How to Future-Proof Your Job Through Career Change
Takeaway:
Whether you want to become your own boss and work from home with
multiple clients, getting the right tech skills and pursuing the right
opportunities will help when you're ready for a career change.
For tech professionals thinking about career change, now is either
not the best of times to be doing so, or it's the perfect time to be
taking advantage of opportunities.
Our current environment has thrown a wrench into the global economy,
and many businesses spanning different industries have shut their doors
and shuttered their windows.
Some will re-open eventually, while others will cease to be going
concerns. Many companies that are still operating have, due in part to
social distancing rules, ordered their employees to work from home.
But how many of those employees will want to return to their cubicles
inside of brick-and-mortar office buildings after the lockdown has been
rolled back?
Might tech workers who’ve gotten used to programming code, preventing data breaches and protecting computer systems from their home offices decide that now's as good a time as any for career change?
Becoming an independent consultant could, for example, give tech
workers more job stability if they can freelance for multiple clients.
The
good news is that there is still a lot of demand in the tech space.
Computers aren’t going anywhere and neither is the Internet said Mark Aiello, President at CyberSN, which provides cybersecurity staffing services for both permanent and contract employment.
“We
have a great number of clients that are hiring and taking advantage of
the opportunity to figure out how to onboard people remotely,” said
Aiello.
“It’s a great industry to be in. The computer is not going away, the
Internet is not going away. There are always going to be bad guys out
there trying to take advantage of both. So you need a whole bunch of
good guys to protect you.”
Is Freelancing a Live Option for Career Change in Tech Space?
The
question for tech professionals is not whether they want to be one of
the good guys or one of the bad guys. Rather, the question is whether
they want to be independent consultants or stay the course on their
career trajectory paths.
While some experts say that the gig
economy will provide opportunities for people who’d like to possibly
future-proof their careers by working for themselves, others stress that
it’s more important to focus on broadening their skills so that they
can take advantage of career opportunities in whatever form they may
come.
The Stats Say
Freelancing in America: 2019, from Upwork and
Freelancers Union, estimates that 57 million Americans freelance. The
study has some especially revealing findings:
- At nearly $1
trillion (approaching 5% of U.S. GDP), freelance income contributes more
to the economy than industries such as construction and transportation
and is on par with the information sector.
- Freelancers
doing skilled services earn a median rate of $28 an hour, earning more
per hour than 70% of workers in the overall U.S. economy.
- For
the first time, as many freelancers said they view this way of working
as a long-term career choice as they do a temporary way to make money.
In addition, the share of those who freelance full time increased from
17% in 2014 to 28% in 2019.
- Skilled services are the
most common type of freelance work, with 45% of freelancers providing
skills such as programming, marketing, IT and business consulting.
Gig Economy: Onward and Upward
Tech
professionals who are interested in transitioning to a tech career
where they can work from home on a full-time basis must ensure they have
the right skills to be successful.
Dr. Nishtha Langer is an assistant professor of Business Analytics in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
As well, she has been studying a variety of research topics on IT for
more than 20 years, and she has more than five years of IT experience in
both India and the U.S.
“[Make] sure you have the
skills that you need to work in this type of environment because there
are challenging environments, there is no guarantee of employment, there
could be uncertainty in the projects you are doing, and working from
home means that you are traversing a lot of boundaries,” said Dr.
Langer.
“My own research looks at tactical intelligence, which is basically street smarts. You should be a problem solver.”
She
said that tech workers who think they might like to work from home
should consider entering the gig economy. But rather than leaving their
day jobs right away and jumping into a freelance or independent
consultant role, she recommends that tech professionals start out by
using freelance projects and gigs as a complement to their current
full-time jobs.
Don’t Neglect Training and Certification Opportunities
During
this lockdown period when many people are both telecommuting and
self-isolating, tech workers should be taking the opportunity to brush
up on their skills and to pick up new ones.
Many experts believe
this will help them in their current jobs and potentially give them new
skills that might lead to new career opportunities now and in the
future.
“I lead a marketing group for my company and we’re a
HubSpot customer,” said Aiello. “They have so many wonderful, great
resources for training that are free. Some are eight-minute videos and
some are full certifications that would take you 20 hours to get through
it or 40 hours to get through it. How many of us have said, ‘I’d love
to do that if I only had the time'? Now’s the time to do it.“
The key is to continue learning new things, noted Dhawal Shah, CEO, Class Central.
But Shah, whose company helps people to find and review online courses,
cautions that there is no silver bullet that will allow tech
professionals to future-proof their careers through any one course.
“Make sure you’re able to learn new things and practice and basically keep learning new things,” he said.
“Online
courses offer a good opportunity to do that. There’s a wide variety of
these courses and many of them are free, so you can start learning new
technologies, new skills. That’s certainly the first step – start
learning....These courses only offer you an entryway into a particular
skill or technology....It’s always good to find practical things to do
such as either your own project or read somebody else’s code so that you
can get better.”
Many online learnings platforms
have reported an increase in demand. This demand is coming from tech
professionals who are working remotely, those who have been laid off and
those who need to brush up on their skills.
So said Ryan Corey, co-founder and CEO, Cybrary,
a cybersecurity and IT workforce development platform that offers
1,000+ hands-on experiences geared towards developing real-world skills.
“The
higher in-demand courses are in the beginner and intermediate
certification courses, such as Security+, A+, and CEH,” said Corey.
“These
provide foundational knowledge to earn common certifications needed in
cyber and infosec roles, so they get high interest for developing the
knowledge and skills needed for a job in the industry.”
Networking Opportunities
While
now might be an ideal time for tech pros to build up their skills
through training, it’s also as good a time for them to build up their
networks.
Michael Goldberg — entrepreneurship professor, Case Western Reserve University
— noted that people are quite reachable right now on the heels of the
lockdown. So it can’t hurt for tech professionals to use some of their
time to connect with other people — not just for job prospects, but also
to be of benefit to others.
“If workers are trying to connect
with folks in their school alumni network or former colleagues, this is
actually a pretty good time to reach people,” said Goldberg, who as
director of the new Veale Institute for Entrepreneurship recently re-launched a massive open online course (MOOC) about surviving the coronavirus as a small businessperson.
There’s
also the chance for tech workers to use their skills in ways that they
may not have prior to the coronavirus pandemic situation.
“There
are a lot of companies or entrepreneurs or small businesses that had to
quickly adapt or go online,” said Goldberg. “In my profession, you have a
lot of educators. For the first time, they’ve had to put something
online. There’s probably some nice opportunities [for IT workers]."
What Now?
Tech
professionals with the right mix of skills and training will be able to
take advantage of opportunities as they arise. What they shouldn't be
doing during these uncertain times, however, is sitting still and
waiting to see how things play out.
Those who invest in themselves now will reap the benefits later.
"We're all living through the three little pigs story right now," said Aiello.
"The
two pigs that made their house out of straws and sticks had a great
time while the other pig that made its house out of bricks didn't enjoy
as leisurely a life as they did. But then when the big bad wolf came, he
was very thankful that he had a house made of brick. Here's your
opportunity, right now, to make your house out of brick."