For you
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For those wishing to pursue a career in tech, what are your top three pieces of advice?
The first thing is to really understand your options. This relates to the routes into tech as well as the potential roles. There are many routes into tech, including apprenticeships, graduate schemes, direct entry boot camps… and there’s a lot of research to do in understanding all of those different entry points, different routes and different roles, and which might be the best match to your own skills and interests.
Secondly, build your network. This means going to events, talking to people, finding out what they do, what they enjoy about their work, and the types of challenges they face. The best way to gain access to some very exciting career opportunities is to grow a wide professional network. Get to know people who work in different organisations, and use that to gain visibility of great roles that exist in companies that you might never have even heard of.
My final piece of advice is to keep learning. So many people that I spoke to in writing the book stressed this. Tech doesn’t stand still, so tech professionals can’t afford to either. There are so many ways to learn by reading articles and books, watching videos, going to community events, and sometimes making an investment of your own time and money in your professional development. Having a positive attitude towards a growth mindset is key. It’s the commitment to lifelong learning that sets the best tech professionals apart from their peers.
How important are role models in today’s tech profession?
The concept of role models is really important and that’s why I conducted so many case studies when writing this book, to show the broad range of people and the types of journeys that they’ve been on. Every career path in tech and every route into tech is quite different. The Fawcett society have published research about the gender gap and perceptions of tech from people outside the industry, which was really interesting. Young girls — who’d been exposed to some of the ‘you should really work in tech as a young woman’ type narrative — said that all they were hearing was ‘I’m going to be the only woman and there must be a reason why so few women work in tech’. By talking about the gender disparity we are actively reinforcing that situation, which I think is really sad. In the book I deliberately haven’t gone into any of the statistics about gender or ethnicity or background. I’ve just said we need a diverse workforce in tech, and this is why. Hopefully anybody picking the book up will be able to see many positive role models that they can identify with, and that’s vitally important.
In closing, what do you want the book to be?
What I’d really like is for this book to be something that tech professionals buy for someone in their life, whether it’s their child, friend or relation — anyone that they would like to help understand what a career in tech involves and what the opportunities are that it provides. I hope it encourages the next generation — the future tech workforce — by showing them the true breadth of roles in tech, and the realisation that many exciting opportunities are open to them.
