Breaking into the tech industry: 3 tips for career changes

How do you break into tech?

Hmm...that's a good question and there's no specific or direct answer!

Some people would say "network - build those relationships", some would say "upskill by finding various programs focusing specifically on what you want to do in tech" and then there's others that would say "there are other industries out there that you can work."

Upskill

Despite what advice, support or comments you may receive from others, I definitely would agree with upskilling. If you want to actually do technical work within the organization, seek out those industry certifications as well as certifications that tailor specific to the area in IT, you'd like work rather that's networking, servers, cloud, cybersecurity and etc.

However, if you enjoy your current line of work but want to work into tech then utilize your current skillset and enhance/upskill on that to obtain a similar or even a position that's a level up from what you've done that could be courses related to project management, product management, digital marketing, business analysis, data analytics or if you work in the administrative area enhancing your skillset with Google apps, Microsoft apps, Jira, Salesforce, ServiceNow and etc. to familiarize yourself with various applications that used throughout the organization.

Identify your prospective technology companies and the products they provide:

One of the biggest pieces of advice, I'd recommend for anyone looking to break into tech is to know what company you want to work for starting off by understanding their products especially if it's a cloud-based companies:

SaaS (Software as a Service) - applications are delivered over the internet as a service ex. Salesforce, Netflix

PaaS (Platform as a Service) - allows development teams to customize applications without the hassle of maintaining the OS, software updates and etc. - AWS, Google Cloud

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) - compute resources such as networks, data storage, servers are provided to the customer in which they can be managed via the cloud. ex. Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines

Then, there's several over offering as a service as a DaaS (Desktop as a Service) ex. Citrix

Whatever path, you carve out for yourself! Just go for it and don't be afraid to put in the extra time needed to get you where you want to be. A year from now, you'll look back and be proud that you did!