's content. There's a lot of content work in tech. There's a lot of content work in tech and even content in tech, it's its own form of marketing. The content is used as a marketing tool for a lot of these tech companies. They use it for inbound marketing whereby they write helpful articles about technologies that are related to their products, about their products, how to use their products, guides and stuff. And people search through the web for these topics and they use them to get them into their sales funnel. So content is even used as a very big marketing tool for software companies. So me, a technical writer, write articles for the application, how to use the application on technologies that the application is used for. Write about the application itself, write the product documentation. All the product documentation that you see out there is written by somebody. You write product documentation. You write things like data sheets, product sheets, even write white papers and stuff like that. Yes, you can be a technical writer, can be a content manager, a content manager that hosts webinars, that guides the whole content creation process, the whole content marketing process. This is also a very huge role in tech. I have been a content, a technical writer for like six or seven years now and I've both worked outside as a freelancer, as a contract writer and as a full-time writer. So it's a beautiful field to be in. I love creating content. I'm creating content right now and I remember in one of my past jobs, I took the YouTube channel from a very, from a low state. Nobody was really coming to our YouTube channel. Nobody was really checking our YouTube channel and I was able to grow it. I was able to grow the YouTube channel or the company. I think I even did that twice. I even did that twice. Sometimes I go on this audit. I audit all our videos, look for past videos, stale videos rather and refresh them and even do new videos based on new features and stuff. Whenever a new feature comes out, whenever it's about to go GA, before we release it, I always create a video for the new feature that is about to come out and that's part of our release process. So it can be, if you like content, if you like documentation, if you like writing stuff, if you like talking in front of a camera, if you like doing demo videos, you can be a technical writer or a content manager. That is also one of the things, one of the areas you can hold as a career path in tech. So we're down to the last two. We're down to the last two categories that we're going to be looking at. And if I don't, if I happen to have not mentioned any career, any tech career path that you know out there, I'm sorry, you can, you can come to the comment section and tell us more about it. I'm trying to give a disclaimer that this list might not be exhaustive. So we're down to the last two. The first one I'm going to talk about, if you, if you see yourself always pointing out errors in apps, like you like pointing out everything in an app that is not working fine. This is not working well. This should work better. This is not going smoothly. This is working well. You might be the application tester that the world is waiting for. Yeah. Application testing is a whole tech field that you can apply yourself to and become a professional tester. You can run tests on application, test testers are needed in every tech, every tech company has testers. Yeah. If you're a tech company that doesn't have testers, I don't know what they are living on the edge. They are playing a dangerous game by just throwing their product out there without fully testing. The Q&A, the quality and assurance department of companies have testers. And what these people do is that when the developers finish developing the application, they release it to these testers and they will run it through rigorous tests. And a lot of times they're even preparing the tests before they see the application. They're already writing everything that they're going to test because they already know what the feature that is going to be built. So they divorce themselves from the developers while the development process is going on and start documenting all the things that they need to test. And when the developers come with the product, they take it on that thorough testing. Even a lot of things that users might not encounter, probably things that like 0.1% of users are going to experience. They test all these things, test it thoroughly. And there's a lot of back and forth between them and the developers. There's always some epic fights between, epic arguments and epic quarrels between those two departments. This is a full field on its own whereby you can use, there's manual testing and you can also use a lot of automated tools to run tests and put applications under most of the conditions that they're going to face in production to make sure that they can withstand those conditions. There are even people that test the infrastructure too, that test the load that the application is going to experience in production to make sure that this application is battery ready, the feature is battery tested, and when it goes out there, it's not going to blow up in people's faces. So application testing, application testers, that is a full career path in tech that you can pursue. The last one we're going to be looking at is people that like numbers. If you have ever loved maths in school, this is your zone. This is where you shine. If you love numbers, if you love cracking numbers, if you love diving into data and bringing out patterns, seeing patterns, deriving inferences, seeing relationships between different data points and stuff like that, you love graphs, you love all those, you know, analyzing data, you love searching data and stuff. Yeah. You might consider being a data analyst. Yeah. I want to consider being a data analyst and that spreads out to things like, you know, people that even ML today, ML is becoming more and more popular today and data analysts are just finding themselves just sliding into the world of ML. They are like one of the most sought after guys right now. So data analysis, machine learning and stuff like that, machine learning is as its foundation, the entire foundation of machine learning is highly baked into data analysis. So if you love data, if you love mining business information to look at patterns, to look at trends, to probably determine, oh, why are we losing money? What are we spending money on that we're not supposed to be spending money on? A lot of business intelligence, which of the staff are most impactful, which ones need to go and stuff like that. You want to be a data analyst. You want to pick up this career path. If you love numbers, if you love seeing patterns and stuff like that, that is one thing you can go for. And that's going to be the last thing we're going to be looking at. That's going to be the last tech part. Like I said, go for what you care about. You see, as we're going through this list, we're going through the perspective of what bothers you. What bothers you when you look at applications? What bothers you when you use a software, when you use a technical item? What bothers you? What would you like to see be better? What do you think you can contribute better to? And from that, that is what should lead you to what you're going to learn. You don't have to say, oh, that's PHP, that's JavaScript. No, no, no, no, no. Go from what you care about and land yourself in the best career path. I hope this video has been impactful, and I hope a lot of you figure out the career path to follow in tech by watching this video. And if you have enjoyed it, please leave a like. And a subscription will help us to know that we can continue to make this kind of video, so that would be appreciated if you have not yet subscribed. Thank you, and see you in another video. Peace.