Tech Careers Are Changing — Here’s How To Stay Relevant When You’re Just Starting Out
The Future-Proof Tech Career Blueprint (5 Steps to Stay Ahead)
Searching for your ideal tech career can quickly get lost in an endless rabbit hole of information.
Everywhere you look, there’s another must-have course, a new technology to learn, or another link to add to your ever-growing bookmark folder.
It’s pretty overwhelming.
In this state of madness, the genuine desire to build the career you envisioned, begins to fade.
I’ve experienced it all — the mistakes, uncertainty, and the confusion of too many options. But on the other side of all that noise was a clear vision letting me know exactly what to do.
In this article, I’ll explain how to build a tech career that will suit you best so you can feel confident in your pathway and avoid feelings of regret down the road.
Hopefully, you will find some value in what I share.
1. The Best Career Direction
At the start of my career, I was clueless about my options.
All I knew was I wanted to work in tech. This was my first mistake. Because for 3 years, I bounced between tech jobs that were not the right fit for me until I eventually stumbled across cloud computing.
With recent advancements in AI and machine learning, this will become a bigger problem for people starting out, with the risk of job displacement hanging over their heads. But it doesn't have to be.
If you can understand the tech landscape you’ll notice which areas will continue to be in demand for years to come. Even if we can’t predict which jobs will continue to exist, we can know what technologies will be essential to our future.
AI is everywhere, automation is changing how businesses operate, and cybersecurity threats will increase with more people online than ever.
Focusing on any of these areas gives you the best chance for a career with long-term growth and stability:
- AI/ML
- Data
- Cloud Computing
- Cybersecurity
2. Explore in Detail
You’ve identified the best fields to focus on. Now what?
Pick 1 or 2 areas that interest you.
If you like the sound of working in AI, a simple search like — “Day in the life of a data scientist” or “What does a machine learning engineer actually do?” will give you a good starting point.
You’d be surprised how much you can learn from doing this.
When I got started, I spent hours in this phase. It helped me to narrow down my interests.
Before you start thinking about which course to take you want to know about the day-to-day realities of different roles.
Don’t be afraid to also reach out to strangers on LinkedIn. Ask what they like and dislike about their job.
You can gain a real advantage from first-hand perspectives.
3. Use a Roadmap
So you’ve done all this research. You have a destination in mind. But you’ll need directions on how to get there.
I was in the same boat a couple of years ago. I had a general idea of what direction to go but how would I know where to start or when I was ready? Here are 3 things that answered my questions.
3.1 Roadmap.sh
If you want a tool that lays out every skill you need to learn, look no further than this website.
They have roadmaps for almost every major tech role. If they don’t have what you’re looking for you can use their AI tool to generate it.
These detailed roadmaps guide your learning for your chosen career path.
I used this site when I was learning to be a cloud engineer. It helped me to focus on the core things I needed without getting distracted.
The amount of detail in these plans can be overwhelming but you don’t need everything they mention. So next I will show you how to narrow down and only focus on 3 or 5 skills you need at the start of your career.
3.2 Job boards
Next, I visited job sites like Indeed, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor.
But at this stage, I wasn’t using these sites for job hunting. I was using them for guidance.
I began to analyze job descriptions, focusing on the skill requirements. By doing this I started seeing patterns. Based on the type of job I looked up, some skills kept showing up across all job descriptions.
3.3 Comparison
Now all I had to do was pair the most frequently listed skills in the job descriptions, to what the roadmap told me to learn and focus on those core skills.
It’s like getting real-time data on what was actually in demand. This strategy will give you a huge advantage — refining your roadmap further to cut through the noise and get to the heart of what will really make a difference.
All the other skills can come later in your career.
These are the steps I took to land my first job as a cloud engineer.
4. The Best Resources
There are a million different ways to learn. The quantity of resources at our fingertips is unlimited, making it difficult to know where to begin.
If you’re looking for a starting point, I’ve listed some of the best options I’ve used below.
- YouTube is great for free tutorials and lectures on just about any subject. You can find courses from content creators, to whole programs from top universities like MIT, Stanford, and Havard.
- DataCamp is great for learning about AI and data science.
- If you want to focus on a specific coding language by doing hands-on practice, Codecademy is for you. And you can test it out for free.
- Pluralsight is a great platform for learning just about any tech skill or studying for any certification if you’re willing to pay the monthly subscription fee. I used this to learn to code in Terraform.
- Udemy is a course marketplace for one-off purchases and they regularly run discounts.
- Use AI Chatbots as your personal tutor. When you need a concept broken down or explained like you're 5 years old — this is where you should turn to. But don’t use them on their own. Verify the information. That’s where learning from multiple sources comes in handy.
Some platforms are more video-based like Udemy, while others are more interactive like Codecademy. This is where it’s helpful to think about your learning style.
Figure out what resonates with you and how you learn best.
5. Have Realistic and Measurable Targets
With each step, we’ve gained more clarity on the specific actions we need to take to go from zero to one hundred.
We know what type of career we want, what skills to learn, and the best resources to use. But that’s not enough. Without setting a time horizon for our goals, bad things happen.
If you set your goal too big, it will take you 10x longer. Set it too small, and you’ll barely get anywhere.
Both of these outcomes are where people get discouraged and give up.
It’s not enough to want to be a software engineer or to work in AI. If you’re training for a marathon, you won’t just show up on event day. You’d have been training for months.
Let’s face it, building a tech career takes time and effort. We need a system that keeps us focused and engaged throughout the journey.
But what does that actually look like?
- Think about your day-to-day life. Can you carve out some time each day to go through each of the steps in this article?
- Set a goal for the next 30 days to explore pathways, get a roadmap, and learn a specific skill.
- Allocate time to it every day, just like you would getting ready for work or school in the morning.
- Take it seriously and be consistent, even if just for 30 minutes a day.
- All kinds of study tools can help you stay on track. Like habit trackers and time blockers. It's about finding the tools and strategies that work for you.
Final Comment
If there’s one thing you take away from this, let it be this — what is one small step you can take today to move you one step closer to your career goal?
If you would like personalized advice to get a head start on your goals — consider booking a 1:1 consulting call with me by clicking here.
