Author: Mo’ Ekujumi, Director at SkillHat

SkillHat launches motivated professionals into dream careers in Tech. In 2021, our students landed dream jobs as Business Analysts, Scrum Masters, Project Managers, and Product Owners. We focus on roles that do not require coding.

While helping others, we’ve learned a lot ourselves, and we would like to share these learnings. If you want to transition into tech, read these, and apply for one of our programs.

• Anyone can transition into tech: We’ve seen people transition into technology roles from all walks of life such as customer service, sales, healthcare, etc. You may be thinking to yourself — I don’t have a background in computer science, and it may be a barrier. It’s not. Start by identifying your transferrable skills, and a learning path. The most common transferrable skill is communication.

• It takes time to transition: Even with the required skills and experience, it can take 2–6 months to land a good job. Transitioning from a different industry may extend that timeline. This might not be what you want to hear, but it’s important to start a journey with the right expectations. You don’t want to go on a flight thinking it’ll take 4 hours and while on board you find out the flight really takes 20 hours. If you know you’re going on a 20 hour flight you’re going to download a few albums, get a book, and a pillow. Having realistic expectations of how long your transition might take will help reduce frustration and pain.

• The transition process can be accelerated through community: To transition, it’s critical to immerse yourself in a community of experts, and like minds. A community will keep you encouraged, and make your goals feel more attainable. You will also gain a lot of insight into privileged information such as nuances of certain companies & roles, salary, interview tips etc.

• Find A Mentor: A mentor is someone whose past is your future. Once you identify the role you want to transition to, recruit someone who is 2 steps ahead of that role, to mentor you into landing the role, and beyond.

• Intern & Volunteer: Doing the work helps you get the job. Look for every opportunity to actually do the work you would do within the full time job you want. If you want to get into User Experience Design (UI / UX), start performing user research and designing interfaces. If you want to get into Project Management, find a small team / project and manage it. You’ll find out if it’s what you are truly passionate about, you’ll have more in your portfolio, and you’ll perform better at interviews as you’ll be more memorable since you have interesting stories.

• Personality & passion give you an edge: One of the great things about working in tech is that you can bring your personality to work, and it actually gives you an edge. Software development & innovation isn’t rigid like medicine or accounting where you have to do things by the book, following a defined process with little room for creativity. Find what you have a passion for, where your creativity can shine, and throw yourself at that space.

• Lack of confidence is one of the biggest barriers: We see a lot of people who perform well in our classes, do well in their case studies and exams but freeze during job interviews. We get it. Interviews can be intimidating, and so is doing something new. However, to attract success, you must project success. You must build your confidence to make a successful transition. Applying the learnings above will help build your confidence. There are many tips for confidence building you can find on the internet, but i’ll leave you with just one — prepare. I personally have found that the more prepared I was, the more confident I became, and effectively the better I performed, so — prepare like your life depends on it.

Let’s Build The Future.